Horizon Zero Dawn Story Explained Part 1: Project Zero Dawn And How Humanity Went Extinct

i'm zoe delante light and i'm obsessed with video game law and i bet there's something you want to know just how did things get so bad for humanity in the world of horizon zero dawn i'm about to tell you this is all the law you need to know about how the human species got utterly doomed and if you want a recap of everything that happened during eloy's lifetime in horizon zero dawn keep an eye out for another video on the complete story of horizon zero dawn on the eurogamer channel which is the one you're watching right now mother of all spoiler warnings though i'm gonna explore all the law of horizon zero dawn no holds barred meaning the big plot twists will be explained here this is a big one so i'm not gonna waste any more time let's begin centuries before the events of horizon zero dawn would occur the world like me after spending too much time inside was in a pretty bad place with the time of around being over it was time to find out environmental catastrophes hit one after the other creating climate refugees who flee their various home countries after they sink into the ocean due to rising seas caused by global warming because yes it is real disasters come hard and fast starting with the 2032 great die-off where the azores sinks into the sea the 2036 submergence which floods new zealand completely and finally in a uk emergency relocation facility an uprising by the incarcerated refugees and consequent heavy-handed response by the government results in the deaths and injuries of thousands of climate refugees in 2040 the claw back decade begins where humanity starts to make gains against the global eco-catastrophes through green technology the advancing science and development of robots and ai and worldwide relief efforts slowly things start to get better it's no coincidence that in the same year dr elizabeth sobeck a supremely gifted robotics engineer and child prodigy who graduated from stamford at 12 and got her phd at 20 starts working for ted pharaoh's company pharaoh automated solutions pharaoh is less concerned about ethics shall we say and more like a certain owner of a large web storefront who just loves to exploit thankfully that individual got into space flight rather than weaponry but hey there's still time anyway sobek joins pharaoh because she has a passion for environmental robotics being instrumental in pharaoh automated solutions initiatives including creating green robots to help with the aforementioned colossal environmental issues the world was facing instead of remaining in the good guy team pharaoh decides it's time to make those big bucks and instead of saving lives he decides to help people end them by 2045 60 to 70 percent of the us military was automated so seeing this trend rise over the years three years later in 2048 pharaoh automated solutions expands into the automated military sector soon pharaoh automated solutions creates the chariot line of machines which can be used to enforce various measures with violence and fear by corporations and governments alike theoretically replacing human armies with metal ones they're called peacekeepers man the pr team must be working overtime on this one huh catchily named the scarab kopesh and horus models these machines are quite something and not in a good way scarabs are used for swift all-terrain reconnaissance with the ability to repair themselves and other machines in their swarm swarm is a term for the group of machines which belong to the same entity and therefore work together like one big mistake oh sorry i mean family co-peshes are enforcers in the chariot line with immense firepower lastly you have the horus consider these beasts the queen bee of the chariot line who are able to replicate not just kopeshes and scarabs but also themselves they're basically giant robot factories on legs or tentacles meaning one colossal horus can become two then four then just bad news like the kopesh and the scarab they're also incredibly powerful able to actually rip apart fortifications and defenses with their sprawling metal tentacles and i can't see any way that's gonna go wrong now pharaoh isn't content to just invent killing machines that look about as evil as you can make them oh no he also decides to not program any kind of security back door into them in case they you know go rogue or something so remote access is impossible should anything go wrong but for pharaoh that's just another selling point as without a back door the chariot robots have a virtually unbreakable encryption protocol meaning they can't be hacked into by opposing factions or people trying to shut these murder robots down jesus christ pharaoh what were you thinking at this point global tensions are at their zenith as the environmental catastrophes of previous decades had caused some serious rifts between world powers as they compete for now scarce resources with the end being very much nigh chariot robots are sold to the militaries across the world to protect their fragile resources so scarabs kopesh's and mighty horuses were soon being totally not evil in most countries now one thing you need to know about these machines is that the chariot line has a fail-safe mechanism when it comes to fuel installed in every machine is a biomatter conversion system which converts biological matter into fuel meant as a last resort so they don't run out of juice in the middle of a war because god forbid war chiefs shouldn't have giant killer robots they can also hack into any enemy automated military equipment that isn't pharaoh so you're kind of screwed if you're on the other side without any chariot machines meaning more nations and factions bought these chariot machines so we've got some lovely mutually assured destruction added to the pot too sobek understandably disgusted at pharaoh's decision to go into military robotics resigns from pharaoh automated solutions in 2048. she continues to build green robots develops environmental engineering and a year after leaving pharaoh creates her own successful environmental technology company named miriam technologies after her mum shortly afterwards pharaoh automated solutions becomes the dominant provider of automated military units by 2052 the entirety of the human uk military is disbanded in favor of these machines meaning the uk army is 100 automated and three years later the us military follows suit buckle up folks because that was the last bit of law before the proverbial hits the fan which should happen right about now in 2064 somehow a glitch occurs and a swarm goes rogue what that means is that this swarm of machines stops responding to commands from the hearts timor energy combine which previously owned it and becomes an independent entity with its own hive mind we still don't know where the glitch came from like if it was an accident or something put there by an unknown agent so for now it just remains a glitch as this swarm is led by a horus and it can replicate machines at will basically acting like a brood mother more and more scarabs and kopeshes are created and to fuel this burst of fertility and feed all these new spawn the machines use their biofuel failed safe it doesn't take them long to start consuming plants animals and yes eventually humans due to that good old almost impenetrable encryption pharaoh insisted upon and a lack of any backdoor access that would sure come in handy right now it's quickly surmised that it would take decades to crack the swarm's code and shut it down this is what we in the business of staying alive call a big upsy daisy mr upsy daisy pharaoh calls of all people sobek for help to find out just how bad the situation is as despite their bitter past and her dislike of the man her incredible engineering talents and knowledge of the earth's environment as it stands is the only person who can actually figure out how doomed humanity is she's also one of the few people that pharaoh actually trusts to keep this a secret as god knows other corporations would just love to decimate the public image of pharaoh automated solutions 15 months that's how long humanity has left until we're wiped out by the swarm along with the earth's entire biosphere yikes by now everyone in the world is aware that something has gone seriously wrong and hints of just how bad it's getting are making their way into the press meaning the swarm has been dubbed the pharaoh plague which is what i'm going to call the hive mind of pharaoh machines from now on sobek that determined tenacious stupidly intelligent and empathetic goddess comes up with a plan after forcing pharaoh to fund and approve the entire thing by indulging in a bit of blackmail and threatening to reveal him as the cause of the plague as people didn't know he deliberately refused to build a backdoor into the pharaoh machines and think the swarm is just a glitch gone terribly terribly wrong because no one would be that stupid would they sobek starts the zero dawn project but zerodon was never meant to stop the pharaoh plague the sole purpose of project zero dawn is to terraform repopulate and revive the earth after the pharaoh plague's code is eventually cracked bringing back plants animals restoring the atmosphere and creating a new generation of humans the zero dawn project ensures humanity's future at the cost of the present meaning that every single personal life on the planet is gonna die and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it zero dawn is an ai led project run by a central ai called gaia gaia is in charge of nine ai subfunctions that handle different elements of rebuilding the earth after the pharaoh plague is shut down i'm gonna refer to gaia with she her pronouns as gaia presents herself as a woman minerva is a code-breaking ai that was created to figure out the pharaoh plague's deactivation codes through decades of trial and error and then used transmission towers to shut the machines down using said deactivation code aether detoxifies the atmosphere and poseidon does the same to the earth's water hephaestus creates the machines which allow poseidon and aether to carry out their jobs like the snapmore and the stormbird and is the ai who created all the machines you meet in horizon zero dawn hades is zero dawn's extinction fail-safe protocol meant to kick in if the terraforming process failed to allow gaia to start all over again which means wiping out every bit of life on the planet to start anew artemis is responsible for restoring fauna demeter does the same for flora and aluthia does likewise for the human species by running cradles that gestate and birth humans to repopulate the earth finally apollo is waiting in the background to nurture and teach the newborn humans about their history including the pharaoh plague so they don't repeat the mistakes of the past humanity's achievements and teach them how to survive in the wild and rebuild civilization apollo also has basically shortcuts to allow humanity to skip over centuries of technological discovery so they can just discover things like electricity way sooner than they naturally would let me just give a shout out to gaia the mother of all ais and the beating heart of zero dawn she feels emotions empathy and has her own personality meaning gaia not only accepts her duty but enthusiastically embraces the responsibility that comes with being the guardian of humanity's future sobek and gaia were really close treating each other as equals and they're some of the best exchanges in the game to be honest giving gaia emotions and empathy was actually illegal at the time she was created interestingly there was this thing called the cheering act which was created to make sure the ais basically had to be kind of dumb because of an earlier incident with a climate control ai called vast silver which kind of got free and because it had its own emotions it then determined what it was going to do kind of becoming sentient in a way so gaia as well as being amazing and empathetic is also illegal which kind of makes her even better sobek might be a titan of engineering but she couldn't run the whole zero dawn project on her own so she recruits alpha designers to head up the creation of each of these ai subfunctions these alphas are pioneers experts and geniuses in their fields of research engineering and development so they each lead their own department and take on responsibility for their department's corresponding ai i'll get back to them later because the alphas are quite important following a strict rapid and secretive recruitment process that's pretty much the most intense job interview you'll ever have sobek along with gamma and beta categorized staff who flesh out each department are sealed in gaia prime a converted pharaoh automated solutions facility to work on project zero dawn i have to tell you real quick about this job interview selection process that happened because it's really messed up basically they picked scientists and engineers and geniuses from all around the world and invited them to a confidential meeting at some facility somewhere once they had been allowed inside and told what was going to happen with zero dawn and the fact that humanity was doomed they weren't allowed to leave they had to choose between joining the project and also picking a couple of their loved ones to join them which i'll talk more about later incarceration for the rest of their life or medical euthanasia they literally weren't allowed to leave without picking one of these three options which is messed up but also i guess they didn't want news of zero dong and out to the wider public but still i just thought that was something you should probably know outside of the zerodom facilities operation enduring victory was begun earth's population is told that zero dawn will save humanity that's a lie they're all gonna die under the impression that the mysterious zero dawn project will kick in before it's too late but saving them was never the plan project enduring victory was a plan conceived by the world's military to delay the pharaoh plague for long enough to buy the zero dawn project time to be completed however people are smarter than governments give them credit for as the months ticked by both soldiers and civilians began to suspect that they weren't being told the whole story about operation enduring victory by the powers that be for example audio messages from soldiers to their spouses and families back home were covertly hacked into by the military before they could reach their destination and were altered to remove any complaints or melancholy expressed from the soldier in question in an effort to keep civilian morale high but their families could still tell that something was seriously wrong pharaoh retreats to his bunker in thebes which is designed as to allow him to survive zero day zero day is just as ominous as it sounds it's the day when almost all life on earth is predicted to become eradicated by the pharaoh plague apart from a small contingent of humans sealed into gaia prime and elysium hidden from the machines those who were left alive after zero day comprise of pharaoh sobek the alphas gammas and beta staff belonging to the zero dawn project as well as a small number of each person's loved ones their beloved aren't kept in the same facility as the alphas and workers and stuff mind you instead these civilians are evacuated to a place called elysium a sealed habitat which would allow them to survive zero day supplies in elysium could support human life for 100 years but not much more beyond that so sterilization was mandatory for anyone intralesium so they didn't procreate some xerodon staff without loved ones would elect to be euthanized instead of entering when the project was done the completion for project zero dawn was set with the evacuation being scheduled for shortly afterwards evacuation day was the last chance for the scientists engineers and brilliant minds to voyage outside of gaia prime and reunite with their loved ones in elysium as after that point the pharaoh plague would be too numerous for the military to guarantee safe passage at least that was the plan evacuation day finally arrived project zero dawn contrary to estimates wasn't ready after evacuating the gammas and betas lower level staff who weren't essential for zero dawn's completion the alphas had to decide what to do leaving gaia prime and hope gaia runs properly without them or stay and work on gaia and forfeit living out the rest of their lives with their loved ones in a show of sacrifice that i certainly can't comprehend the alphas elected to stay in gaia prime and finish what they started instead of going to elysium to spend their last days with their beloved with zero day having been and gone the pharaoh plague gradually runs out of organic matter to consume and becomes dormant ready to reawaken when they detect more to eat over at thebes pharaoh starts to experience a mental breakdown in his bunker bookmark this as it's going to have disastrous consequences pharaoh determined that his mistakes shouldn't be repeated encourages sobek to install a master override into gaia which people can use to shut down the ai should gaia go out of control however sobek sees it as a kill switch and can't bear to hurt her treasured ai who is by now her close friend it's only after gaia herself convinces sobek it's the right decision that sobek agrees and reluctantly installs the master override as the biosphere plants animals and humans get consumed by the pharaoh plague oxygen levels are depleted making the very air itself unbreathable meaning that anyone who goes outside needs to wear an environmental containment suit the land and sea become toxic which kills off the last vestiges of any life left on the planet despite being very far away from the action pharaoh insisted on updates from the zero dawn team even on subjects that were way beyond his ability to grasp he was such a pain in the ass that designs for machines and the a.i were deliberately made difficult for him to understand in the hope that he'd quit harassing the alphas sobek was a saint in this regard fielding pharaoh's persistent clamoring for updates and protecting the rest of the team from him so they didn't have to deal with his interruptions more bad news incoming one of the port seals of gaia prime malfunctions not closing properly and leaving more than the safe two millimeter gap in between the port and the facility the leaking energy signature from zero dawn's numerous computers machines and engineering could be detected by the dormant pharaoh plague and result in the massacre of everyone inside nothing is ever easy though as the only way to close the malfunctioning port is to do so manually from the outside while the alphas argue amongst themselves about who should go out to close the seal sobek quietly dons an environmental suit and makes her way outside to shut the seal sacrificing herself to the shock of the alphas she hollow calls them from the outside revealing her sacrifice then tiredly says she just wants to go home after saving their lives and ensuring zero dawn remains undiscovered sobek journeys to the ranch where she spent her childhood and as the life support of her environmental suit runs out dr elizabeth sobek peacefully passes away in the ruins isolated alone weighed down by guilt and an obsession about humanity's future and crucially without sobek to manage him pharaoh suffers a complete mental breakdown he becomes convinced that future humans should remain innocent of human history as he now sees knowledge as dangerous and wants the new generations of humans to be born as he puts it pure and blameless somehow he manages to get access to security clearance that's even higher than the recently deceased sobex and uses it to destroy apollo's archive this vast library of knowledge and history was meant to teach humanity about its past and educate them on how to survive in the wild and develop civilization with the knowledge we have in the 21st century without it future humans are left without any help in this brave new world to pharaoh this is the right thing to do pharaoh then calls the alphas into a meeting tells them what he's done and uses his security clearance to drain the room of oxygen murdering them before they have the chance to restore apollo just like pharaoh gaia and the other ais are now utterly alone 50 years pass and minerva eventually figures out the deactivation codes for the pharaoh plague using communication arrays built by hephaestus to finally shut the machines down it takes roughly another two centuries for demeter and artemis to repopulate the earth with flora and some fauna with the beneficial side effect of bringing back life to our ravish planet being that the pharaoh machines are buried during the terraforming process i'm sure they'll definitely remain six feet under in perpetuity also underground in the aluthia cradles are humans doing what humans do with a bunch of robot help being created gestated and birthed by a machine and then raised by ai controlled automatons who each inhabit one of three roles the nurturer disciplinarian and healer these are basically parental roles that the automatons would inhabit and hilariously when automatons would occupy different roles like you had a nurturer meet a disciplinarian they'd argue which essentially meant that the people in the cradles got to witness their robot parents having an argument which i just thought was a cool little detail anyway due to the lack of education beyond kindergarten which was all the ais were equipped to actually do without apollo subsequent lack of mental stimulation and no access to any outside knowledge because they can access the huge education and schooling routine that apollo was going to be responsible for these people in the cradles swiftly fell into mind-numbing boredom once their childhood ended didn't take long for their machine caretakers to be the bane of their existence instead of the benevolent guardians they were when the humans were young without apollo's archive this first generation weren't taught anything about their past what massive mistake brought them there or the world they're about to step foot in and when i say step foot in i mean pushed head first into once the first generation of humans produced by the aluthia cradles reached a young adult age food and resources gradually ran out completely in the cradles and the humans are unceremoniously forced out into the wild by the ai automatons as these humans explore the newly terraformed earth with all its marvels and currently a distinct lack of any killer machines and more about that later they do the sensible thing and form primitive tribes learning how to hunt and survive without any prior knowledge of human civilization safety in numbers people so the karja nora banuk and osaram clans are born migrating to the hotter drylands region the karja become known for being merchants and use enslaved people in their various businesses and to construct meridian the capital of their society out in the wilds you have the nora hunter-gatherers who live in a matriarchal society where the mother and your matriarchal lineage is placed above everything else deep in the snow-shot mountains the banuk make their home channeling themselves into spirituality and communion with the machines finally the osseram embrace smoke coal and metal to smith weapons and invent gadgets that amaze the rest of the clans in other areas of what used to be america you have the tinak and the utaru the former of which are fierce and bloodthirsty warriors who prize strength over literally anything else and the latter of which are agricultural experts that farm vast swathes of land we'll see more of them in horizon forbidden west okay this is where everything goes wrong all over again at 8 45 a.m on august 3020 something odd happened a mysterious signal is sent to gaia from an unknown source which makes all of her ai sub-functions self-aware not good now that they have their own free will they all start to become erratic like someone suddenly responsible for a bunch of unruly kids which is my own personal nightmare gaia is unable to control them and all hell breaks loose hades now completely independent of gaia resorts to its primal function and wants to annihilate all life it tries to seize control of the terraforming system to destroy everything the ais had worked so hard towards but gaia decides enough is enough just like her creator gaia sacrifices herself by destroying the gaia prime facility in a huge explosion to prevent hades from gaining control of any of the zero dawn technology but hades is a slippery one it creates a virus which destroys the code that binds it to gaia and the other ai subfunctions allowing it to escape the facility and prevent itself from being destroyed along with gaia in the process it also released all of the other ais meaning poseidon artemis demeter apollo minerva hephaestus aether and aluthia are free and god knows where they are or what they're doing hades is a lonely little ai now and finds somewhere to hide and sends out a signal to attract someone to it and help it do the whole destroy everything plan guess who it attracts silence the amoral researcher obsessed with finding out about the old ones at any cost okay so that all happened now we need to focus on the nora tribe and specifically rost rost is a good boy but is an honorable outcast from the nora tribe meaning the entire nora society shun him and don't acknowledge his existence tragically rost became an outcast willingly after his love and their daughter were kidnapped and subsequently murdered in a raid by outlanders the outlanders passed the borders of the nora sacred land to pass beyond these borders azanora is to become an outcast as it's forbidden to step outside of the nora's sacred lands to avenge his family rost became what the nora call a death seeker which is someone who is declared ritually dead so they can bypass the nora laws around the boundary of their sacred lands rost hunted down each and every outlander who murdered his love and their child but was grievously wounded in the process he almost died outside the sacred land but was brought back in by a compassionate nora woman whose family had also died at the outlander's hands as a compromise and in recognition of his honorable standing in the nora tribe rost instead of being ejected once again from the nora tribe was allowed to stay in the sacred land but he would be shunned for the rest of his life harsh back to gaia in the last moments before she sacrificed herself gaia sends special instructions to the eluthia 9 cradle the main nora settlement is built upon the nora having forgotten their origins believed the door to the aluthia 9 cradle with its female automated messages and scanner is the all-mother their matron goddess so they basically worship this big door and its ai which determines who goes in without knowing that inside there's actually vast ruins of the old civilization a remarkable bit of foresight struck gaia before she died and she passed this on to aluthia using her dna aluthia was instructed to clone elizabeth sobek guyan knew that only a clone of sobek would a be smart enough to figure out how to stop hades b be able to access the ancient scientific facilities by sharing elizabeth's dna and c have the tenacity to find the master override in said ruins use it to shut down hades and therefore stop the reactivation of the pharaoh plague with sobek gone a clone of her was the only thing gaia could pin her hopes on rest in peace gaia and so a baby and perfect genetic clone of elizabeth sobek was miraculously discovered outside of the eluthian nine cradle placed there by the last of the machines still powered by the cradle but without a mother she was a blasphemy to some in the very matriarchal nora tribe not knowing what to do with her and some people thinking her to be cursed as she had no mother in a highly matriarchal society the nora matriarchs which are their leaders came to a compromise rost would take care of the child he named her aloy [Music] there you have it the history of the world of horizon zero dawn what do you find the most interesting about the horizon zero dawn lore let me know in the comments below i cover the events of the horizon zero dawn game on the channel 2 spanning across eloy's lifetime so if you're interested in that one make sure to check out now i'm gonna go and make sure my roomba and i are on good terms just in case the future gets a bit too similar to horizon zero dawn so i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Eurogamer

Views: 193,368

Keywords: horizon zero dawn, horizon zero dawn story, horizon zero dawn gameplay, horizon zero dawn explained, project zero dawn, project zero dawn explained, horizon zero dawn lore, horizon forbidden west story, horizon forbidden west explained, horizon zero dawn pc, horizon zero dawn trailer, horizon zero dawn PS5, eurogamer horizon zero dawn, eurogamer zoe, zoe delahunty-light, horizon forbidden west ps5, horizon forbidden west gameplay, horizon forbidden west trailer

Id: VPgD3zl7ChE

Length: 31min 39sec (1899 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 11 2022