- Perestroika
- Apr 8, 2010
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I loved the first game but plotwise I only remember that Ted Faro was a butthole
Can someone bullet point the story
This is more or less in in-universe chronological order, rather than how it's revealed ingame:
- Ted Faro, idiot that he is, decides to build a model of combat robots that can self-sustain as well as self-reproduce using biomass they gather from their surroundings.
- Predictably, those robots go rogue and start rampaging around, reproducing at an exponential rate.
- Conventional militaries are unable to fight back against them. Also, Grand Idiot Faro specifically made them hack-proof without a backdoor. The only way to shut them down would be brute-forcing their encryption, which would take hundreds of years.
- Within months, the robots have consumed so much biomass that complete biosphere collapse becomes inevitable
- Elisabet Sobeck realises that humanity is irrevocably hosed and proposes the Zero Dawn protocol: Let the robots burn themselves out by consuming all biomass, use that time crack their encryption and disable them permanently, then re-seed the world with life
- In order to do all that, they create an AI called GAIA (plus a suite of minor assistant AIs) to do the cracking as well as clone all the animals and humans once the robots are done for
- They also added a failsafe AI called HADES. If GAIA ended up accidentally creating a nonviable biosphere, HADES would temporarily shut GAIA down, destroy all life, and then let it try again from a clean slate
- All of this is hastily built and put into place barely days before the project would have been overrun by the robots. Almost all of humanity is dead at this point, except for the people who worked on project Zero Dawn hidden away in underground bunkers. Elisabet Sobeck dies at the last moment fixing a leak that might've given the project away to the rampaging robots.
- At this point, the survivors just settle in to live out the remainder of their lives while putting some finishing touches on the project.
- Absolute rear end in a top hat Ted Faro kills them instead. He does this so he can delete the assistant AI that would've been intended to teach the next generation of humanity using all the accumulated knowledge and history up to this point.
- Faro claims that he only wanted to prevent humanity to repeat the same mistakes, but we all know it was an act of unimaginable hubris intended to hide his responsibility for the literal end of the world
- Over the next several centuries (or perhaps millennia), the plan bears fruit. The robots are shut down and the Earth is re-seeded.
- Without the AI intended to teach them, humanity has to start over at more or less stone-age level. Still, things go alright, the biosphere is stable, human cultures begin to develop
- Despite this, at some point a mysterious signal is sent from somewhere to activate HADES, which would've flattened all life to start over.
- Knowing that the signal is invalid, GAIA tries its best to prevent that. It sends a signal to one of the repopulation centres to grow a clone of Elisabet Sobeck, in part due to sentimentality, but also because that clone would have access to all remaining Zero Dawn facilities due to the DNA match, which would allow her to figure out what's going on. Finally, it self-destructs, which prevents HADES from accessing the infrastructure it'd need to destroy humanity outright.
- The clone grows up to be Aloy, protagonist of the games.
- HADES is still around and still wants to kill all life. It manages to deceive a ruin-diver into helping it, who then in turn gets another tribe to accept HADES as a god. It identifies Aloy as the greatest risk to its objective, and tries to have her killed by that tribe
- The resulting attack on Aloy's village leads her to set out on a journey to basically discover everything mentioned above.
- HADES almost manages to achieve its objective, going so far as to reactivate the old Faro robots to go around killing people. However, Aloy manages to stop it at the last moment by re-sending the shutdown command that worked the first time around and ejecting HADES' AI core.
- The main story ends here. Notably, HADES' AI core is retrieved by the same guy who initially found it, and whose motives have never been made entirely clear and who wanders off into the sunset with it. It is also never revealed where the signal that reactivated HADES in the first place came from.
You could go into a lot more detail particularly when it comes to the actual game's missions and plot, but honestly this is getting too long already. But in conclusion: gently caress Ted Faro.
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Jan 19, 2022 16:31
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May 21, 2024 15:59
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- Perestroika
- Apr 8, 2010
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There's always hope, maybe one of his sexbots murdered him horribly.
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Jan 19, 2022 23:24
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- Perestroika
- Apr 8, 2010
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Yeah, Sylens is sort of understandable once you appreciate just how immensely valuable the lost knowledge could be, and how tantalizing it must be to know that it's out there somewhere. It's one thing thinking that some day in the future somebody is going to figure out how to produce enough food that nobody is ever at risk of starvation ever again. It's quite different if you know for a fact that somebody already did that, and that it might just be a matter of digging through the right mountain to find that knowledge.
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Jan 22, 2022 23:54
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Jan 19, 2022 16:31
