I told myself “I’m going to beat this game” even when I was early in the game. That was before it started getting progressively harder with enemies that can fly and dodge my attacks, and enemies that come rushing at me before I have time to line up a shot.
But I’ve done it…and with the OP armor. Yes, you can get the armor before the final battle! Even though when you’re told you reached the point of no return, it isn’t the actual point. There are two PoNR points; “Deep Secrets of the Earth” and the end of “The Looming Shadow”.
Once you get the ‘Heart of the Nora’ quest and survive the battles, the gate is opened and you can get the power core. And before (or even after) completing ‘The Mountain That Fell’, you’ll have access to all five power cells, and be able to obtain the armor.
So it’s not true that you have to complete the game. Infact, you can’t complete it anyway. Because when you do and sit through 20+ minutes of watching endgame credits, it tells you that it has rewinded time to before doing ‘The Looming Shadow’, even going as far as telling me to do the quest again (which makes me feel “Uhh..so my victory was for nothing?”).
Not gonna lie, all of that “I need to complete everything I can before I even step foot in Meridian!” heck I went though (getting all the collectables, clearing all corruption sites, etc..), felt like it was for nothing. Quite disappointed.
Speaking of which, it’s that time again that I have to talk about spoilers about the endgame. Remember not to click “Endgame Spoilers” if you don’t wish to be spoiled.
The story of Horizon Zero Dawn, as I said once, was the thing that kept myself playing. Trying to piece together (just as Aloy and Sylens were learning) what caused ‘the Derangement’ and the fall of the human race. And I have to say, it’s pretty bone-chilling– hearing people talking about the extinction of everything on Earth. The fear on those people’s faces, knowing there was nothing they could do but wait ’till ‘The Swarm’ kills everything. That’s just like knowing a meteor (or the Supervolcano) is coming to wipe out all life on Earth. Except The Swarm was different, because they were consuming everything (plants, people, animals.. water) and killing the biosphere, making the planet unbreathable.
THAT, is some scary shit. Though I doubt this’ll ever happen in my lifetime (as it happened in the 2060’s, which I would likely be dead by then..so if it does happen, at least I won’t be around to see it).
Yet there’s one piece of the story puzzle that seems to not be able to fit right, no matter how hard it’s jammed in. And that is the cause of the ‘Fero Virus’ that lead to a total extinction event.
The second coming of the virus (aka HADES taking over GAIA’s subroutines) was clarified (aka ‘the Derangement’: the machines turning hostile and making foot travel quite dangerous), but the main reason (from what I’ve struggled to make out) never came to me when I was exploring the ruins of the Fero Automated Solutions building. The only thing I know (from listening to the PDAs) is Fero tried his best to stop his “Peacekeepers”(aka the “killer robots” which started ‘The Swarm’), but they wouldn’t respond to his shutdown commands.
This couldn’t be HADES’ doing, as Project: Zero Dawn wasn’t even a thing back then. So what could had caused it? Did the robots simply get sick and tired of being slaves?
Another thing, and this is on my part, when reaching the top floor and seeing this conversation of Fero having to sign this document, to make his company not liable for the damages (I think it was, please correct me if I’m wrong), then later on when the joint chiefs of staff guy is telling the woman that looks like Aloy, that there’s a “Decommissioned Rocket Site”. My initial thought, that she was going to drop a nuke to kill the robots with this ‘Project: Zero Dawn’.
The name ‘Zero Dawn’ just sounds like a codemane for an “end all” way to stop the swarm. And the fact it’s been several decades since those dark days, that would’ve given more than enough time for the nuclear fallout to clear (which felt was backing up my theory).
Yet, where’s the crater? And also, if it was a nuke, we would’ve had a Fallout-like universe of mutated creatures (and hardly any vegetation). So..not a nuke.
Instead, Project: Zero Dawn turns into a way to bring humanity back from the brink of extinction (which was also supposed to give the future human race the full knowledge of our own history).
Instead, Fero wipes everything from APOLLO(which contained the data), claiming to “prevent the sickness” (and then suffocates all the Alpha candidates of the project).
If this was a way to prevent history from repeating, apparently it didn’t work (as Sylens is the one that turned the gears that allowed HADES to take over).
He’s a bastard, and doesn’t deserve pity (and he damn well knows it, and isn’t ashamed of what he did..even saying he would do it all over again). He used Aloy to learn more secrets of what happened to ‘the Old Ones'(aka us). This is even proven in the end, when he manages to capture HADES’ being, only to use him again to get more knowledge. He has learned NOTHING about preventing this from happening again. He doesn’t give a fuck of how he gets the knowledge, and this is going to be his downfall.
This screams “Horizon Zero Dawn 2” to me, with Sylens being the main bad guy (and using his ‘dark knowledge’ against the player). Or at least a proper DLC.
But at the end, I don’t get why Aloy walked away with her spear still in HADES, allowing it to escape. She was all “you know, FUCK this! I’m DONE killing machines!”
Well good riddance. If I have to hear her pain sounds again, it’ll be too soon.
I’m curious what the game would look like by replaying it in ‘Story Mode’, being possibly 7/8 cinematics and maybe an 8th of gameplay. But, it’s time to send it back to Gamefly.
It’s a cool game. Felt it had the right amount of challenge (though a bit too many cinematics in Easy difficulty). But I still recommend it to anyone thinking of trying it out. It’s definitely worth a playthrough…even with all the bad things I said about the game in my last post.
Hell, I’ll excuse a few of them for allowing me to get the armor before ‘completing’ the game.