I always liked the headcanon that Ted didn’t delete Apollo in order to “protect” the new humans from their mistakes. He just didn’t want to be remembered as humanity’s destroyer.
true... it is also possible that he didn't destroy Apolo but only removed Zero Dawn project's access to it: 1) The entire archive was described as being coded into probably the most durable medium known to pre-Zero Dawn man, that being artifical fossils, something that would have to be destroyed physically, which is not something to be done by people already locked in bunkers 2) Considering that Faro wanted to guide "Liz's children", in essence becoming a god for them, he could have still had access to the archive through his Omega clearance.
@@marty2129 Correct me if I'm mistaken but Apollo was the Teacher AI, yes? So yeah it's most likely that Faro erased the teacher who basically the middle-man between humans and the archive.
I think the most horriflying thing about Horizon is the Faro Plague isn't even a Smart AI, they just followed their base line orders; replicate, consume, replicate. The thing that killed Earth wasn't even conscience.
It's definitely what makes it creepy. The Faro Plague wasn't out to destroy humanity because it thought it was better than humanity or that it was the rise of a new lifeform or anything like that. It was like a clock just ticking away. It was doing what it was programmed to do and nothing more, nothing less. It was literally the *Perfect Machine.* But because the world can't run on "perfection" it eventually collapse under the weight of that programming.
Yeah, that's why I despise ideas proposed by some people desperately trying to assign some hidden meaning to the the Swarm, like it's Vast Silver's doing etc. The idea that era of rampant consumerism was brought low to an explosive finish by what was essentially a self-replicating swarm of military Roombas is terrifyingly poignant, and it would be a waste to ruin it for a cheap, "Gotcha!" plot-twist.
I hadn’t even known the story when I made that comment. Hadn’t played the game. Had just gotten to the Faro Plague and the solution. I just knew the pattern of three, and knew the old punch about malice and ignorance. Funny. That was right.
She knew Ted Faro so well that she knew she had to have an ace up her sleeve to force him to sign. Otherwise he would have whined about his dirty conscience, and his hesitation would have destroyed Zero Dawn alongside Earth.
That got me thinking of something now. She threatened him with "telling everyone the real cause of the glitch" what does that mean? If it was a "glitch" then it wasn't Faro's fault, but he definitely felt threatened by that. Just what did Faro do that caused the glitch? He might be even more guilty than we know.
@@sekkuar I think the implication is that the "glitch" is less of a technical bug and more the inevitable result of building a line of unstoppable, self-replicating, biomass-fueled robots whose systems are so advanced that they cannot be hacked or turned off by ANYONE, including their creator. Faro thought that would be fine because he assumed that they would never malfunction and would always respond to human commands. But technology crashes happen ALL THE TIME. That's why modern tech always has a backdoor; always has a shutdown function built into it: so that engineers can examine the machinery, figure out what went wrong, and hopefully fix it. But Ted fucking Faro specifically ordered that no such safety measures be installed in his robots. Because God forbid, his competitors could hack them. So while the actual "glitch" may technically not be Ted Faro's fault, the glitch being unfixable and the consequences thereof ABSOLUTELY were.
@@sekkuar I don't think there was a glitch, just that computers don't understand human intentions. Kinda like how (insert evil AI here) was designed to protect humanity, but realized that the best way to do so was to enslave them, so it did so, because that's what it's programming wanted. It sounds a lot more like Ted just had his PR team reword the incidents into being a glitch.
Ted Faro being kept alive but in pain for hundreds of years, only to be killed off by one of his future admirers in Forbidden West was one of the most satisfying moments in the series in my opinion. The Horizon Games are so underrated I swear
i highly doubt that we saw the last of ted or that the beeing he became was killed by one quen soldier with a torch, he became something that lives of geothermal (heat) energy arround a core that was 541°F/282 celcius, the heat of a flame would mean nothing to it! as datapoint 36 reactor report states : WARNING: Structural Integrity low. Core vulnerable. Any disturbance may trigger Safeguard protocol! from what i think , the torch agitated /disstessed the beeing that was until that moment fully intertwined with the reactor causing a structural issue setting of the failsafe , the only thing we did was freeing this thing from it food supply , and its going to look for an new source of food!
@@palvierflex4344Now add to his possible survival the fact that the the foreshadowed threat for Horizon 3, the Nemesis, was made to offer Zeniths' minds to upload to any body, be it mechanical OR ORGANIC... Meeting a mutated-immortal-Ted-Faro-blob-Thing that is connected to the Nemesis hivemind isn't exactly o my bucket list, but your comment made me think of it as a possibility...
@@marty2129 pretty sure the next game is gonna be insane with the levitation, immortality and threat of a mutent and crazy AI hive mind on the loose. Maby ted will regain himself a bit and do what he does best. Make things worse. Mutent ted vs nemasis which ends with ted being adsorbed and a true boss fight starting would be interesting
@@isdrakon9802 i know and am not discounting that , the lava flow is part of the "normal" failsafe design in case tedd was killed by his harem/followers ,or in teds own words if someone tried to steal his "cheese"! look at the hologram aloy is looking arround 39:55 , there are a lot of yellow pipes that are connected the reactor that are meant to fill thebes with lava so no one could hide/survive, even the eventualy of death ted wanted the last word! but those pipes only go from the reactor room to other rooms , not the reactor room it self! and thebes is surrounded by a huge body of water, any structural issue would cause that to start rushing in!
It breaks my heart to see Samina just shatter when she hears Apollo was destroyed in the hologram. The greatest amalgamation of human knowledge since the Library of Alexandria. A seed of a new tree of life and culture eradicated
I just noticed those two comforting her after hearing that and was like "wow, they put a small detail nobody would have mentioned if it wasn't added". They put alot into these games and I love them.
Actually if you look it up the library at Alexandria wasn't nearly the great loss that pop history makes it out to be. Baghdad being destroyed was way worse, and the current destruction of Syria I would say is also worse. So much history lost
It's so sad that Egipt did't passed to islamic hands, before christians made that whole mess with their intolerance of science and culture over half Rome. Thing is, i fear something similar is about to happend with neo-pentecostal and evangelical takeover.
The end of forbidden West, Apollo is recovered, from the copy that the Far Zenith's had with them - plus the addition of their 1000 years of knowledge and culture.
Incompetent villains are kinda underrated in my opinion. They are not someone we ‘Like to Hate’, they are someone we ‘Just Hate’, but that doesn’t (always) mean they are badly written characters (ex: Joffrey). It’s just that we are invested in them in a different way that even ourselves sometimes might not fully understand .
This. In a way... this type of villain is the most "real", people like Faro exist in real life much more easily, it isnt that they arent smart, they are... it is just that the let arrogance take hold of every single aspect of their being and the money and influence they amassed convinces them that nothing they do is wrong, which doesnt take a high level of intelligence to know it isnt true. Normally in stories like this we get these large than life villains that are hype competent or so beyond common concepts that we just suspend our disbelief, but Ted Faro is real, they only part we don't have is the overly advanced tech.
@Alacaelum the holocaust was perpetrated in large part by people like faro. more so than just at the top. A veritable human centipede of faro-likes, from general to clerk, is what unleashed the darkest evil this world has ever suffered. And that is horrifying because our world is not just ruled by faro-likes, but upheld, maintained, even to an extent composed of them. Horizon's world, like ours, was probably full of these people on every level of business and government. Saving the world from an evil billionaire is easy, but how do you save the world from one billion morally bankrupt office drones? Is that even possible?
Something to point out: When he is found (like he wants to be) by a cult that worships him (best possible scenario for him), even they're disgusted by what he's turned into, and their leader's first reaction is to light him on fire. It would be poetic, if it weren't for the Ceo's second reaction: cover up and lie about it.
Actually... i find that poetic. The loser wanted to be worshiped like a savior, but more than anything... he wanted the personal acknowledgment, he wanted to be there to bask in the confetti, and just when he it was at his grasp... the same type of loser lights him on fire and covers it up. Poetry.
@@Alacaelum I think Alacaelum meant it in a more personal reaction way (as in human always repeat the same mistakes), and not in the grand philosophical/thematic way like you pointed out.
Oh I think the cult of personality he accidentally created doing the exact same thing he did, I.E. immediately try to cover up how full of shit they were without actually acknowledging the problem, is *very* poetic.
It's rather fitting Ceo was the exact same as Ted, refused to acknowledge any possibility of him having any negative to him He gets to meet his idol and sees his God is nothing but a sham Whether Ceo would have lived long enough to see he was becoming the very same person or not we will never know
There's something particularly aggravating about how some bastard that dropped out of school deciding they can destroy foundational knowledge that was meant to serve a new generation of human beings. Trying to hide away his heinous actions or not, there can be no greater insult to humanity's collective intellect.
well yeah destroying the history of how his mistake happened and kill off humanity how can the future humans avoid that mistake without learning about it because some idiot thought it should be erased
That's the thing... People like Ted Faro are so narcissistic, that they think everyone else is like them. He couldn't learn from mistakes, so how could future humanity?
@SaraMorgan-ym6ue Exactly! "When humanity doesn't learn from its mistakes, history tends to repeat itself." Ted did it to cover his own ass. Simple as that. How selfish do you have to be to completely destroy all knowledge of the past and send the future of humanity back into the stone age just because you don't want to be seen as the bad guy? It's sick and just makes him more of the bad guy he was trying not to be.
@@theminerwithin9316Plenty of people don't like teaching history if it portrays any group other than Caucasians as the bad guy... We do plenty of this today, already. Hell, they even try to race swap historical characters now. It won't be long until swathes of history are completely suppressed and rewritten, if we allow things to continue as they are.
My personal theory for why we never actually got to see Faro's "final form" onscreen is because showing that degree of Resident Evil-esque body horror likely would've bumped Forbidden West's rating up to M, and I would guess they had to keep the rating at T to keep the game as accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Still, I think the vague holographic image coupled with the... sounds... do a good job of getting across that whatever he's become, it isn't pretty.
Probably, although I like that the game doesn't let us see him, letting us imagine something maybe even more horrific than what the game would have designed. Sometimes the unknown horror is way more impactful.
I think another reason that Faro’s “final form” wasn’t revealed was also a thematic choice, in that Faro no longer matters in the modern day or the grand scheme of things anymore. He *IS* nothing to the Aloy or any of the other characters, only some old figure that ruined the old world… and a glorified tumor.
@@luvamiart8567 That's why Alien is so effective. You never truly see the monster until the very end. Otherwise, you'd notice that it's just some dude in a costume. What the writer can give us may never be as impactful as what we imagine in our minds.
@@slateoffate9812 In the hologram of his vital signs said the brain activity was minimal, so I guess he was not capable of coherent thought anymore, just a big mass of fleshy blob with some sentience.
A part you missed that really sums up Ted Faro as a character are the two inactive (but functional) scarab drones he kept in Thebes. He wiped out the alphas and Apollo to "protect future generations from poisonous knowledge," but was literally incapable of understanding the hypocrisy and risk of saving two of the very robots that destroyed the world. And remember, these are not statues, they are inactive but fully functional models. I love Ted Faro as a villain because he isn't evil in the traditional sense, but he is a monster through his inability to ever replace his ego with empathy, no matter what has occurred.
In a way, the fact those two were protected also had the risk of setting the planet back to hell once again Sure they didn't escape but life is weird. A strong enough earthquake could have cracked it open. Maybe a malfunction in the tomb, etc. Him keeping those was for his ego of his creations as well as risking things to happen once again
I believe that only the Horus's could create new ones. However I believe those one's were the ones that hacked and repaired. So they could have possibly reactivated the other machines by hacking them and reactivating them. Even if we say that they cannot hack the other Faro machines, there is a reason Hephaestus only activated after Minerva deactivated them, its machines could easily be hacked. These are primitive tribes just learning how to use bow, if these two machines could even just hack a few Thunderjaws they could tactically send even just a few to the villages and there would be nothing stopping them. This is also assuming it can't hack Hephaestus itself. If they could Hephaestus could be there replacement for Horus's. This isn't lack of empathy... this is him still being unable to think about a decision for longer than a second.
@@RaidFiftyOne it's obvious that Chariots can't hack other Chariots. If they could, what's stopping FAS from just using the same tech to regain control of the Rogue Swarm? That's the terrifying beauty of the situation. It was completely containable in the beginning. Just send a few swarms to uh... "Forcibly Disassemble" the rogue one, but recalling these assets from the clients would be impossible to keep under wraps and would result in a scandal and loss of confidence in the product, and Faro was already too busy sicking his suits on everyone daring to say anything regarding what was happening in Timor. Faro tells Sobeck about the situation at the tail end of October, but one of the data points talks about the swarm chomping on a mango orchard and ruining the harvest - meaning this crap started in the SUMMER! Meaning FAS was trying to keep a lid on it for MONTHS!
Like he wasn’t a fun villain we could love to hate or bathe in their cold calculating schemes. He was just an incompetent man, with too much money and power in his hands, who created the apocalypse out of short sighted greed, who hid the problems under that fucking tech-bro smugness, and who, when the world *could* have fixed his fuck up, in an act of self pity, he decided to kill off the Alphas and destroy Apollo because he felt ALL of humanity didn’t deserve to live (from his fuck up!), thus setting humanity back thousands of years, destined to repeat the same mistakes as before. Ferro is the that one son of a bitch I wish I could punch all the way back in the first game. (Never played the second one)
When I first saw that I just thought 'of course'. Dude fancied himself like an Egyptian Pharoah. The whole Thebes section was like something out of a horror game. We didn't see exactly what Ted ultimately became, but the guttural roaring and the disgusted reactions of Aloy and Ceo tell you plenty about it, to let your imagination fill in the blanks. Killed everyone on the planet, and then wanted to live forever.
What truly scares me about Ted Faro is that he never takes responsibility for what he’s done, or feel any remorse. He’s got this bullshit narrative in his head that he is always right - or, if he causes damage, it’s not that bad. And because he’s always right in his own eyes, he never learns from his mistakes. Because, as far as he’s concerned, he’s never done something bad enough to learn from. Talking to him is pointless because he simply doesn’t see the same reality the rest of us do.
Ah, the “Tony Stark Syndrome”. The richest, “smartest” man on the planet thinking he, and only he, can chart the course of humanity for the better. Everyone else are idiots, and his vision is the only right way to go
I loved the plot line that made the Quen worship Faro. They simply could not access newer data because of the devices they were using. Like having a computer that can only read floppy discs while the new data is only on CDs. CDs that told the story of the Faro plague.
Horizon zero dawn is Jurassic park just on a much larger scale goes to show the dangers for you and me in the real world this sort of thing actually happening for real
One of my favorite things about Horizon is they basically worked backwards from really cool concept art of giant robot dinosaurs existing with tribal humans. The writers did a hell of a job making that a believe reality with amazing lore.
Actually I think the very earliest concept of horizon zero dawn was a controllable ball on a platform with a T. rex and they managed to build up from that
"Hey, have you noticed anything... odd, about the killer robots we're making?" "Odd? In what way?" "They use flesh to make more killer robots." "So?" "Ted. Are we the baddies?"
You would think someone would have pointed out this was all a colossally bad idea at some point...but then I realised he would either fire them, or just plain ignore them. Hubris.
They don't use biomass to make more of themselves. They're steel and other composites while biomass is predominantly carbon. The biomass conversion is means of refueling. Their nanomachines convert biomass straight into diesel fuel, skipping the millions of years it usually takes dead organic matter to become oil.
In Thebes you actually can find audio tapes of the teenage daughter explaining how the spiritual guide for Faro allowed him to stay more somewhat sane and not mentally deteriorate more than he already was. When faro killed the spiritual guide he just started becoming worse and worse which confirms his psychological breakdown was in fact getting worse and explains the change in character
The horror when you find out Ted Faro killed Humanity twice over, First in body by accident with his self replicating robots Second in spirit when he consciously wipes the Archive of all Human knowledge. Its a true testament to the writing skill of the Horizon team to write such a chilling apocalypse story with such a horrific villain.
He is not horrifying, he is believable as someone who could actually exist and that is where the horror comes from, not directly from him, but the thought that someone like him could exist and do exactly what he did and it not seem out of place today.
@@JoshSweetvale It is a different type of horror than being directly about the individual, you would not be scared of Ted at first but because of his actions being believable and within his nature as a narcissistic/parasitic and self-styled Saviour, he becomes frightening because it is believable that everything he did would be something that someone like him would do even in the real world if they had all that power, but no self-control.
I think it's a fitting them since Horizion zero dawn is actually a Warhammer 40k game based on the empty part of lore from the age of strife during the 25m its very grim dark. I've watched about four videos so far from Brett and their pretty funny they're reddit coded if he's not himself just actually an ai bot farm creator scaping data from reddit. Everything he complains about is actually just the cometary on 40k the entire reason the game even exist in the first place and why he can make essays about it. Ted represents man as a whole not an archetype of a guy and far zenith represents Eldar repackaged and the consequences of the powerful not protecting the weak not the rich losing there humanity. It's like when fallout 4 youtubers complain about the brotherhood of steel as a faction not realizing fallout 4 is self is actually a cometary on the blood angles and grey knights or halo otsd, and helldivers being a commentary on the imperial guard and star ship trooper movie which is itself was a competing commentary of the director who was a socialist and the book which is actually a commentary on both nationalism and socialism which itself is the same themes of commentary as the imperial guard with the commentary of the inquisition and tyrranids. These side communities of 40k who don't understand there in the 40k community and probably dislike 40k unless it's repackaged in a simpler softer tones don't recognize there in a kitty pool above a hidden ocean which the kitty pool is actually a part of unless you knew these games where actually about 40k and understood 40k lore you can misinterpret them. Now that Horizon dawn is big its writing staff will likely slowly be replaced by writers who didn't have the full context to interpret them and find them offensive and be turned into a poor soulless copy that loses its rich themes that made it good with its roots in 40k why they even got into it in the first place.
Actually, when the swarm was on the small scale on that island with the dolphin and the mango trees, it could have been stopped since it wasn't to the point where the swarm could self replicate faster than humanity could destroy them, but since Ted Faro's solution to the glitch was to cover up his mistake and hire "the best lawyers to defend him in court". He accidentally gave the swarm the time it needed to replicate enough Horus' to become unstopable
@@razorflossrazor2937 Yup, that's why I really like this game's story, it's utilize the fact that there are "Ted Faro"s in the world right now and the only reason why they haven't killed the world yet is that they don't have the tech that Ted has in HZD, which is what makes it so goddamn scary and a good tragedy IMO.
They could've had time to nuke the swarm if not for his cover up. When they first learned it was unpatchable, they should have told the US military immediately.
The only other villain in the Horizon series with a death count even remotely close in terms of scale to Ted Faro is Jiran the Mad Sun King. About half of the problems that Aloy has to deal with over the course of the first two games are a result of the Red Raids that Jiran set into motion. And the strangest part is that when we first learn about him, he's already long dead.
Kinda what I like and hate about he Mad Sun King. He was instrumental in _a lot_ of the pain and suffering characters go through but you don't ever meet him. You don't even get to _see_ him. He's the kind of person you definitely want to punch in the face but you never get that chance. I love it because it makes what he did a reflection of the worse parts of humanity; the Mad Sun King isn't so much a person as he's an ideology that must be rejected if humans are ever to move forward, but then again you really want to know what he was like as a person directly.
Jiran is also the perfect antithesis to the bullshit Faro feeds himself to justify deleting APOLLO. There you have it a 'blameless' man raised in a world without the knowledge of the Old Ones and what does he do? Raid neighboring tribes for blood sacrifices to appease a Sun God and cure the derangement of the machines. Even a millennia later humanity was paying for Faro's mistakes.
@@marty2129 Of course, he was mad because of Nemesis, when Gaia blew herself up and created Aloy, that's when the derangement and killing machines started appearing. This due to Hefestus going rouge, the mad sun king only sacrificed that many people to try to reverse this in his own twisted understanding
Fucking facts that's all he ever cared about himself and his ego. Like the audio files before that scene stated...He just didn't want people to know he was responsible.
@@HinataElyonTophif he’d had his way, humanity probably wouldn’t have been reading in English, or he’d have lied and told the new humans that his mark is what stopped the machines, he planned to basically install himself as an immortal god of the new humans, and had he not done what he did in the bunker that caused the doctor and his daughter to end themselves, he might’ve succeeded
What I adore about the Horizon series is that it gives us a TRUE apocalypse. Not the half baked versions of Fallout or Terminator or Mad Max or so many zombie movies. No, this isn't a world that ended on a modern society scale or even a human scale. This is a world that ended on a biological scale. And yeah, its depressing, but thats why I love it. So many franchises present the end of the world as just a big old mistake that we humans can learn a lesson and bounce back from, and thats a bad thing to teach people IRL. It is rare to see a scenario where the audience of this kind of media is confronted with the idea that "Yeah, some things can't be fixed." Kind of an important lesson in the modern age with the ever escalating climate crisis and the remaining threat of death by nuclear weapons.
This comment deserves more attention because this is so true! All of the well-known “apocalypse” movies and games see at least a small fraction of humans survive, but in the Horizon universe NOTHING survived, with the exception of one man, who could barely be called human to begin with. Humanity literally went extinct for thousands of years and if not for project Zero Dawn, it would’ve stayed that way.
This is what blew me away when I got into the lore the first time. The planet Died. There was no miraculous last second victory that saved the world. No, everyone and everything died and only afterwards Gaia started trying to rebuild. The absolutism of the end of the world here was just so good.
I liked how they hid what happened to the world till the end. When I was plying zero down, I thought at first that they had succeeded but barely and that the animal robots we hunted had stopped the faro plague. I was horrified when I learned what zero down indeed was.
Let me add one more thing. This is what Really sells the robot army. This is what makes them so terrifying and why I feel on edge when thinking about them. They succeeded! So many other robot threats are not all that intimidating because they were defeated but the Faro Plague Won. No one could defeat them and if they could be reactivated they could do it Again. That's why they are so scary, they were successful.
@@HubiKoshiWhich is why the final mission of Zero Dawn is so impactful and intense (well once you get past the Helis boss fight). These machines destroyed the world once and they were just a mindless group with no central governing intelligence. Purely doing what they did on instinct. But now they do, HADES. And they almost succeeded in starting the apocalypse once again. I love how the final fight has a timer. If that timer hits zero, the whole world loses, again. And to think, all of that was to deny the Zeniths a refuge from Nemesis. Nemesis was willing to end life on Earth once again just to get even with 13 Zeniths.
"Imagine working for this company and your CEO anounces these changes" wait a minute... incompetent leader of AI-developer reverses company-course to develop weapons. Refuses to elaborate further. Kills the world. ... Ted Faro is reverse-Iron Man
I guess. I think its more accurate to say Ted is a tony who is no genius and insted of getting a wake up call about his wepons he insted leand into it and used his money to upgrade his money maker to be better and more wanted by the militerys. In other words not reverse iron man but idiot tony stark
True, but the difference is he ignored any wake up calls, denied responsibility, and even though the results of his incompetence stared him right in the face, he *still* couldn't realize executive decisions should not be in his ballpark. Then tried again by erasing humanity's knowledge slate because, of course, one last mistake for the road. All for nothing, too. It's really interesting.
i mean if Iron-Man had no morals, was stupid while presenting as a genius, still having a good marketing department, no backbone and had his head so far up himself he can only perceive his own anus... so essentially Elon Musk but with more money, better PR and in more advanced world
those aren't just the scientists who created Zero Dawn, they are the Zero Dawn ALPHAS. the ones who designed and were in charge of the various subsystems for the projects. while the other workers under them got to live with their loved ones in a bunker after they were done on the project (FW tells us something went wrong with this bunker, but we don't know what), the alphas had to essentially sign their lives over to the project forever. these were THE most self-sacrificing people, the true heroes that gave us a world after complete destruction, and... that's what Ted did. also, the Thebes bit in Forbidden West was like the most perfectly creepy and horrific thing in a non-horror game that I've ever experienced. mwah. I agree the giant Ted was a bit much but pretty much everything else was so spot-on. you can see he started losing it when Lis died, it makes sense that seeing the world completely fall apart broke his mind entirely. there is a really fucked up alt Horizon world where like, the life extension did work fine and Ted emerged and was treated as a god in the new world... then again he's so shitty and incompetent that humanity wouldn't have survived very long oh and of course, FUCK TED FARO
The Alphas planned to continue working on Gaia until it was perfect even if that required them to clone themselves and tech their clone to do their job. They were signing up for lifetimes of work.
Your next video should be on Sylens. Knowledge at all costs...sounds like a villain to me. Also I think the slow dawning HORROR on Aloy's face when she learns that Faro is still alive, is an amazing touch.
Sylens has done some villainous things like supporting the Shadow Caja and Regalla’s rebels. He is also wanted by the Banuk for lying and stealing some of their holy relics. However he would say that he is the only man of science and reason in a world of superstitious tribesmen and whatever he does is for the greater good. That it is only through him that humanity has a chance of regaining anything that was lost and evolving beyond tribalism. He is also refreshingly humble sometimes. When Aloy derails his plan to use Regalls rebels in a suicidal attack on the Zeniths he quickly and calmly adapts and goes along with her plan instead, even if he doesn’t know what it is. For him the ends do justify the means and pride is a hindrance to knowledge.
If anything I would classify Sylens as chaotic neutral, perhaps falling into similar pits as Ted and the Zeniths but not inherently evil. The stage is pretty set for a similar style "oopsie" though by him.
It may seem over the top at first, but I think Faro's bunker is designed perfectly from a narrative point of view, the design itself is not egomania, it's a strategy, visual shorthand meant to influence the opinion of any who enter, it's only the entryway and main hall that look like this, the rest of the facility looks just the same as any other. His plan, however, was the epitome of egomania, when he was designing his bunker and choosing who would accompany him, he clearly already had a plan in place, he wanted to live long enough to see the new world, and become an important part of it, but with his descent into madness and paranoia, the plan become even more extreme: Delete Apollo. Further the development of life extending technology while waiting for the human race to reform. Then emerge as the immortal God-King of all mankind, so that he could mold them to his liking and ensure they didn't repeat his own mistakes. Either way, when the new peoples found him, he needed his palace to look the part.
Darn, never thought of it that way - the fact that he may have legitimately believe he could live to see the new world, and thus made preparations from the very start on how he would look when the new world found him... If this is the case, the Ceo & Quen reacted exactly as he would have wanted when they were going thru that hall.
Absolutely, although he didn’t really care about them making the same mistakes, he cared about how they’d think of him He’s an unstable narcissist who cannot accept any blame or accountability for the problems he’s caused, this is displayed best when Lis had to strong arm him into signing the funding for the Zero Dawn project, his last comment of “Jesus Lis, you didn’t have to threaten me.” which he says literally after she had to threaten him to fund the project He wanted to become an immortal god king who had no flaws in the eyes of his subjects, and in a way, he got what he wanted
@@Johninadelaide2022 He does and they rust and catch on fire constantly, doesn't fill one with much hope. Luckily enough he is a lot more of a bumbling incompetent than Faro.
I think Fero plage would never happen, since private companies nowadays tend to reduce live expected of the product so buyers would constantly buy from them. So why would you sell something that self replicate if you will not get profits out of it afterwards?
And then teach him allll about the dangers of hubris and greed and the merits of humility and generosity! I mean... you aren't actually suggesting to harm a child, right? ...right?
True, they are incapable of recognizing that their actions are bad or at the very least necessary for their supposed “great” cause. Much like Thanos, who believed so much in his own idea of cleansing half the universe that he willingly sacrificed a love one to advance towards his goal, not realizing the short sightedness of his decision. Even in Endgame, after realizing his idea was flawed he did not contemplate of what people would make of his decision so he decided to cleanse the universe entirely so no one, ever, will ever know of his crime and worship him as god, much like Ted Faro and his decision to kill all the scientists in that bunker and deleting APOLLO.
It isnt just blaming knowledge, Ted is absolutely acting out of fear and shame. He knows what he did, knows its his fault, and doesnt want anyone knowing just how much of the blame rests on his shoulders
The part of faro that scares me is that he’s honesty a pretty realistic corporate villain. Because a lot of corporate leaders in real life aren’t overtly evil (obviously with some exceptions), they’re stupid, arrogant, don’t think through their actions, and don’t think about people’s humanity at all. Elon musk is an obvious public example, but this applies to all of them to varying extents. His story, and honestly the entire horizon story is really well written. The slow reveal of what he did, how he reacts, and his ultimate fate is incredibly well done and it’s very subtly horrific. You don’t see what happened most of the time, it just leaves you to imagine and it sticks with you. The only thing I would have changed is to let the player see the actual mutated monster that Ted became. I know why the didn’t, the game is rated T for teen and they’d have to change it to really show him and his demise, but I think that final impact would have genuinely been one of the best in gaming. But a small missed opportunity being my only criticism is pretty great overall.
Elon Musk is actually a bad example. The guy has consistently been negative on AI and spends his money to get off world and make a colony as an insurance policy. Sam Altman, who used Microsoft to defeat a coup brought about by colleagues worried about going too far too fast with AI out of pure greed is a much MUCH better example.
He unleashed a Grey Goo scenario on accident. That’s the engineers worst nightmare and why we’re still wary of the concept of full automated assembly because if they’re just building more and more of themselves and something goes haywire where they won’t stop, what then?
@@Mediados "Grey Goo" is a popular hypothetical apocalypse scenario where out-of-control self-replicating nanomachines consume all biomass on the planet. The term was coined sometime in the mid-80s, I think. So nothing to do with the game in this case. (Even though the game does build on the scenario.)
Ted Faro becoming a sort of eldritch cancer on the world strikes me as thematically appropriate. The over-the-top Egyptian theming of his Thebes bunker also strikes me as appropriate as well. All of his bots have Egypt-themed names (scarab, khopesh, Horus). Hell, so does Elisabet *Sobeck*. There's also the idea that a lot of early 20th Century Egyptology-based horror comes with the idea that modern man will be punished for his arrogance by unleashing ancient magics that we are powerless against. In its original context, it was the fear that colonialism will bite us in the ass, but here its flipped on its head. Modern man has stored up the ancient techno-magical curses for our children to find.
In Horzion. Ted can be sort of the futuristic take of the Pharaoh's Curse. As the whole game's apocalypse was literally his curse. A Faro Curse. AFAROPLAGUEOHMYGODIGETHEPUNNOW
I find Ted's spiral into insanity led by his guilt, arrogance, and narcissism rather interesting. His guilt and shame for causing the downfall of humanity leads him to destroy the accumulation of human knowledge. His arrogance prevents him from learning from his own mistakes and choosing a different path. His narcissism has him believe that only he is capable of saving humanity to the extent of denying the people around him. The self-destructive cycle of a narcissist consumed by guilt.
Part of his descent into madness which lead to erasing APOLLO, which did not get mentioned by FatBrett in this video, is he lost the last person that was stabilizing him. Elisibet had to don an exo suit and seal the bunker the rest of the Alphas were sheltering in from the outside and during this, Ted is begging and pleading for Elisibet to get back inside. But if she did go back in, then the Alphas would be found by the Plague and either the door would be ripped open to let the machines in, or the nanobots that feasted on biomass to refuel and replicate for the Plague would slip in through the crack in the door because the door was open just wide enough that they could be detected. Elisibet sacrificed herself to save her team, and Ted fell off the deep end because of it. The only person he could confide in over his guilt because she knew the whole truth was now effectively dead. Then the spiraling descent happened...
@Lightna Yep. Despite their differences Ted held Elizabet in high regard and as a confidant he could rely on. With her gone, he no longer had a rock to lean on and no one else could or would be capable of fulfilling that role and stop him from sinking.
He also coulden't learn from his mistakes. He kept two of the death machines in his bunker still active. He could've killed Earth AGAIN, but this time much more durastic. There is a reason Hephaestus activated AFTER Minerva did her job, its because the machines would easily be hacked via the robots. While Minerva cold be reactivated, it probally coulden't shut down Hephaestus's machines. While Hephaestus could create new machines to kill the old ones they would also be hacked. Even if the original 2 are shut down by Minerva again, the machines Minerva can't deactivate just hack the ones Hephaestus creates to destroy them. If they got out and even just hacked a FEW machines, the world would end... permenantly. He was a man that destroyed the world through ignorance and stupidity, destroyed the HISTORY of the world, then almost finished the world through ignorance and stupidity again.
He subconsciously already thought of himself as god-like, the festering idea of being known as the one who destroyed the world was to much for a born narcissist and tipped him into full "I am a messiah" idea that was explored moes in game 2.
It was him preparing his palace for the new humans to worship him in, he planned to become the messiah that would guide humanity into a new rebirth, with himself as its god It makes a lot more sense when you think of it that way, the man wanted to be worshipped, Apollo would’ve made sure that never happened simply by telling the new humans the truth, and being the narcissist he is he couldn’t bear the thought of others thinking poorly of him, that’s why he deleted Apollo, that’s why he ended the Alphas, and that’s why he ended everyone in his Bunker when they either discovered what he did or questioned what he had done The only reason he didn’t end the doctors daughter was because without her the doctor would’ve simply stopped helping him, ironically though, and kinda poetically, because he never ended her, she convinced her dad to end it all with her, which forced him into the reactor in a last ditch effort to survive
Do you think it's possible that Somptow purposefully made Ted's treatments cause his mutations, and even lied that the reactor would help him "grow strong"? Instead knowing the reactor would make his mutations worse, out of revenge against Ted? So that he could spend the rest of his now immortal life suffering?
The situation between Ted and Somptow reminds me of Porky and Dr. Andonuts from Mother 3. Two impossibly rich ego maniacs keep a brilliant scientist in their back pocket and force said scientist to manufacture a way to help them achieve immortality to escape from the apocalypse they created. Also they both have hookers.
There are a few date caches that kind of allude to this, that the good doctor purposely created a rampant mutant strain in Faro as a way of getting back at him before he ultimately took his life with his daughter.
@@thrilla72 This. The fact they kept Ted around until the very end really speaks to their own incompetence. Then again, maybe they believed nobody could be so selfish as to doom humanity twice. Personally, you give him some acute lead treatment and move on. He was the money man, he served no other purpose, so seize the assets and remove him as a threat.
Ted absolutely refused to add any kind of back door access or remote kill switch to his robots, but he was happy to create a "purge all human knowledge" button for Apollo. You know, just in case.
Man imagine being an arms dealer who creates the ultimate weapon and your actions are relegated as "an accident", dude even commited to the bit and destroyed the penultimate repository of human knowledge to hide his actions and that death count isnt even taken into consideration as part of his inital death count.
- not in the video but Faro was perfectly ok with letting the Zero Dawn team, until Liz died & that's when he got the idea that the other scientists were totally going to keep the Faro Plague in the APOLLO library, which considering who was in charge of it is probably not the case - so, the egyptian theme regarding Ted was already in HZD as the FAS units are named Horus, Kopesh, & Scarab respectively. - the irony is that, he did learn something from the Swarm & instantly used it wrong: his followers had a backdoor, a killswitch to shut them down -sir, what part of "he took an Spiritual Guru to his secret bunker" makes his megalomania in Forbidden West come out of nowhere? - also, another thing that makes Ted so frustratingly real is that in the Frozen Wilds DLC we actually get to see what his work was before the switch to creating the swarm & he was capable of enabling Good People, the Computer in charge of keeping Yellowstone from exploding is what Elizabeth used as the basis for GAIA
Anyone else notice the Scarab holding up a skeleton like a trophy at 13:34? Also, you should have included the Audio Log where a Commanding Officer talks about how "the scope and nature of fatalities have generated a... pervasive sense of hopelessness throughout the unit." I believe the unit is the 9th MRB. THAT one hits almost as hard as the Audio Log from Ames' wife.
Absolute master class in storytelling. It’s almost like Aloy is time-travelling, jumping back in time to discover a new puzzle piece then jumping back to the present to apply that knowledge and move the story forward It was a privilege to experience 🧠♥️👊
A note about that first audio log where FAS changes it's production. At least a good chunk of the company would hear that and quickly conclude a rouge swarm. The signs were there before and anyone who knew about the lack of a backdoor, which was a direct selling point, just needed to put two and two together
I played the first and second games twice, but I’ll never play it again. They’re great games, and I’m glad I played them, but they’re depressing. The scale and scope of the game is massively sad. The best thing about the game is the actors. They did an amazing job.
Honestly, in the first game, when we see that conversation between him and Elisabet where they're going through everything he did with the Chariot Line - making them able to self-replicate, able to use bio-mass to fuel themselves, and then not even having a backdoor into accessing the AI in case of any problems - made me think of that GIF of all those people face palming. Like, what the hell, Ted? Didn't at least a single person in the room point out this was all a bad idea when you first came up with the idea? But then I realised that either he was completed surrounded by yes men, anyone who did speak up was fired, or he just plain ignored them. The world's first trillionaire, business school dropout, Old World superstar, and all that. The sheer arrogance at display here, doomed us all. And then it just got even worse with Forbidden West. Thebes and the whole cult of personality he created while they all lived out the apocalypse in relative comfort, and he lorded over them like an ancient Pharoah. The arrogance is still astounding, and no single trace of remorse for what he did. Or he buried it really well. And while we don't get to see what he became exactly, the projection of his new body growing through the facility, the guttural roaring, and the disgusted reactions from Aloy and Ceo give you everything you need to know to let your imagination fill the blanks in. I agree with Sylens. Ted deserved worse.
Thing is, whenever government wants back doors to anything people scream anout privacy and security. A back door means the bots can be hacked. I can see it happening today.
Besides Ted Faro it is also a horrifying tale of designers, engineers and programmers that were so in love with the perfection of their creation that they thought they didn’t need a fail-safe. Building killing machines without any countermeasures or safety shutoffs is a very special kind of arrogance. If I was one of these code experts that were forbidden to build in a back door, I would have been like "This is insane! Of course we will build in a back door. We will just not tell the boss about it, until it is needed!".
What baffles me is the log of the engineer arguing about installing a backdoor with Ted. That he didn't quietly turn around and install a backdoor anyway is where the story lost me for a bit. At least have a second log of Ted finding this backdoor, deleting it, and deleting the engineer from the company. Give me at least one person who isn't enabling this manchild.
@@LevantineR1 it is also interesting that one of the logs tells how it was only Ted who insisted on creating a master override for GAIA, which is later used by Aloy to defeat HADES. And Sobeck is against it. Which is kinda ironic.
@@side2kto be fair had he not had the backdoor into GAIA, Apollo would’ve activated correctly and humanity probably would’ve been able to deal with Hades on its own, since they’d have had a complete understanding of what the towers were and how they functioned, also Hades was only able to put humanity at risk because it preyed on the ignorance of the old world Sylas had, along with his craving for knowledge of the old world, to manipulate him into creating the zealots (I can’t remember their precise name), but with the knowledge of the old world Apollo would’ve given them, there wouldn’t have been anyone Hades could manipulate, because they would’ve known what the Faro Plague was and adamantly refused to help it
@@side2k they are different protocols, but what Faro had in Omega clearance was by its very nature a backdoor, it wasn’t an official or planned for protocol, it was hidden from its creators and created in secret, only it’s nature is different Omega Clearances directive was all about control of Project Zero Dawn The directive of the Master Override was specifically achieve the to reset or deletion of a subordinate function, or GAIA herself, in case of another FARO Plague type rampant AI incident This was a planned back door program, unlike Omega Clearance, and although The Master Override was planned it also counts as a backdoor to the system
The destruction of Apollo on earth was an absolutely incredible tragedy of human progress, one rarely portrayed in typical apocalypse scenarios. I really hope the copy in Far Zenith manages to find its way home.
@@edgarmarques97 It's a classic horror trope, the idea that nothing they can show you could be as scary as what you, the audience, can imagine. Whatever individual viewers imagine the terrifying monster to be, it's terrifying for them specifically, something that a defined design shown onscreen will not guarantee. This is why effective horror media hides the monster until the end, when the hero is backed into a corner and forced to confront the horror they could only run from before.
@@vincentleonard3797Yeah even as someone terrified beyond belief by body horror, not seeing what became of him actually didn't make me feel any better at all. I was still horrified and terrified and it took a long time irl, not just in game, to feel okay again. It was very effective to only suggest the horror he became.
I wouldn't count Ted out just yet. His body is gone for sure, but his mind, maybe not so much. We know Nemesis was created by the Far Zeniths uploading their minds, and they had access to and perfected immortality. So maybe Ted, knowing that he would be plugging himself into a power grid, turned to preserving his mind as they did as a backup plan. And maybe that backup included use of the same program that GAIA used to create Liz again into Alloy. So perhaps there may even be a clone of Ted out there.
I think Faro being over the top sociopathic in the second game is because his villainy was subtle enough to have apologists after the first game. Before the release of Forbidden West, I remember people saying Ted had a point about APOLLO and how destroying it was more to prevent people making bad decisions again, and that he had the best of intentions. I think the writers wanted to double down by making it clear that he just didn't want to be remembered as the person who destroyed humanity, and his quest for immortality was so that he could control the narrative as a pseudo-god.
The most dangerous kinds of villains are the ones who think they are always in the right, and nothing can convince them otherwise. The ultimate narcissism that cannot deal with the real world and tries to make it how they see it, no matter how twisted it could get, chilling really.
Biggest problem of Faro was not the fact that machines can refuel by any biomass source but because they created Horus.... Machine that actively produces new machines. Thats why they couldnt stop it. When they were nuking machines all over the place, Horus kept on popping new ones
That’s because as much as nuking works, they had an almost limitless supply of biomass in the form of ocean life, humanity couldn’t have won without wiping itself out in the process, and so the choice they had was to end it all immediately by destroying the world themselves, or stick it out for as long as possible with the hope that Zero Dawn might create a path of life to survive in the future
Another semi reasonable idea faro had that backfires was the creation of HADES, the main villain of the first game, since he wanted Gaia to have a backdoor so it couldn't go rogue like the original swarm did.
As far as I remember, Hades was not Faro's idea. Hades was a logical part of Zero Dawn in case Gaia needed more than one attempt to build the biosphere, and we know through the data points Hades indeed needed to destroy a couple biosphere failed attempts before Gaia got it right and stable. The idea Faro demanded (which turned out to be useful) was the creation of a master override in case Gaia glitched like his robot swarm, the override devise Aloy got at Gaia's Prime and which with she purged Hades at the Spire. That was maybe the only good idea Faro had in all this mess and the only time he somehow learned from his mistakes. Sadly, it was only a temporary learned lesson for him, because he fucked it all up later again.
You're mixing up a bit of lore there. HADES is not the backdoor, the backdoor kill switch in Gaia was the master override, which was intended as a way for a person to assert control over Gaia in the event she went rouge. Because they were also part of the system the other functions of Gaia were also rendered controllable by the override, which is why Aloy could use it to purge HADES, in a weird sense Faro asking for that killswitch for Gaia actually ended up being one of the only good decisions he ever made, and it's interesting because Sobek didn't want to include it at first, it wasn't until Gaia herself said she agreed with Faro's assessment. Faro, for all his pathetic failings, remembered the mistake of not leaving a backdoor in the Faro robots, and as possibly the only good thing he ever did he convinced Sobek to not do the same. If that override had never been created, Aloy wouldn't have been able to stop the rouge destructive HADES function that was trying to destroy the world. Wait, the sounds familiar, a rouge AI/tech/robotic force destroying the world, one had a killswitch and could be taken out early on before the destruction was too large, the other didn't and it destroyed the world. As the famous quote goes, "It's like poetry, it rhymes" HADES was part of the original plan for Zero Dawn as designed by Sobek, not an idea by Faro. The purpose of HADES wasn't to be a kill switch to Gaia, but a system used to return the biosphere to a blank slate in case the first, second, third, etc. attempts to recreate the world failed. And HADES did exactly what it was designed to do very well, until the signal, which we still don't know exactly how it worked or what it did, though we now know it's source.
The first game was amazing, hearing all the different people's voice logs as you go into creepy places was some of the best parts. It really made you feel like you was there when the end of humanity was brought about.
Ar first I was kinda disappointment that the game didn't show us the extend of his mutation and lack of humanity. But I thinks it's perfect, what's the ultimate punishment for a man obsessed with himself, with being the hero. To not give him even the luxury of a last show.
you know until I saw that scene (and replayed it for morbid curiosity) I can`t help but feel like he got the worst fate of any character I have ever seen. I mean it was deserved for sure but think about it. his punishment was 1000 years of unimaginable, hell like torture both mentally and physically as his body filled the power plant like some sort of living meatball in an incubator. and then being burned by fire and lava until your nothing. imagine how long it took for him to die nevermind being incapable of saying anything and just screaming in inhuman agony. what he got was a fate worse then death and then a death worse then said fate which I didn`t even know was possible. and he deserved every bit of it which was even more surprising to me.
The revelation of what happened to the world and the part Ted played on it is a very very powerful moment of the game. I love Horizon mainly for the world build
Something I kind of wished was touched on in the video was the impacts of APOLLO’s destruction that we see in the cradle facility in All-Mother Mountain. The feral, confused children trying to claw their way out, and the school room door being blocked off and their desperate attempts to get inside it, even though they didn’t know what was in there. Faro did that to them.
The truly scary thing about Ted Faro is how utterly plausible his character is. Very much unlike the more typical omnicidal maniac we see in many stories, and their motivation, here it's all the result of monumental stupidity, irresponsibility and hubris. At least in the first game, he's a kind of person we do see occasionally in real life.
Tesla presents the Cybermech... or the Amazon Killbot Prime, the iMurdermachine. We kind of have the kind of insane hubris present in Faro in our world.
@@J-manli Dude is two for two lmao. He's destroyed the world twice, once by accident, then by choice; and saved the world twice too. Once by sniffing out money in stopping and reversing climate change and hiring out the best minds in the world to actually do it, and the second time by actually learning something and insisting for GAIA to have a hardcoded backdoor and a capacity to be scuttled via a killswitch in case of emergency. Not many people can match this core lmao.
Personally I always interpreted that scene where Ted announces that he "destroyed Apolo" as his final purely selfish choice. Because of one little subtle line delivery: _"Those blameless men... and women-"_ The way he hastily adds that after drifting off, always seemed to me like he was referring to himself, not the Zero Dawn people. And as is clear from every other piece of info about him, he was desperate to become the saviour and erase his crimes. The way he presented it was just another weak excuse, like Ted always had.
Also, his bit about knowledge being the problem? I think it’s copium. He just got rid of Apollo to get rid of the history of the apocalypse being his fault. His image and perception is what matters to him.
He also had a misguided fear of the new humanity following his footsteps if they had the knowledge. Of course, if they knew the mistakes that were made, they would be able to avoid it. However, if they had no information whatsoever, what's to stop someone in a thousand years from accidentally reactivating one of the plague bots and kicking off the apocalypse again?
@@Dudekunle It's a tangent, but the Chariots are "Fixed" by ZD time. Evidently, since the glitch rendered them unresponsive to commands, after cracking the encryption - the first thing MINERVA did had to be uploading a service pack to fix the glitch so she can order them to stand down in the first place. Fast forward a thousand years, and the Eclipse has no issue using them without the bots turning around immediately to go all OM NOM NOM NOM on them. And Faro, copium or not, low key had a point. The Zeniths had all the knowledge of human species, they knew exactly how their homeworld died, and then... THEY FUCKINMG DID IT AGAIN! In the end, humanity's gonna human and there will ALWAYS be Faro's and Zeniths who's pride comes before the fall. It's an issue the third game needs to thematically handle when the time comes.
@@TheKain202 On the Zenith point, they were all narcissistic wealthy people, many of which lack the actual skill and foresight that made them their billions (they just hired the scientists and engineers, similar to people like Musk). They thought they were above recreating an apocalypse (yet they made Nemesis). I'm sure the far Zenith scientists, during the initial planning and build stages of the project planned to grow a new human society on the colony (evidence being all the zygotes stored on the ship and the need for Apollo). But once all the spots were taken by a bunch of talentless, selfish hacks, they probably thought it would be a hassle having to think about other human beings and "scrapped" that part of the plan. Fuck Ted Faro, but the Zeniths are just as bad.
21:34 His narration really put into perspective how incredibly screwed up the situation was: "that's how the US Army meets its end, a single final scream and then nothing." We always have the fact in our mind that the US Military was the strongest and most influential armed force in the world, and for it and EVERYONE else's militaries to be squashed like nothing in just over a year by the swarm is apocalyptic in its scale and destruction. General Herres's presentation about Operation: Enduring Victory included some rather very old equipment (by 2065 standard) like the Bradley IFV because there is simply nothing else that they could use that wouldn't and couldn't be hacked by Faro's killer robots in 2065.
You fail to see it because wokeness is in fact, not a thing and people like the person who replied to you have zero concept of anything @chrisnotpratt1903
The biggest tragedy of Zero Dawn apocalypse it's that it probably could be avoided. I don't mean the obvious not give the robots a unhackable protocol, or self replicating capabilities, or ability to hack anything, or bio-fuel consumption. Not having any one of those capabilities would have made the swarm stoppable in a way or another. But I'm not talking about that. What I'm referring to it's that Faro ego and unwillingness to take responsibility for his mistake destroyed the world. If as soon as he knew of the glitch he had contacted Elizabeth and US Robot command, when the swarm was small and contained to just one Island, when it was composed of just one Horus class unity (it's the only one capable of self replicating and the one that fabricate the smaller assault units as seen on Forbidden West Burning Shores DLC) and it's children, they could possibly have destroyed it. Nuclear attack from orbit, a rain of rods from God to kill the Horus (which would mean you had only smaller units to kill, if you kill them before they spread and hack other swarms you would be safe), a massive human fighting force with older non hackable weapon's or newer like they created after if it didn't take to much time to overwhelm the swarm and kill the Horus when they were still on the island, etc. There was possibilities to deal with them when they were a small contingent and contained in a small geographic region. There is a long time since I played, but I think the game even hints at that. But instead of doing this, Ted Faro tried to cover up the incident to find a solution when his company and himself would still be on top of the world after it. Losing precious time and allowing the swarm to spread and become unstoppable. He knew that if he had done what I said, they would destroy the swarm but he and his company would be gone. If he was not arrested for gross negligence and endangerment of the human species (and the people that would have to die, be the population of the island killed in the nuclear or orbital bombardment or the soldiers necessary to kill the swarm, so there wouldn't be just hypothetical deaths) because of his fortune, he would be ruined financially and most important his reputation. From "The man who save the world" he would be know as "The man that almost killed life on earth by hubris", that was too much for his ego. And his company if it was not destroyed or broken down by governments like happened to Standard Oil in real life, I doubt that it would ever recover as market leader (not on Teds lifetime anyway) from the lawsuits, the recall and disassembly of their military robots not affected by the glitch, the destruction of it's public reputation and the damages they would have to pay for the victims of what would be just a incident not the apocalypse.
the terror of Faro is that he ISN'T evil or some scheming sadist. He is just a wildly incompetent guy with no accountability. Like, he's just really fucking dumb. That's it. So plain and simple, so destructive and negligent.
And more powerful and rich than any single person should ever be. With people who probably told him he was doing a good job all the way to the end of life on the planet.
If there's one good thing Ted Faro did was that he insisted on having a master override (a backdoor) for GAIA which did actually help Aloy stop Hades. Elisabet was even hesitant to implement it but Ted did not want to make the same mistake again after the disaster of the Faro Plague due to not having a backdoor.
Bare in mind the only reason, the ONLY reason we're able to fight off the Corruptors and Deathbringers with just a bow and spear is simply because they've spent thousands of years buried underground with all of their major systems being greatly damaged over time.
Eh, chalk it up to rule of cool and the fact taht said arrowheads are made out of alloys a thousand years ahead of XXI'st century tech. If they were so decayed as to having their structural integrity compromised to that extent, even trying to move would cause them to fall apart from stress.
Not to mention that in the 300+ years before terraforming took hold, you'd have had thinks like acid rain, electricity discharges, high speed winds with corroding particles. Plus most metal, even without rusting, becomes brittle or weakened over time. I think the way of portraying it through a weakness to fire actually makes a lot of sense.
Even the old ones could easily defeat most of the swarm robots. It’s just the issue was that the pure numbers were insanely one sided. You could kill 500k of them and they’d still have millions in reserve
I like that there is no subtlety in his fate. I like sutlety, i like to think about the themes of a story... but sometimes some themes are too simple to need complex over and undertones, just show what it is and end there. Just let truth be truth, no overanalysing.
I think something never really talked about in the fandom is the fact that the faro swarm robots where DEPLOYED, deadly, but contained, people probably saw these things at the very least online, they where dangerous but far away from regular people, especially with almost all wars being waged with machines, and suddenly the barrier is shattered, these far away dangers where suddenly in peoples faces, imagine how terrifying that had to be, and then learning you had to go FIGHT those things
Thomas Midgley Jr.: I invented leaded gasoline and ozone layer destroying CFCs. I damaged the environment more than any single individual. Ted Faro: Hold my beer...
A headcanon of mine is that, in Fero’s final moments, he was so happy to finally see the “children” of Liz. He had waited for so long and now he can finally lead them into a new dawn, but couldn’t speak since he had lost that ability (note how when Aceo enters, Ted starts to scream like he’s happy, or he’s trying to talk but is only able to roar, yet when he sees the torch, he is completely terrified), only to see him leave and another one come in with a torch, which confused him before he was burned alive, being literally burned by the flames of his arrogance, A fitting fate.
I wouldn't call what Ted did with erasure his final mistake. That was probably most of all what makes him a villain. It was conscious. It was planned. He couldn't accept what he'd done, and he decided to actually do something evil.
I think Ted is my most hated villain. There's something to be said about destroying the world not out of malice or greed, but just rank incompetence. He was a chimp given the keys to a nuke without understanding what he has. And then to be so monumentally petty that, when presented with his one chance to make things right, he'd rather burn everything down for a 1000 year PR stunt than admit he made a mistake. Compare him to someone like General Harris, a man with very little culpability in this beyond maybe letting FAS gain too much power. He signed off on Enduring Victory, and even knowing that his only other option was extinction, considered it such a heinous act that he wanted his name to be linked to it for all eternity.
Ted Faro reminds me of Elon Musk in a number of ways. Hell even a quote that I heard about Musk perfectly describes Faro "He wants the world to be saved, but only if he's the one who gets to do it."
Musk never said anything like that in his defense but I do feel like if you took all tech elites and combined them into one person you would probably get Ted Fero maybe. Though Ted Fero really just reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg infact I'm pretty sure if Mark Zuckerberg had this technology this would probably be the mistake he would make with A.I.
The most frightening thing about Horizon's apocalypse is that it feels so possible nowadays. It's my favorite story ever, so depressing yet so full of hope and love for life.
I think you skipped one important factor that made Ted go nuts and delete Apollo. He spiraled down after Sobeck sacrificed herself in order to seal a bunker down. She did what his ego would never allow him to do. Another possible underlying reason was for him to not be portrayed as the destroyer of the old world to the new generations. All info point to him being a diva.
There is another theory that Ted caused the mechanical issue when they were closing the bunker by abusing his access, so that he could delete Apollo (because remember he locked himself in his room while the defences were being bolstered for the base to not be discovered.) However, he didn't account for the fact that Liz would sacrifice herself.
"they will need me, my advice, my guidance," bro really huffed his own farts so hard he devolved into a cursed Ditto, without the intelligence of a Ditto.
easy, we just need one immoral tech billionaire who buys up some faltering military production company and move all his secret research to some third world country without any oversight, then he could invest into genetic engineering and AI as much as he wanted. Its basically what if Amazon+Tesla+Raytheon but without any checks and balances or oversight
I'm glad I'm not the only one remembering Ted Faro. I've played a lot of games and seen a lot of movies, but him killing the Zero Dawn staff. Stunned me when it happened, and has stuck with me ever since.
The Horus is the core of the Chariot line, what made it special. The Scrab and Kopesh were in themselves just machines that had been seen before. The Horus was what gave a swarm true autonomy since it could create new Scarab and Kopesh units as required. It was in essence a mobile factory + command center.
"Pride goeth before a fall." He really is a fascinating example of the most extreme types of narcissism. He created an unfixable problem by proactively backing the creation of an unfixable system. The ENTIRE planet doomed to extinction by a MATH error. One that MIGHT have been corrected if Farro hadn't gotten the idea to make the system unhackable. THAT is what scares me about connecting AI to the military. ONE simple mistake could cause an event much like this.
One of my favorite ways they show ted's stupidity is part of a text log. TALA AQUINO: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Isaac Newton. TED FARO: Well, Newton didn't have the resources we've got, Tala. He couldn't dream of the horizons we can already see. We're the giants now.
38:41 I'm not generally the intended audience for "horror" in media, so my viewpoint is pretty skewed. But this scene was absolutely disturbing in the best possible way. The build up of just seeing how twisted his mindset was shifting into the realization that, oh god, he's still alive. And the unspoken horror of what lurks behind those doors. It did far more than showing it would have (it frankly would have just grossed me out unnecessarily), so I really appreciate how they handled that scene because I was just utterly shocked and horrified in a way that felt oddly satisfying, lmao I do agree with you that they maybe were a bit much on how literal they took his ego spiraling into that, but even in spite of that, he had to be incredibly arrogant to decide the Alpha Members of Zero Dawn had to die, and then he be allowed to not only live but potentially "Shepard Humanity into a new beginning".
Same here. I hate body horror. HATE. Scares me utterly. And the impending horror and fear in Thebes was absolutely brutal to me. From the logs to the physical signs of abuse and experimentations and the Downward Spirals of all involved. Ugh. I couldn't wait to be out of there. I wasn't even that relieved not to see him (in hindsight thank God) because what we could imagine was bad enough.
He killed billions of people and set humanity's progress back by thousands of years. And he didn't even do it on purpose, he was just a greedy idiot. I hate him so much.
Something interesting to see is that Ted Faro isn’t a part of Far Zenith despite being supposedly the richest man on the planet. This can be for a variety of factors, my favorite being that even Far Zenith saw him as too pathetic to offer a seat. The other option is that he refused a seat because he believed he had to fix his mistake, and just kept making more and more mistakes. He clearly doesn’t have access to the same immortality tech that Far Zenith does, which both saves and bites the entire world in the rear multiple times over. He is arrogant enough to believe he can live forever, and arrogant enough to believe no one should be allowed into Thebes when he is gone. These two arrogant mindsets clash with each other, allowing Aloy to snatch Omega Clearance in the end all due to Ted’s conflicting arrogant choices.
I always liked the headcanon that Ted didn’t delete Apollo in order to “protect” the new humans from their mistakes. He just didn’t want to be remembered as humanity’s destroyer.
Bingo.
He was influenced by the "luddite priest" in his bunker.
And now he'll be remembered for destroying it Twice.
true... it is also possible that he didn't destroy Apolo but only removed Zero Dawn project's access to it:
1) The entire archive was described as being coded into probably the most durable medium known to pre-Zero Dawn man, that being artifical fossils, something that would have to be destroyed physically, which is not something to be done by people already locked in bunkers
2) Considering that Faro wanted to guide "Liz's children", in essence becoming a god for them, he could have still had access to the archive through his Omega clearance.
@@marty2129 Correct me if I'm mistaken but Apollo was the Teacher AI, yes? So yeah it's most likely that Faro erased the teacher who basically the middle-man between humans and the archive.
I think the most horriflying thing about Horizon is the Faro Plague isn't even a Smart AI, they just followed their base line orders; replicate, consume, replicate. The thing that killed Earth wasn't even conscience.
The actual all powerful sentient AI is actually benevolent too because it was "raised" for a lack of a better term correctly.
It's definitely what makes it creepy. The Faro Plague wasn't out to destroy humanity because it thought it was better than humanity or that it was the rise of a new lifeform or anything like that. It was like a clock just ticking away. It was doing what it was programmed to do and nothing more, nothing less. It was literally the *Perfect Machine.* But because the world can't run on "perfection" it eventually collapse under the weight of that programming.
Yeah, that's why I despise ideas proposed by some people desperately trying to assign some hidden meaning to the the Swarm, like it's Vast Silver's doing etc.
The idea that era of rampant consumerism was brought low to an explosive finish by what was essentially a self-replicating swarm of military Roombas is terrifyingly poignant, and it would be a waste to ruin it for a cheap, "Gotcha!" plot-twist.
*killed the old world
The Earth doesn't give a shit
@@blackknight50277621
Oh, it would definitely give a shit about being reduced to a dead proto-Venus if it could.
Once, is a mistake. Twice is idiocy.
Three times is a pattern and a problem.
Or a choice. Maybe the obvious choice
Once is negligence. Twice is malice. Thrice is the kingdom of hell.
I hadn’t even known the story when I made that comment. Hadn’t played the game. Had just gotten to the Faro Plague and the solution. I just knew the pattern of three, and knew the old punch about malice and ignorance.
Funny. That was right.
"One's an anomaly. Two's a trend, Rule number 89."
Three times' a charm!
He absolutely watched whole cities be consumed by the horde of demonic robots and Tweeted "Concerning. Looking into this."
Glad I wasn't the only one thinking elongated muskrat and how he actions
Lmao yes 100%.
he would do that!
Posts a poll: “Shut down the machines?” And when “yes shut down” wins, nothing happens.
This is EXACTLY who I thought of before getting into the meat of the video. It's uncanny.
" Jesus Liz, you don't have to threaten me..."
After making it clear that she did in fact have to threaten him to do it.
She knew Ted Faro so well that she knew she had to have an ace up her sleeve to force him to sign. Otherwise he would have whined about his dirty conscience, and his hesitation would have destroyed Zero Dawn alongside Earth.
lol Ted Faro in a nutshell
That got me thinking of something now. She threatened him with "telling everyone the real cause of the glitch" what does that mean?
If it was a "glitch" then it wasn't Faro's fault, but he definitely felt threatened by that.
Just what did Faro do that caused the glitch? He might be even more guilty than we know.
@@sekkuar I think the implication is that the "glitch" is less of a technical bug and more the inevitable result of building a line of unstoppable, self-replicating, biomass-fueled robots whose systems are so advanced that they cannot be hacked or turned off by ANYONE, including their creator. Faro thought that would be fine because he assumed that they would never malfunction and would always respond to human commands. But technology crashes happen ALL THE TIME. That's why modern tech always has a backdoor; always has a shutdown function built into it: so that engineers can examine the machinery, figure out what went wrong, and hopefully fix it. But Ted fucking Faro specifically ordered that no such safety measures be installed in his robots. Because God forbid, his competitors could hack them. So while the actual "glitch" may technically not be Ted Faro's fault, the glitch being unfixable and the consequences thereof ABSOLUTELY were.
@@sekkuar I don't think there was a glitch, just that computers don't understand human intentions. Kinda like how (insert evil AI here) was designed to protect humanity, but realized that the best way to do so was to enslave them, so it did so, because that's what it's programming wanted. It sounds a lot more like Ted just had his PR team reword the incidents into being a glitch.
Ted Faro being kept alive but in pain for hundreds of years, only to be killed off by one of his future admirers in Forbidden West was one of the most satisfying moments in the series in my opinion. The Horizon Games are so underrated I swear
i highly doubt that we saw the last of ted or that the beeing he became was killed by one quen soldier with a torch,
he became something that lives of geothermal (heat) energy
arround a core that was 541°F/282 celcius, the heat of a flame would mean nothing to it!
as datapoint 36 reactor report states :
WARNING: Structural Integrity low. Core vulnerable. Any disturbance may trigger Safeguard protocol!
from what i think ,
the torch agitated /disstessed the beeing that was until that moment fully intertwined with the reactor causing a structural issue
setting of the failsafe ,
the only thing we did was freeing this thing from it food supply ,
and its going to look for an new source of food!
@@palvierflex4344Now add to his possible survival the fact that the the foreshadowed threat for Horizon 3, the Nemesis, was made to offer Zeniths' minds to upload to any body, be it mechanical OR ORGANIC...
Meeting a mutated-immortal-Ted-Faro-blob-Thing that is connected to the Nemesis hivemind isn't exactly o my bucket list, but your comment made me think of it as a possibility...
@@marty2129 pretty sure the next game is gonna be insane with the levitation, immortality and threat of a mutent and crazy AI hive mind on the loose. Maby ted will regain himself a bit and do what he does best. Make things worse. Mutent ted vs nemasis which ends with ted being adsorbed and a true boss fight starting would be interesting
@@palvierflex4344there's also the lava, can't discount that
@@isdrakon9802 i know and am not discounting that ,
the lava flow is part of the "normal" failsafe design in case tedd was killed by his harem/followers ,or in teds own words if someone tried to steal his "cheese"!
look at the hologram aloy is looking arround 39:55 , there are a lot of yellow pipes that are connected the reactor that are meant to fill thebes with lava so no one could hide/survive, even the eventualy of death ted wanted the last word!
but those pipes only go from the reactor room to other rooms , not the reactor room it self!
and thebes is surrounded by a huge body of water, any structural issue would cause that to start rushing in!
It breaks my heart to see Samina just shatter when she hears Apollo was destroyed in the hologram. The greatest amalgamation of human knowledge since the Library of Alexandria. A seed of a new tree of life and culture eradicated
I just noticed those two comforting her after hearing that and was like "wow, they put a small detail nobody would have mentioned if it wasn't added". They put alot into these games and I love them.
Actually if you look it up the library at Alexandria wasn't nearly the great loss that pop history makes it out to be. Baghdad being destroyed was way worse, and the current destruction of Syria I would say is also worse. So much history lost
It's so sad that Egipt did't passed to islamic hands, before christians made that whole mess with their intolerance of science and culture over half Rome. Thing is, i fear something similar is about to happend with neo-pentecostal and evangelical takeover.
The end of forbidden West, Apollo is recovered, from the copy that the Far Zenith's had with them - plus the addition of their 1000 years of knowledge and culture.
@elainetamika4822 the islamics finished off the library in a fit of zeal.
Incompetent villains are kinda underrated in my opinion. They are not someone we ‘Like to Hate’, they are someone we ‘Just Hate’, but that doesn’t (always) mean they are badly written characters (ex: Joffrey). It’s just that we are invested in them in a different way that even ourselves sometimes might not fully understand .
Exactly
Banality of evil
This.
In a way... this type of villain is the most "real", people like Faro exist in real life much more easily, it isnt that they arent smart, they are... it is just that the let arrogance take hold of every single aspect of their being and the money and influence they amassed convinces them that nothing they do is wrong, which doesnt take a high level of intelligence to know it isnt true.
Normally in stories like this we get these large than life villains that are hype competent or so beyond common concepts that we just suspend our disbelief, but Ted Faro is real, they only part we don't have is the overly advanced tech.
Glass Onion is such a perfect example of this.
@Alacaelum the holocaust was perpetrated in large part by people like faro. more so than just at the top. A veritable human centipede of faro-likes, from general to clerk, is what unleashed the darkest evil this world has ever suffered.
And that is horrifying because our world is not just ruled by faro-likes, but upheld, maintained, even to an extent composed of them. Horizon's world, like ours, was probably full of these people on every level of business and government.
Saving the world from an evil billionaire is easy, but how do you save the world from one billion morally bankrupt office drones? Is that even possible?
Something to point out: When he is found (like he wants to be) by a cult that worships him (best possible scenario for him), even they're disgusted by what he's turned into, and their leader's first reaction is to light him on fire. It would be poetic, if it weren't for the Ceo's second reaction: cover up and lie about it.
Actually... i find that poetic.
The loser wanted to be worshiped like a savior, but more than anything... he wanted the personal acknowledgment, he wanted to be there to bask in the confetti, and just when he it was at his grasp... the same type of loser lights him on fire and covers it up.
Poetry.
@@Alacaelum I think Alacaelum meant it in a more personal reaction way (as in human always repeat the same mistakes), and not in the grand philosophical/thematic way like you pointed out.
Oh I think the cult of personality he accidentally created doing the exact same thing he did, I.E. immediately try to cover up how full of shit they were without actually acknowledging the problem, is *very* poetic.
It's rather fitting
Ceo was the exact same as Ted, refused to acknowledge any possibility of him having any negative to him
He gets to meet his idol and sees his God is nothing but a sham
Whether Ceo would have lived long enough to see he was becoming the very same person or not we will never know
Not to mention this reaction was borne out of the ignorance HE intended for them when he nuked the Apollo sub-function.
There's something particularly aggravating about how some bastard that dropped out of school deciding they can destroy foundational knowledge that was meant to serve a new generation of human beings.
Trying to hide away his heinous actions or not, there can be no greater insult to humanity's collective intellect.
well yeah destroying the history of how his mistake happened and kill off humanity how can the future humans avoid that mistake without learning about it because some idiot thought it should be erased
Hey destroy the history when THEY ARE LITTERALY GRAVEYARDS OF ROBOTS IN THE FKING DESERT YOU TED FARO SCUMBAG?
That's the thing... People like Ted Faro are so narcissistic, that they think everyone else is like them. He couldn't learn from mistakes, so how could future humanity?
@SaraMorgan-ym6ue Exactly!
"When humanity doesn't learn from its mistakes, history tends to repeat itself."
Ted did it to cover his own ass. Simple as that. How selfish do you have to be to completely destroy all knowledge of the past and send the future of humanity back into the stone age just because you don't want to be seen as the bad guy? It's sick and just makes him more of the bad guy he was trying not to be.
@@theminerwithin9316Plenty of people don't like teaching history if it portrays any group other than Caucasians as the bad guy...
We do plenty of this today, already. Hell, they even try to race swap historical characters now. It won't be long until swathes of history are completely suppressed and rewritten, if we allow things to continue as they are.
My personal theory for why we never actually got to see Faro's "final form" onscreen is because showing that degree of Resident Evil-esque body horror likely would've bumped Forbidden West's rating up to M, and I would guess they had to keep the rating at T to keep the game as accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Still, I think the vague holographic image coupled with the... sounds... do a good job of getting across that whatever he's become, it isn't pretty.
Probably, although I like that the game doesn't let us see him, letting us imagine something maybe even more horrific than what the game would have designed. Sometimes the unknown horror is way more impactful.
I think another reason that Faro’s “final form” wasn’t revealed was also a thematic choice, in that Faro no longer matters in the modern day or the grand scheme of things anymore. He *IS* nothing to the Aloy or any of the other characters, only some old figure that ruined the old world… and a glorified tumor.
@@luvamiart8567 That's why Alien is so effective. You never truly see the monster until the very end. Otherwise, you'd notice that it's just some dude in a costume. What the writer can give us may never be as impactful as what we imagine in our minds.
What do you think happened to Faro's mind? Was he still even capable of coherent thought or communication by the time he was killed?
@@slateoffate9812 In the hologram of his vital signs said the brain activity was minimal, so I guess he was not capable of coherent thought anymore, just a big mass of fleshy blob with some sentience.
A part you missed that really sums up Ted Faro as a character are the two inactive (but functional) scarab drones he kept in Thebes. He wiped out the alphas and Apollo to "protect future generations from poisonous knowledge," but was literally incapable of understanding the hypocrisy and risk of saving two of the very robots that destroyed the world. And remember, these are not statues, they are inactive but fully functional models. I love Ted Faro as a villain because he isn't evil in the traditional sense, but he is a monster through his inability to ever replace his ego with empathy, no matter what has occurred.
In a way, the fact those two were protected also had the risk of setting the planet back to hell once again
Sure they didn't escape but life is weird. A strong enough earthquake could have cracked it open. Maybe a malfunction in the tomb, etc. Him keeping those was for his ego of his creations as well as risking things to happen once again
I believe that only the Horus's could create new ones. However I believe those one's were the ones that hacked and repaired. So they could have possibly reactivated the other machines by hacking them and reactivating them. Even if we say that they cannot hack the other Faro machines, there is a reason Hephaestus only activated after Minerva deactivated them, its machines could easily be hacked. These are primitive tribes just learning how to use bow, if these two machines could even just hack a few Thunderjaws they could tactically send even just a few to the villages and there would be nothing stopping them. This is also assuming it can't hack Hephaestus itself. If they could Hephaestus could be there replacement for Horus's. This isn't lack of empathy... this is him still being unable to think about a decision for longer than a second.
@@RaidFiftyOne it's obvious that Chariots can't hack other Chariots. If they could, what's stopping FAS from just using the same tech to regain control of the Rogue Swarm?
That's the terrifying beauty of the situation. It was completely containable in the beginning. Just send a few swarms to uh... "Forcibly Disassemble" the rogue one, but recalling these assets from the clients would be impossible to keep under wraps and would result in a scandal and loss of confidence in the product, and Faro was already too busy sicking his suits on everyone daring to say anything regarding what was happening in Timor. Faro tells Sobeck about the situation at the tail end of October, but one of the data points talks about the swarm chomping on a mango orchard and ruining the harvest - meaning this crap started in the SUMMER! Meaning FAS was trying to keep a lid on it for MONTHS!
Ted Faro is so interesting because he is extraordinarily average. He kicked loose a rock that he's unable to stop, no matter what he does.
@@Mediados and what he does ultimately makes things worse
Ted Faro’s statue of himself in Thebes genuinely pissed me off as much as him killing the Alphas did in the first game.
For that reason I wanted to see what he became when he was finally discovered.
Don't forget, the walls of his bunker are lined with with statues of Sekhmet, the goddess of destruction and he has 2 active Scarabs in there as well!
Like he wasn’t a fun villain we could love to hate or bathe in their cold calculating schemes.
He was just an incompetent man, with too much money and power in his hands, who created the apocalypse out of short sighted greed, who hid the problems under that fucking tech-bro smugness, and who, when the world *could* have fixed his fuck up, in an act of self pity, he decided to kill off the Alphas and destroy Apollo because he felt ALL of humanity didn’t deserve to live (from his fuck up!), thus setting humanity back thousands of years, destined to repeat the same mistakes as before.
Ferro is the that one son of a bitch I wish I could punch all the way back in the first game.
(Never played the second one)
When I first saw that I just thought 'of course'. Dude fancied himself like an Egyptian Pharoah.
The whole Thebes section was like something out of a horror game. We didn't see exactly what Ted ultimately became, but the guttural roaring and the disgusted reactions of Aloy and Ceo tell you plenty about it, to let your imagination fill in the blanks.
Killed everyone on the planet, and then wanted to live forever.
I guess ted did live in the real term of "burn in hell"
What truly scares me about Ted Faro is that he never takes responsibility for what he’s done, or feel any remorse. He’s got this bullshit narrative in his head that he is always right - or, if he causes damage, it’s not that bad. And because he’s always right in his own eyes, he never learns from his mistakes. Because, as far as he’s concerned, he’s never done something bad enough to learn from. Talking to him is pointless because he simply doesn’t see the same reality the rest of us do.
This sounds so awfully familiar.
Like a god
Because he's a part of the capitalist class, they always think they're right no matter what.
Narcissism at it's finest. And why men like him should never be allowed even a modicum of power.
Ah, the “Tony Stark Syndrome”. The richest, “smartest” man on the planet thinking he, and only he, can chart the course of humanity for the better. Everyone else are idiots, and his vision is the only right way to go
I loved the plot line that made the Quen worship Faro. They simply could not access newer data because of the devices they were using. Like having a computer that can only read floppy discs while the new data is only on CDs. CDs that told the story of the Faro plague.
Horizon zero dawn is Jurassic park just on a much larger scale goes to show the dangers for you and me in the real world this sort of thing actually happening for real
like if all knowledge of elon musk ended before he went completely nuts
One of my favorite things about Horizon is they basically worked backwards from really cool concept art of giant robot dinosaurs existing with tribal humans. The writers did a hell of a job making that a believe reality with amazing lore.
The lead writer on the Horizon series also was the lead writer on Fallout New Vegas, which explains a lot.
Actually I think the very earliest concept of horizon zero dawn was a controllable ball on a platform with a T. rex and they managed to build up from that
"Hey, have you noticed anything... odd, about the killer robots we're making?"
"Odd? In what way?"
"They use flesh to make more killer robots."
"So?"
"Ted. Are we the baddies?"
You would think someone would have pointed out this was all a colossally bad idea at some point...but then I realised he would either fire them, or just plain ignore them.
Hubris.
Honestly this wasn't even his biggest mess-up, that would be not installing a sure-fire way to turn them Off if something went wrong.
They don't use biomass to make more of themselves. They're steel and other composites while biomass is predominantly carbon.
The biomass conversion is means of refueling. Their nanomachines convert biomass straight into diesel fuel, skipping the millions of years it usually takes dead organic matter to become oil.
Ted: “I don’t think so, continue.”
@@jamesnorman9160 Or "disappear" cuz he's that rich.
In Thebes you actually can find audio tapes of the teenage daughter explaining how the spiritual guide for Faro allowed him to stay more somewhat sane and not mentally deteriorate more than he already was. When faro killed the spiritual guide he just started becoming worse and worse which confirms his psychological breakdown was in fact getting worse and explains the change in character
The horror when you find out Ted Faro killed Humanity twice over,
First in body by accident with his self replicating robots
Second in spirit when he consciously wipes the Archive of all Human knowledge.
Its a true testament to the writing skill of the Horizon team to write such a chilling apocalypse story with such a horrific villain.
He is not horrifying, he is believable as someone who could actually exist and that is where the horror comes from, not directly from him, but the thought that someone like him could exist and do exactly what he did and it not seem out of place today.
@@allster0crowlySo "no, but yes."
@@JoshSweetvale It is a different type of horror than being directly about the individual, you would not be scared of Ted at first but because of his actions being believable and within his nature as a narcissistic/parasitic and self-styled Saviour, he becomes frightening because it is believable that everything he did would be something that someone like him would do even in the real world if they had all that power, but no self-control.
@@allster0crowly You're contradicting yourself.
I think it's a fitting them since Horizion zero dawn is actually a Warhammer 40k game based on the empty part of lore from the age of strife during the 25m its very grim dark. I've watched about four videos so far from Brett and their pretty funny they're reddit coded if he's not himself just actually an ai bot farm creator scaping data from reddit. Everything he complains about is actually just the cometary on 40k the entire reason the game even exist in the first place and why he can make essays about it. Ted represents man as a whole not an archetype of a guy and far zenith represents Eldar repackaged and the consequences of the powerful not protecting the weak not the rich losing there humanity. It's like when fallout 4 youtubers complain about the brotherhood of steel as a faction not realizing fallout 4 is self is actually a cometary on the blood angles and grey knights or halo otsd, and helldivers being a commentary on the imperial guard and star ship trooper movie which is itself was a competing commentary of the director who was a socialist and the book which is actually a commentary on both nationalism and socialism which itself is the same themes of commentary as the imperial guard with the commentary of the inquisition and tyrranids. These side communities of 40k who don't understand there in the 40k community and probably dislike 40k unless it's repackaged in a simpler softer tones don't recognize there in a kitty pool above a hidden ocean which the kitty pool is actually a part of unless you knew these games where actually about 40k and understood 40k lore you can misinterpret them. Now that Horizon dawn is big its writing staff will likely slowly be replaced by writers who didn't have the full context to interpret them and find them offensive and be turned into a poor soulless copy that loses its rich themes that made it good with its roots in 40k why they even got into it in the first place.
Actually, when the swarm was on the small scale on that island with the dolphin and the mango trees, it could have been stopped since it wasn't to the point where the swarm could self replicate faster than humanity could destroy them, but since Ted Faro's solution to the glitch was to cover up his mistake and hire "the best lawyers to defend him in court". He accidentally gave the swarm the time it needed to replicate enough Horus' to become unstopable
That's what makes it a damn tragedy. Greed doomed the world.
@@razorflossrazor2937 Yup, that's why I really like this game's story, it's utilize the fact that there are "Ted Faro"s in the world right now and the only reason why they haven't killed the world yet is that they don't have the tech that Ted has in HZD, which is what makes it so goddamn scary and a good tragedy IMO.
Exactly what I was thinking, corporate @$$ covering and ignorance of their own products capabilities didn’t sound the alarm until it was too late.
They could've had time to nuke the swarm if not for his cover up. When they first learned it was unpatchable, they should have told the US military immediately.
It sounded like there were already so many in circulation that a glitch like this in itself was a catastrophic problem.
The only other villain in the Horizon series with a death count even remotely close in terms of scale to Ted Faro is Jiran the Mad Sun King. About half of the problems that Aloy has to deal with over the course of the first two games are a result of the Red Raids that Jiran set into motion. And the strangest part is that when we first learn about him, he's already long dead.
Kinda what I like and hate about he Mad Sun King. He was instrumental in _a lot_ of the pain and suffering characters go through but you don't ever meet him. You don't even get to _see_ him. He's the kind of person you definitely want to punch in the face but you never get that chance. I love it because it makes what he did a reflection of the worse parts of humanity; the Mad Sun King isn't so much a person as he's an ideology that must be rejected if humans are ever to move forward, but then again you really want to know what he was like as a person directly.
Funnily enough, he was alive during the prologue when Aloy was just a child. He was killed two years before Aloy got to the proving ceremony...
Jiran is also the perfect antithesis to the bullshit Faro feeds himself to justify deleting APOLLO. There you have it a 'blameless' man raised in a world without the knowledge of the Old Ones and what does he do? Raid neighboring tribes for blood sacrifices to appease a Sun God and cure the derangement of the machines. Even a millennia later humanity was paying for Faro's mistakes.
@@marty2129 Of course, he was mad because of Nemesis, when Gaia blew herself up and created Aloy, that's when the derangement and killing machines started appearing. This due to Hefestus going rouge, the mad sun king only sacrificed that many people to try to reverse this in his own twisted understanding
“Blameless men… and women” that pause, speak volumes. Didn’t want people of the future to learn who was responsible.
Fucking facts that's all he ever cared about himself and his ego. Like the audio files before that scene stated...He just didn't want people to know he was responsible.
@@davevd9944 kinda hard to hide that when all the robots have your last name engraved on them 🤦♀️ I assume he forgot about that fact
@@HinataElyonTophif he’d had his way, humanity probably wouldn’t have been reading in English, or he’d have lied and told the new humans that his mark is what stopped the machines, he planned to basically install himself as an immortal god of the new humans, and had he not done what he did in the bunker that caused the doctor and his daughter to end themselves, he might’ve succeeded
What I adore about the Horizon series is that it gives us a TRUE apocalypse. Not the half baked versions of Fallout or Terminator or Mad Max or so many zombie movies. No, this isn't a world that ended on a modern society scale or even a human scale. This is a world that ended on a biological scale. And yeah, its depressing, but thats why I love it. So many franchises present the end of the world as just a big old mistake that we humans can learn a lesson and bounce back from, and thats a bad thing to teach people IRL. It is rare to see a scenario where the audience of this kind of media is confronted with the idea that "Yeah, some things can't be fixed." Kind of an important lesson in the modern age with the ever escalating climate crisis and the remaining threat of death by nuclear weapons.
This comment deserves more attention because this is so true! All of the well-known “apocalypse” movies and games see at least a small fraction of humans survive, but in the Horizon universe NOTHING survived, with the exception of one man, who could barely be called human to begin with. Humanity literally went extinct for thousands of years and if not for project Zero Dawn, it would’ve stayed that way.
This is what blew me away when I got into the lore the first time. The planet Died. There was no miraculous last second victory that saved the world. No, everyone and everything died and only afterwards Gaia started trying to rebuild. The absolutism of the end of the world here was just so good.
I liked how they hid what happened to the world till the end. When I was plying zero down, I thought at first that they had succeeded but barely and that the animal robots we hunted had stopped the faro plague. I was horrified when I learned what zero down indeed was.
Let me add one more thing. This is what Really sells the robot army. This is what makes them so terrifying and why I feel on edge when thinking about them. They succeeded!
So many other robot threats are not all that intimidating because they were defeated but the Faro Plague Won. No one could defeat them and if they could be reactivated they could do it Again. That's why they are so scary, they were successful.
@@HubiKoshiWhich is why the final mission of Zero Dawn is so impactful and intense (well once you get past the Helis boss fight). These machines destroyed the world once and they were just a mindless group with no central governing intelligence. Purely doing what they did on instinct. But now they do, HADES. And they almost succeeded in starting the apocalypse once again. I love how the final fight has a timer. If that timer hits zero, the whole world loses, again.
And to think, all of that was to deny the Zeniths a refuge from Nemesis. Nemesis was willing to end life on Earth once again just to get even with 13 Zeniths.
"Imagine working for this company and your CEO anounces these changes"
wait a minute...
incompetent leader of AI-developer reverses company-course to develop weapons.
Refuses to elaborate further.
Kills the world.
...
Ted Faro is reverse-Iron Man
I guess. I think its more accurate to say Ted is a tony who is no genius and insted of getting a wake up call about his wepons he insted leand into it and used his money to upgrade his money maker to be better and more wanted by the militerys. In other words not reverse iron man but idiot tony stark
More like Tony Stark if he was even more of a bastard which isn’t saying much for him really
True, but the difference is he ignored any wake up calls, denied responsibility, and even though the results of his incompetence stared him right in the face, he *still* couldn't realize executive decisions should not be in his ballpark.
Then tried again by erasing humanity's knowledge slate because, of course, one last mistake for the road.
All for nothing, too. It's really interesting.
Faro, like Ferrous, as in iron, supports that.
i mean if Iron-Man had no morals, was stupid while presenting as a genius, still having a good marketing department, no backbone and had his head so far up himself he can only perceive his own anus...
so essentially Elon Musk but with more money, better PR and in more advanced world
those aren't just the scientists who created Zero Dawn, they are the Zero Dawn ALPHAS. the ones who designed and were in charge of the various subsystems for the projects. while the other workers under them got to live with their loved ones in a bunker after they were done on the project (FW tells us something went wrong with this bunker, but we don't know what), the alphas had to essentially sign their lives over to the project forever. these were THE most self-sacrificing people, the true heroes that gave us a world after complete destruction, and... that's what Ted did.
also, the Thebes bit in Forbidden West was like the most perfectly creepy and horrific thing in a non-horror game that I've ever experienced. mwah. I agree the giant Ted was a bit much but pretty much everything else was so spot-on. you can see he started losing it when Lis died, it makes sense that seeing the world completely fall apart broke his mind entirely.
there is a really fucked up alt Horizon world where like, the life extension did work fine and Ted emerged and was treated as a god in the new world... then again he's so shitty and incompetent that humanity wouldn't have survived very long
oh and of course, FUCK TED FARO
The Alphas planned to continue working on Gaia until it was perfect even if that required them to clone themselves and tech their clone to do their job.
They were signing up for lifetimes of work.
I'll tell you what went wrong; Ted the Doom Pharaoh. That crazy ass must have got it in his head they'd leave a record...
@@tranz2deepIf only Ted had done the sensible thing and chewed on some lead instead of dooming humanity twice over.
Your next video should be on Sylens. Knowledge at all costs...sounds like a villain to me. Also I think the slow dawning HORROR on Aloy's face when she learns that Faro is still alive, is an amazing touch.
Sylens has done some villainous things like supporting the Shadow Caja and Regalla’s rebels. He is also wanted by the Banuk for lying and stealing some of their holy relics.
However he would say that he is the only man of science and reason in a world of superstitious tribesmen and whatever he does is for the greater good. That it is only through him that humanity has a chance of regaining anything that was lost and evolving beyond tribalism.
He is also refreshingly humble sometimes. When Aloy derails his plan to use Regalls rebels in a suicidal attack on the Zeniths he quickly and calmly adapts and goes along with her plan instead, even if he doesn’t know what it is. For him the ends do justify the means and pride is a hindrance to knowledge.
If anything I would classify Sylens as chaotic neutral, perhaps falling into similar pits as Ted and the Zeniths but not inherently evil. The stage is pretty set for a similar style "oopsie" though by him.
@@maxpower3990 He is still responsible for ALOT of dead innocents... no matter how he tries to justify it to himself...he is a bad person.
RIP Lance Reddick
@@Disturbedfan077 Yeah, but being a bad person doesn't make you the villain, your role in the story does. That's why anti-heroes are a thing.
It may seem over the top at first, but I think Faro's bunker is designed perfectly from a narrative point of view, the design itself is not egomania, it's a strategy, visual shorthand meant to influence the opinion of any who enter, it's only the entryway and main hall that look like this, the rest of the facility looks just the same as any other.
His plan, however, was the epitome of egomania, when he was designing his bunker and choosing who would accompany him, he clearly already had a plan in place, he wanted to live long enough to see the new world, and become an important part of it, but with his descent into madness and paranoia, the plan become even more extreme: Delete Apollo. Further the development of life extending technology while waiting for the human race to reform. Then emerge as the immortal God-King of all mankind, so that he could mold them to his liking and ensure they didn't repeat his own mistakes.
Either way, when the new peoples found him, he needed his palace to look the part.
Darn, never thought of it that way - the fact that he may have legitimately believe he could live to see the new world, and thus made preparations from the very start on how he would look when the new world found him... If this is the case, the Ceo & Quen reacted exactly as he would have wanted when they were going thru that hall.
Absolutely, although he didn’t really care about them making the same mistakes, he cared about how they’d think of him
He’s an unstable narcissist who cannot accept any blame or accountability for the problems he’s caused, this is displayed best when Lis had to strong arm him into signing the funding for the Zero Dawn project, his last comment of “Jesus Lis, you didn’t have to threaten me.” which he says literally after she had to threaten him to fund the project
He wanted to become an immortal god king who had no flaws in the eyes of his subjects, and in a way, he got what he wanted
The scary thing is, Ted Faro could absolutely exist in real life at some point.
Which is absolutely terrifying
Even scarrier, someone like him may already exist right now (and that hinges dangerously close to certainity).
@@marty2129 Does he make cars?
@@Johninadelaide2022 He does and they rust and catch on fire constantly, doesn't fill one with much hope. Luckily enough he is a lot more of a bumbling incompetent than Faro.
ya know, I think making machines that can survive off of biomass, in general, is a bad idea. 🎉
I think Fero plage would never happen, since private companies nowadays tend to reduce live expected of the product so buyers would constantly buy from them. So why would you sell something that self replicate if you will not get profits out of it afterwards?
Ted is 9 right now lets go get him!
Ted is the biggest butterfly effect. Get him before its too late!
Meanwhile a kid named Ted Faro somewhere IRL is very concerned right now.
And then teach him allll about the dangers of hubris and greed and the merits of humility and generosity!
I mean... you aren't actually suggesting to harm a child, right?
...right?
Nah the second he learns about robots it’s over for us
@@jayson3788 he's gunna pull a Steve Jobs and just sell other people's inventions in his name.
The worst kind of villain that don't recognize itself evil.
Everyone is the hero of their own story.
So all of them?
True, they are incapable of recognizing that their actions are bad or at the very least necessary for their supposed “great” cause.
Much like Thanos, who believed so much in his own idea of cleansing half the universe that he willingly sacrificed a love one to advance towards his goal, not realizing the short sightedness of his decision. Even in Endgame, after realizing his idea was flawed he did not contemplate of what people would make of his decision so he decided to cleanse the universe entirely so no one, ever, will ever know of his crime and worship him as god, much like Ted Faro and his decision to kill all the scientists in that bunker and deleting APOLLO.
It isnt just blaming knowledge, Ted is absolutely acting out of fear and shame.
He knows what he did, knows its his fault, and doesnt want anyone knowing just how much of the blame rests on his shoulders
The part of faro that scares me is that he’s honesty a pretty realistic corporate villain. Because a lot of corporate leaders in real life aren’t overtly evil (obviously with some exceptions), they’re stupid, arrogant, don’t think through their actions, and don’t think about people’s humanity at all. Elon musk is an obvious public example, but this applies to all of them to varying extents.
His story, and honestly the entire horizon story is really well written. The slow reveal of what he did, how he reacts, and his ultimate fate is incredibly well done and it’s very subtly horrific. You don’t see what happened most of the time, it just leaves you to imagine and it sticks with you. The only thing I would have changed is to let the player see the actual mutated monster that Ted became. I know why the didn’t, the game is rated T for teen and they’d have to change it to really show him and his demise, but I think that final impact would have genuinely been one of the best in gaming. But a small missed opportunity being my only criticism is pretty great overall.
Do you know a lot of corporate leaders?
Elon Musk is actually a bad example. The guy has consistently been negative on AI and spends his money to get off world and make a colony as an insurance policy.
Sam Altman, who used Microsoft to defeat a coup brought about by colleagues worried about going too far too fast with AI out of pure greed is a much MUCH better example.
Me: *starts video*
FatBrett: "Ted Faro is the biggest idiot I've ever encountered."
Me: "Oh, boy. This is gonna be good."
He unleashed a Grey Goo scenario on accident. That’s the engineers worst nightmare and why we’re still wary of the concept of full automated assembly because if they’re just building more and more of themselves and something goes haywire where they won’t stop, what then?
Not to mention current corporations bribing away regulations.
Brings up a good question of not how to make it, but should we.
EMP?
I find it very interesting someone still remembers Grey Goo. That game really had an interesting alien threat.
@@Mediados "Grey Goo" is a popular hypothetical apocalypse scenario where out-of-control self-replicating nanomachines consume all biomass on the planet. The term was coined sometime in the mid-80s, I think.
So nothing to do with the game in this case. (Even though the game does build on the scenario.)
Ted Faro becoming a sort of eldritch cancer on the world strikes me as thematically appropriate. The over-the-top Egyptian theming of his Thebes bunker also strikes me as appropriate as well. All of his bots have Egypt-themed names (scarab, khopesh, Horus). Hell, so does Elisabet *Sobeck*. There's also the idea that a lot of early 20th Century Egyptology-based horror comes with the idea that modern man will be punished for his arrogance by unleashing ancient magics that we are powerless against. In its original context, it was the fear that colonialism will bite us in the ass, but here its flipped on its head. Modern man has stored up the ancient techno-magical curses for our children to find.
Literal and metaphorical cancer indeed
In Horzion. Ted can be sort of the futuristic take of the Pharaoh's Curse. As the whole game's apocalypse was literally his curse. A Faro Curse. AFAROPLAGUEOHMYGODIGETHEPUNNOW
I find Ted's spiral into insanity led by his guilt, arrogance, and narcissism rather interesting. His guilt and shame for causing the downfall of humanity leads him to destroy the accumulation of human knowledge. His arrogance prevents him from learning from his own mistakes and choosing a different path. His narcissism has him believe that only he is capable of saving humanity to the extent of denying the people around him. The self-destructive cycle of a narcissist consumed by guilt.
Part of his descent into madness which lead to erasing APOLLO, which did not get mentioned by FatBrett in this video, is he lost the last person that was stabilizing him. Elisibet had to don an exo suit and seal the bunker the rest of the Alphas were sheltering in from the outside and during this, Ted is begging and pleading for Elisibet to get back inside. But if she did go back in, then the Alphas would be found by the Plague and either the door would be ripped open to let the machines in, or the nanobots that feasted on biomass to refuel and replicate for the Plague would slip in through the crack in the door because the door was open just wide enough that they could be detected. Elisibet sacrificed herself to save her team, and Ted fell off the deep end because of it. The only person he could confide in over his guilt because she knew the whole truth was now effectively dead. Then the spiraling descent happened...
@Lightna Yep. Despite their differences Ted held Elizabet in high regard and as a confidant he could rely on. With her gone, he no longer had a rock to lean on and no one else could or would be capable of fulfilling that role and stop him from sinking.
It wasn't guilt, it was shame, at best.
He also coulden't learn from his mistakes. He kept two of the death machines in his bunker still active. He could've killed Earth AGAIN, but this time much more durastic. There is a reason Hephaestus activated AFTER Minerva did her job, its because the machines would easily be hacked via the robots. While Minerva cold be reactivated, it probally coulden't shut down Hephaestus's machines. While Hephaestus could create new machines to kill the old ones they would also be hacked. Even if the original 2 are shut down by Minerva again, the machines Minerva can't deactivate just hack the ones Hephaestus creates to destroy them. If they got out and even just hacked a FEW machines, the world would end... permenantly. He was a man that destroyed the world through ignorance and stupidity, destroyed the HISTORY of the world, then almost finished the world through ignorance and stupidity again.
@@Lightna No. I think he was more jealous than concerned. Jealous that Elizabeth got her heroic sacrifice, instead of sad about her demise.
I’m legitimately struggling to process how much I hate this imaginary man I just found out existed.
underrated comment🤣🤣 Go check out the game btw (Horizon Zero Down then Horizon Forbidden West (sequel))
yeah, there is a whole subreddit r/fucktedfaro that is dedicated to talk shit about Ted Faro
@@tyrondor5600 I love that subreddit! 😅
Just wait until you find out about sylens if you ever play the game 💀
@@animanga103I remember that lil shit-for-brains all too well..he was not the brightest but just bright enough to string Aloy along.
I love how in their meeting, Elisabet calls the robots & what they're doing what it is, and Ted corrects her in corporate approved vocabulary.
I feel Faro’s statue at Thebes is meant to be a sign of how far he has gone.
He subconsciously already thought of himself as god-like, the festering idea of being known as the one who destroyed the world was to much for a born narcissist and tipped him into full "I am a messiah" idea that was explored moes in game 2.
It was him preparing his palace for the new humans to worship him in, he planned to become the messiah that would guide humanity into a new rebirth, with himself as its god
It makes a lot more sense when you think of it that way, the man wanted to be worshipped, Apollo would’ve made sure that never happened simply by telling the new humans the truth, and being the narcissist he is he couldn’t bear the thought of others thinking poorly of him, that’s why he deleted Apollo, that’s why he ended the Alphas, and that’s why he ended everyone in his Bunker when they either discovered what he did or questioned what he had done
The only reason he didn’t end the doctors daughter was because without her the doctor would’ve simply stopped helping him, ironically though, and kinda poetically, because he never ended her, she convinced her dad to end it all with her, which forced him into the reactor in a last ditch effort to survive
Do you think it's possible that Somptow purposefully made Ted's treatments cause his mutations, and even lied that the reactor would help him "grow strong"? Instead knowing the reactor would make his mutations worse, out of revenge against Ted? So that he could spend the rest of his now immortal life suffering?
The situation between Ted and Somptow reminds me of Porky and Dr. Andonuts from Mother 3. Two impossibly rich ego maniacs keep a brilliant scientist in their back pocket and force said scientist to manufacture a way to help them achieve immortality to escape from the apocalypse they created. Also they both have hookers.
Probably.
There are a few date caches that kind of allude to this, that the good doctor purposely created a rampant mutant strain in Faro as a way of getting back at him before he ultimately took his life with his daughter.
Lis, should've ensured Ted was imprisoned and given the death sentence when she explained Zero Dawn to the military
@@thrilla72 This. The fact they kept Ted around until the very end really speaks to their own incompetence. Then again, maybe they believed nobody could be so selfish as to doom humanity twice.
Personally, you give him some acute lead treatment and move on. He was the money man, he served no other purpose, so seize the assets and remove him as a threat.
Never played these games but always wondered what the back story was. Honestly, was not ready for robot apocalypse borne of hubris. Holy hell.
You should definitely play the games if you get a chance! They're literally the best games I have ever played, hands down. No competition
They’re so fun! And the lore is cool. The different tribes and their cultures are so interesting!
"i can't in good conscience sign this"
Ted, you made robots that eat people....robots, that eat people.
Ted absolutely refused to add any kind of back door access or remote kill switch to his robots, but he was happy to create a "purge all human knowledge" button for Apollo. You know, just in case.
For Faro that is the closest je comes to learning from mistakes
Man imagine being an arms dealer who creates the ultimate weapon and your actions are relegated as "an accident", dude even commited to the bit and destroyed the penultimate repository of human knowledge to hide his actions and that death count isnt even taken into consideration as part of his inital death count.
- not in the video but Faro was perfectly ok with letting the Zero Dawn team, until Liz died & that's when he got the idea that the other scientists were totally going to keep the Faro Plague in the APOLLO library, which considering who was in charge of it is probably not the case
- so, the egyptian theme regarding Ted was already in HZD as the FAS units are named Horus, Kopesh, & Scarab respectively.
- the irony is that, he did learn something from the Swarm & instantly used it wrong: his followers had a backdoor, a killswitch to shut them down
-sir, what part of "he took an Spiritual Guru to his secret bunker" makes his megalomania in Forbidden West come out of nowhere?
- also, another thing that makes Ted so frustratingly real is that in the Frozen Wilds DLC we actually get to see what his work was before the switch to creating the swarm & he was capable of enabling Good People, the Computer in charge of keeping Yellowstone from exploding is what Elizabeth used as the basis for GAIA
Anyone else notice the Scarab holding up a skeleton like a trophy at 13:34? Also, you should have included the Audio Log where a Commanding Officer talks about how "the scope and nature of fatalities have generated a... pervasive sense of hopelessness throughout the unit." I believe the unit is the 9th MRB. THAT one hits almost as hard as the Audio Log from Ames' wife.
my god... you are right.. that's damn sadistic.
Absolute master class in storytelling. It’s almost like Aloy is time-travelling, jumping back in time to discover a new puzzle piece then jumping back to the present to apply that knowledge and move the story forward
It was a privilege to experience 🧠♥️👊
A note about that first audio log where FAS changes it's production. At least a good chunk of the company would hear that and quickly conclude a rouge swarm. The signs were there before and anyone who knew about the lack of a backdoor, which was a direct selling point, just needed to put two and two together
And a lot of those employees who could make the deduction would probably think "Elisabet really was the brains of this company" at some point.
I played the first and second games twice, but I’ll never play it again. They’re great games, and I’m glad I played them, but they’re depressing. The scale and scope of the game is massively sad. The best thing about the game is the actors. They did an amazing job.
Honestly, in the first game, when we see that conversation between him and Elisabet where they're going through everything he did with the Chariot Line - making them able to self-replicate, able to use bio-mass to fuel themselves, and then not even having a backdoor into accessing the AI in case of any problems - made me think of that GIF of all those people face palming. Like, what the hell, Ted? Didn't at least a single person in the room point out this was all a bad idea when you first came up with the idea?
But then I realised that either he was completed surrounded by yes men, anyone who did speak up was fired, or he just plain ignored them. The world's first trillionaire, business school dropout, Old World superstar, and all that. The sheer arrogance at display here, doomed us all.
And then it just got even worse with Forbidden West. Thebes and the whole cult of personality he created while they all lived out the apocalypse in relative comfort, and he lorded over them like an ancient Pharoah. The arrogance is still astounding, and no single trace of remorse for what he did. Or he buried it really well. And while we don't get to see what he became exactly, the projection of his new body growing through the facility, the guttural roaring, and the disgusted reactions from Aloy and Ceo give you everything you need to know to let your imagination fill the blanks in.
I agree with Sylens. Ted deserved worse.
Like Liz Truss who fired anyone who told her that her ideas were bad and then rat fucked the British economy overnight.
Ted Pharaoh
Thing is, whenever government wants back doors to anything people scream anout privacy and security. A back door means the bots can be hacked.
I can see it happening today.
Besides Ted Faro it is also a horrifying tale of designers, engineers and programmers that were so in love with the perfection of their creation that they thought they didn’t need a fail-safe.
Building killing machines without any countermeasures or safety shutoffs is a very special kind of arrogance.
If I was one of these code experts that were forbidden to build in a back door, I would have been like "This is insane! Of course we will build in a back door. We will just not tell the boss about it, until it is needed!".
What baffles me is the log of the engineer arguing about installing a backdoor with Ted. That he didn't quietly turn around and install a backdoor anyway is where the story lost me for a bit. At least have a second log of Ted finding this backdoor, deleting it, and deleting the engineer from the company. Give me at least one person who isn't enabling this manchild.
@@LevantineR1 it is also interesting that one of the logs tells how it was only Ted who insisted on creating a master override for GAIA, which is later used by Aloy to defeat HADES.
And Sobeck is against it.
Which is kinda ironic.
@@side2kto be fair had he not had the backdoor into GAIA, Apollo would’ve activated correctly and humanity probably would’ve been able to deal with Hades on its own, since they’d have had a complete understanding of what the towers were and how they functioned, also Hades was only able to put humanity at risk because it preyed on the ignorance of the old world Sylas had, along with his craving for knowledge of the old world, to manipulate him into creating the zealots (I can’t remember their precise name), but with the knowledge of the old world Apollo would’ve given them, there wouldn’t have been anyone Hades could manipulate, because they would’ve known what the Faro Plague was and adamantly refused to help it
@@3adgamd3r Faro wasn't using a backdoor into GAIA, he was using Omega level access. It was kind of backdoor too, but not the same as Master Override.
@@side2k they are different protocols, but what Faro had in Omega clearance was by its very nature a backdoor, it wasn’t an official or planned for protocol, it was hidden from its creators and created in secret, only it’s nature is different
Omega Clearances directive was all about control of Project Zero Dawn
The directive of the Master Override was specifically achieve the to reset or deletion of a subordinate function, or GAIA herself, in case of another FARO Plague type rampant AI incident
This was a planned back door program, unlike Omega Clearance, and although The Master Override was planned it also counts as a backdoor to the system
The destruction of Apollo on earth was an absolutely incredible tragedy of human progress, one rarely portrayed in typical apocalypse scenarios. I really hope the copy in Far Zenith manages to find its way home.
Somehow I think the devs _not_ showing Ted's final form makes that scene even worse.
Its what the devs themselves intended. They felt showing you Faro's ultimate fate would not compare to how you imagine it being.
@@edgarmarques97 It's a classic horror trope, the idea that nothing they can show you could be as scary as what you, the audience, can imagine. Whatever individual viewers imagine the terrifying monster to be, it's terrifying for them specifically, something that a defined design shown onscreen will not guarantee. This is why effective horror media hides the monster until the end, when the hero is backed into a corner and forced to confront the horror they could only run from before.
@@vincentleonard3797Yeah even as someone terrified beyond belief by body horror, not seeing what became of him actually didn't make me feel any better at all. I was still horrified and terrified and it took a long time irl, not just in game, to feel okay again. It was very effective to only suggest the horror he became.
Yea the out-of-focus hologram and the noises were enough to get the point across while leaving plenty to the imagination
"born in 2013" i think we need to address that a part of why Ted Faro is like that is that he grew up with skibidi toilet
I genuinely wanted to throw up the moment I saw Faro's statue in Thebes. He has learned NOTHING from his actions.
I wouldn't count Ted out just yet. His body is gone for sure, but his mind, maybe not so much. We know Nemesis was created by the Far Zeniths uploading their minds, and they had access to and perfected immortality. So maybe Ted, knowing that he would be plugging himself into a power grid, turned to preserving his mind as they did as a backup plan. And maybe that backup included use of the same program that GAIA used to create Liz again into Alloy. So perhaps there may even be a clone of Ted out there.
I think Faro being over the top sociopathic in the second game is because his villainy was subtle enough to have apologists after the first game. Before the release of Forbidden West, I remember people saying Ted had a point about APOLLO and how destroying it was more to prevent people making bad decisions again, and that he had the best of intentions. I think the writers wanted to double down by making it clear that he just didn't want to be remembered as the person who destroyed humanity, and his quest for immortality was so that he could control the narrative as a pseudo-god.
'Ted Faro is the most despicable villain I have ever covered on this channel' Great start, subscribed
The most dangerous kinds of villains are the ones who think they are always in the right, and nothing can convince them otherwise. The ultimate narcissism that cannot deal with the real world and tries to make it how they see it, no matter how twisted it could get, chilling really.
Biggest problem of Faro was not the fact that machines can refuel by any biomass source but because they created Horus....
Machine that actively produces new machines. Thats why they couldnt stop it. When they were nuking machines all over the place, Horus kept on popping new ones
That’s because as much as nuking works, they had an almost limitless supply of biomass in the form of ocean life, humanity couldn’t have won without wiping itself out in the process, and so the choice they had was to end it all immediately by destroying the world themselves, or stick it out for as long as possible with the hope that Zero Dawn might create a path of life to survive in the future
Another semi reasonable idea faro had that backfires was the creation of HADES, the main villain of the first game, since he wanted Gaia to have a backdoor so it couldn't go rogue like the original swarm did.
As far as I remember, Hades was not Faro's idea. Hades was a logical part of Zero Dawn in case Gaia needed more than one attempt to build the biosphere, and we know through the data points Hades indeed needed to destroy a couple biosphere failed attempts before Gaia got it right and stable.
The idea Faro demanded (which turned out to be useful) was the creation of a master override in case Gaia glitched like his robot swarm, the override devise Aloy got at Gaia's Prime and which with she purged Hades at the Spire. That was maybe the only good idea Faro had in all this mess and the only time he somehow learned from his mistakes. Sadly, it was only a temporary learned lesson for him, because he fucked it all up later again.
You're mixing up a bit of lore there. HADES is not the backdoor, the backdoor kill switch in Gaia was the master override, which was intended as a way for a person to assert control over Gaia in the event she went rouge. Because they were also part of the system the other functions of Gaia were also rendered controllable by the override, which is why Aloy could use it to purge HADES, in a weird sense Faro asking for that killswitch for Gaia actually ended up being one of the only good decisions he ever made, and it's interesting because Sobek didn't want to include it at first, it wasn't until Gaia herself said she agreed with Faro's assessment. Faro, for all his pathetic failings, remembered the mistake of not leaving a backdoor in the Faro robots, and as possibly the only good thing he ever did he convinced Sobek to not do the same. If that override had never been created, Aloy wouldn't have been able to stop the rouge destructive HADES function that was trying to destroy the world. Wait, the sounds familiar, a rouge AI/tech/robotic force destroying the world, one had a killswitch and could be taken out early on before the destruction was too large, the other didn't and it destroyed the world. As the famous quote goes, "It's like poetry, it rhymes"
HADES was part of the original plan for Zero Dawn as designed by Sobek, not an idea by Faro. The purpose of HADES wasn't to be a kill switch to Gaia, but a system used to return the biosphere to a blank slate in case the first, second, third, etc. attempts to recreate the world failed. And HADES did exactly what it was designed to do very well, until the signal, which we still don't know exactly how it worked or what it did, though we now know it's source.
@@DreadKyller this should def be pinned cuz i see plenty of people who dont know this even though its pretty overtly stated in the main storyline
The first game was amazing, hearing all the different people's voice logs as you go into creepy places was some of the best parts. It really made you feel like you was there when the end of humanity was brought about.
Ted Faro is literally one of the AI tech bros we're currently dealing with
🤡 while they are building the world you are on youtube....
@@SWOTHDRA You clearly didn't watch the video then
@@SWOTHDRA Elon musk dickrider detected!
@@SWOTHDRAYou're here too you idiot
The most concerning thing about Horizon is that the end of world like this is neither unrealistic, nor unlikely.
If history is doomed to be repeated by those who don’t study it, then Faro not only doomed humanity once but twice. That’s maximally monstrous.
Ar first I was kinda disappointment that the game didn't show us the extend of his mutation and lack of humanity. But I thinks it's perfect, what's the ultimate punishment for a man obsessed with himself, with being the hero. To not give him even the luxury of a last show.
you know until I saw that scene (and replayed it for morbid curiosity) I can`t help but feel like he got the worst fate of any character I have ever seen. I mean it was deserved for sure but think about it. his punishment was 1000 years of unimaginable, hell like torture both mentally and physically as his body filled the power plant like some sort of living meatball in an incubator. and then being burned by fire and lava until your nothing. imagine how long it took for him to die nevermind being incapable of saying anything and just screaming in inhuman agony. what he got was a fate worse then death and then a death worse then said fate which I didn`t even know was possible. and he deserved every bit of it which was even more surprising to me.
@@thememeilator2633and the irony is he did it all to himself
@@pancakes8670 damn.. talk about being trapped in a hell of your own making.
The revelation of what happened to the world and the part Ted played on it is a very very powerful moment of the game. I love Horizon mainly for the world build
Something I kind of wished was touched on in the video was the impacts of APOLLO’s destruction that we see in the cradle facility in All-Mother Mountain. The feral, confused children trying to claw their way out, and the school room door being blocked off and their desperate attempts to get inside it, even though they didn’t know what was in there. Faro did that to them.
The truly scary thing about Ted Faro is how utterly plausible his character is. Very much unlike the more typical omnicidal maniac we see in many stories, and their motivation, here it's all the result of monumental stupidity, irresponsibility and hubris. At least in the first game, he's a kind of person we do see occasionally in real life.
Hell, he's the kind of person that we occasionally *are* in real life.
F*ckups happen and what-not, but... Wow - that's some next level f*ckup.
Tesla presents the Cybermech... or the Amazon Killbot Prime, the iMurdermachine. We kind of have the kind of insane hubris present in Faro in our world.
He could have been a hero, instead he became a monster (in a litera l sense)
Ironically, it was his twisted attempts to be the hero that caused him to kill humanity twice.
i dont think he ever wanted to be a Hero. he wanted to be the Messiah.
@@J-manli Dude is two for two lmao. He's destroyed the world twice, once by accident, then by choice; and saved the world twice too. Once by sniffing out money in stopping and reversing climate change and hiring out the best minds in the world to actually do it, and the second time by actually learning something and insisting for GAIA to have a hardcoded backdoor and a capacity to be scuttled via a killswitch in case of emergency.
Not many people can match this core lmao.
Personally I always interpreted that scene where Ted announces that he "destroyed Apolo" as his final purely selfish choice. Because of one little subtle line delivery:
_"Those blameless men... and women-"_
The way he hastily adds that after drifting off, always seemed to me like he was referring to himself, not the Zero Dawn people. And as is clear from every other piece of info about him, he was desperate to become the saviour and erase his crimes. The way he presented it was just another weak excuse, like Ted always had.
Also, his bit about knowledge being the problem? I think it’s copium. He just got rid of Apollo to get rid of the history of the apocalypse being his fault. His image and perception is what matters to him.
He also had a misguided fear of the new humanity following his footsteps if they had the knowledge. Of course, if they knew the mistakes that were made, they would be able to avoid it. However, if they had no information whatsoever, what's to stop someone in a thousand years from accidentally reactivating one of the plague bots and kicking off the apocalypse again?
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Ted Faro missed that memo to preserve his ego and image.
@@Dudekunle It's a tangent, but the Chariots are "Fixed" by ZD time. Evidently, since the glitch rendered them unresponsive to commands, after cracking the encryption - the first thing MINERVA did had to be uploading a service pack to fix the glitch so she can order them to stand down in the first place.
Fast forward a thousand years, and the Eclipse has no issue using them without the bots turning around immediately to go all OM NOM NOM NOM on them.
And Faro, copium or not, low key had a point.
The Zeniths had all the knowledge of human species, they knew exactly how their homeworld died, and then... THEY FUCKINMG DID IT AGAIN!
In the end, humanity's gonna human and there will ALWAYS be Faro's and Zeniths who's pride comes before the fall. It's an issue the third game needs to thematically handle when the time comes.
@@TheKain202 On the Zenith point, they were all narcissistic wealthy people, many of which lack the actual skill and foresight that made them their billions (they just hired the scientists and engineers, similar to people like Musk). They thought they were above recreating an apocalypse (yet they made Nemesis). I'm sure the far Zenith scientists, during the initial planning and build stages of the project planned to grow a new human society on the colony (evidence being all the zygotes stored on the ship and the need for Apollo). But once all the spots were taken by a bunch of talentless, selfish hacks, they probably thought it would be a hassle having to think about other human beings and "scrapped" that part of the plan. Fuck Ted Faro, but the Zeniths are just as bad.
21:34 His narration really put into perspective how incredibly screwed up the situation was: "that's how the US Army meets its end, a single final scream and then nothing."
We always have the fact in our mind that the US Military was the strongest and most influential armed force in the world, and for it and EVERYONE else's militaries to be squashed like nothing in just over a year by the swarm is apocalyptic in its scale and destruction. General Herres's presentation about Operation: Enduring Victory included some rather very old equipment (by 2065 standard) like the Bradley IFV because there is simply nothing else that they could use that wouldn't and couldn't be hacked by Faro's killer robots in 2065.
born in 2013. dang, of course homie was an ipad baby.
Born in a woke world, prob single mother raised
@@SWOTHDRA I'm failing to see the correlation of wokeness in this situation
You fail to see it because wokeness is in fact, not a thing and people like the person who replied to you have zero concept of anything @chrisnotpratt1903
@@SWOTHDRA You did NOT eat that
The biggest tragedy of Zero Dawn apocalypse it's that it probably could be avoided. I don't mean the obvious not give the robots a unhackable protocol, or self replicating capabilities, or ability to hack anything, or bio-fuel consumption. Not having any one of those capabilities would have made the swarm stoppable in a way or another. But I'm not talking about that. What I'm referring to it's that Faro ego and unwillingness to take responsibility for his mistake destroyed the world. If as soon as he knew of the glitch he had contacted Elizabeth and US Robot command, when the swarm was small and contained to just one Island, when it was composed of just one Horus class unity (it's the only one capable of self replicating and the one that fabricate the smaller assault units as seen on Forbidden West Burning Shores DLC) and it's children, they could possibly have destroyed it. Nuclear attack from orbit, a rain of rods from God to kill the Horus (which would mean you had only smaller units to kill, if you kill them before they spread and hack other swarms you would be safe), a massive human fighting force with older non hackable weapon's or newer like they created after if it didn't take to much time to overwhelm the swarm and kill the Horus when they were still on the island, etc. There was possibilities to deal with them when they were a small contingent and contained in a small geographic region. There is a long time since I played, but I think the game even hints at that.
But instead of doing this, Ted Faro tried to cover up the incident to find a solution when his company and himself would still be on top of the world after it. Losing precious time and allowing the swarm to spread and become unstoppable. He knew that if he had done what I said, they would destroy the swarm but he and his company would be gone. If he was not arrested for gross negligence and endangerment of the human species (and the people that would have to die, be the population of the island killed in the nuclear or orbital bombardment or the soldiers necessary to kill the swarm, so there wouldn't be just hypothetical deaths) because of his fortune, he would be ruined financially and most important his reputation. From "The man who save the world" he would be know as "The man that almost killed life on earth by hubris", that was too much for his ego. And his company if it was not destroyed or broken down by governments like happened to Standard Oil in real life, I doubt that it would ever recover as market leader (not on Teds lifetime anyway) from the lawsuits, the recall and disassembly of their military robots not affected by the glitch, the destruction of it's public reputation and the damages they would have to pay for the victims of what would be just a incident not the apocalypse.
Ah yes, the example of true human hubris. Im gonna love this.
As Kratos said
"We must be better."
the terror of Faro is that he ISN'T evil or some scheming sadist. He is just a wildly incompetent guy with no accountability. Like, he's just really fucking dumb. That's it. So plain and simple, so destructive and negligent.
And more powerful and rich than any single person should ever be. With people who probably told him he was doing a good job all the way to the end of life on the planet.
Ted didn't destroy Apollo and kill the Alphas to save anybody.
He was just covering his tracks.
If there's one good thing Ted Faro did was that he insisted on having a master override (a backdoor) for GAIA which did actually help Aloy stop Hades. Elisabet was even hesitant to implement it but Ted did not want to make the same mistake again after the disaster of the Faro Plague due to not having a backdoor.
Bare in mind the only reason, the ONLY reason we're able to fight off the Corruptors and Deathbringers with just a bow and spear is simply because they've spent thousands of years buried underground with all of their major systems being greatly damaged over time.
Eh, chalk it up to rule of cool and the fact taht said arrowheads are made out of alloys a thousand years ahead of XXI'st century tech.
If they were so decayed as to having their structural integrity compromised to that extent, even trying to move would cause them to fall apart from stress.
Not to mention that in the 300+ years before terraforming took hold, you'd have had thinks like acid rain, electricity discharges, high speed winds with corroding particles.
Plus most metal, even without rusting, becomes brittle or weakened over time.
I think the way of portraying it through a weakness to fire actually makes a lot of sense.
And also because Ted insisted on creating a master override.
Even the old ones could easily defeat most of the swarm robots. It’s just the issue was that the pure numbers were insanely one sided. You could kill 500k of them and they’d still have millions in reserve
@@SuperTheastthey could also repair the damaged or destroyed units, using multiple destroyed units to build a new one
I like that there is no subtlety in his fate.
I like sutlety, i like to think about the themes of a story... but sometimes some themes are too simple to need complex over and undertones, just show what it is and end there.
Just let truth be truth, no overanalysing.
I think something never really talked about in the fandom is the fact that the faro swarm robots where DEPLOYED, deadly, but contained, people probably saw these things at the very least online, they where dangerous but far away from regular people, especially with almost all wars being waged with machines, and suddenly the barrier is shattered, these far away dangers where suddenly in peoples faces, imagine how terrifying that had to be, and then learning you had to go FIGHT those things
Thomas Midgley Jr.: I invented leaded gasoline and ozone layer destroying CFCs. I damaged the environment more than any single individual.
Ted Faro: Hold my beer...
A headcanon of mine is that, in Fero’s final moments, he was so happy to finally see the “children” of Liz. He had waited for so long and now he can finally lead them into a new dawn, but couldn’t speak since he had lost that ability (note how when Aceo enters, Ted starts to scream like he’s happy, or he’s trying to talk but is only able to roar, yet when he sees the torch, he is completely terrified), only to see him leave and another one come in with a torch, which confused him before he was burned alive, being literally burned by the flames of his arrogance, A fitting fate.
I wouldn't call what Ted did with erasure his final mistake. That was probably most of all what makes him a villain. It was conscious. It was planned. He couldn't accept what he'd done, and he decided to actually do something evil.
I think Ted is my most hated villain. There's something to be said about destroying the world not out of malice or greed, but just rank incompetence. He was a chimp given the keys to a nuke without understanding what he has. And then to be so monumentally petty that, when presented with his one chance to make things right, he'd rather burn everything down for a 1000 year PR stunt than admit he made a mistake. Compare him to someone like General Harris, a man with very little culpability in this beyond maybe letting FAS gain too much power. He signed off on Enduring Victory, and even knowing that his only other option was extinction, considered it such a heinous act that he wanted his name to be linked to it for all eternity.
Ted Faro reminds me of Elon Musk in a number of ways. Hell even a quote that I heard about Musk perfectly describes Faro "He wants the world to be saved, but only if he's the one who gets to do it."
Getting ever heavier Faro-vibes from Musk, ngl
Faro isn’t an engineer. Faro is also a genuine idiot. Lol. A healthy distrust of scientists/“experts” and authority is a healthy attitude though IMO.
Musk never said anything like that in his defense but I do feel like if you took all tech elites and combined them into one person you would probably get Ted Fero maybe. Though Ted Fero really just reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg infact I'm pretty sure if Mark Zuckerberg had this technology this would probably be the mistake he would make with A.I.
Listening to Faro's voice lines I wouldn't be surprised if the actor took some inspiration from Elon Musk.
The most frightening thing about Horizon's apocalypse is that it feels so possible nowadays. It's my favorite story ever, so depressing yet so full of hope and love for life.
I think you skipped one important factor that made Ted go nuts and delete Apollo. He spiraled down after Sobeck sacrificed herself in order to seal a bunker down. She did what his ego would never allow him to do.
Another possible underlying reason was for him to not be portrayed as the destroyer of the old world to the new generations. All info point to him being a diva.
There is another theory that Ted caused the mechanical issue when they were closing the bunker by abusing his access, so that he could delete Apollo (because remember he locked himself in his room while the defences were being bolstered for the base to not be discovered.)
However, he didn't account for the fact that Liz would sacrifice herself.
"they will need me, my advice, my guidance," bro really huffed his own farts so hard he devolved into a cursed Ditto, without the intelligence of a Ditto.
One thing that both fascinantes and terrifies me is the idea of a single man like Faro being able to pretty much end the human race
Putin
easy, we just need one immoral tech billionaire who buys up some faltering military production company and move all his secret research to some third world country without any oversight, then he could invest into genetic engineering and AI as much as he wanted.
Its basically what if Amazon+Tesla+Raytheon but without any checks and balances or oversight
I'm glad I'm not the only one remembering Ted Faro. I've played a lot of games and seen a lot of movies, but him killing the Zero Dawn staff. Stunned me when it happened, and has stuck with me ever since.
I get the Scarab and Khopesh models but who in the world would ever need the Horus it’s so ridiculously huge.
The Horus is the core of the Chariot line, what made it special. The Scrab and Kopesh were in themselves just machines that had been seen before. The Horus was what gave a swarm true autonomy since it could create new Scarab and Kopesh units as required. It was in essence a mobile factory + command center.
Even the Quins CEO noped the hell out of that situation
Speaking of subtlety, Ceo end dying being crushed by a rock, like being crushed by his own ego and selfishness.
He wasn't crushed by just a rock, he was crushed by the giant head of Ted's sculpture. Certainly not subtle xD
"Pride goeth before a fall." He really is a fascinating example of the most extreme types of narcissism. He created an unfixable problem by proactively backing the creation of an unfixable system. The ENTIRE planet doomed to extinction by a MATH error. One that MIGHT have been corrected if Farro hadn't gotten the idea to make the system unhackable. THAT is what scares me about connecting AI to the military. ONE simple mistake could cause an event much like this.
One of my favorite ways they show ted's stupidity is part of a text log.
TALA AQUINO: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Isaac Newton.
TED FARO: Well, Newton didn't have the resources we've got, Tala. He couldn't dream of the horizons we can already see. We're the giants now.
38:41 I'm not generally the intended audience for "horror" in media, so my viewpoint is pretty skewed. But this scene was absolutely disturbing in the best possible way. The build up of just seeing how twisted his mindset was shifting into the realization that, oh god, he's still alive. And the unspoken horror of what lurks behind those doors. It did far more than showing it would have (it frankly would have just grossed me out unnecessarily), so I really appreciate how they handled that scene because I was just utterly shocked and horrified in a way that felt oddly satisfying, lmao
I do agree with you that they maybe were a bit much on how literal they took his ego spiraling into that, but even in spite of that, he had to be incredibly arrogant to decide the Alpha Members of Zero Dawn had to die, and then he be allowed to not only live but potentially "Shepard Humanity into a new beginning".
Same here. I hate body horror. HATE. Scares me utterly. And the impending horror and fear in Thebes was absolutely brutal to me. From the logs to the physical signs of abuse and experimentations and the Downward Spirals of all involved. Ugh. I couldn't wait to be out of there. I wasn't even that relieved not to see him (in hindsight thank God) because what we could imagine was bad enough.
I never hated a videogame character so much than Ted Fkng Faro
He killed billions of people and set humanity's progress back by thousands of years. And he didn't even do it on purpose, he was just a greedy idiot. I hate him so much.
Something interesting to see is that Ted Faro isn’t a part of Far Zenith despite being supposedly the richest man on the planet. This can be for a variety of factors, my favorite being that even Far Zenith saw him as too pathetic to offer a seat. The other option is that he refused a seat because he believed he had to fix his mistake, and just kept making more and more mistakes. He clearly doesn’t have access to the same immortality tech that Far Zenith does, which both saves and bites the entire world in the rear multiple times over. He is arrogant enough to believe he can live forever, and arrogant enough to believe no one should be allowed into Thebes when he is gone. These two arrogant mindsets clash with each other, allowing Aloy to snatch Omega Clearance in the end all due to Ted’s conflicting arrogant choices.
No there's data points where they rejected Faro outright for ending the world and being a fool.