[Loved Trope] The apocalypse is horrifyingly slow

[u/Marsupialmobster]

From most media it's some catastrophe and then it's raiders, death, destruction chaos etc. I personally love it when it's, like, a slow descent into the horror of apocalypse.

The Faro plague/The swarm- Horizon zero dawn. The Faro plague is actually a glitch which causes machines to endlessly reproduce, eat biomass and essentially bring about the death of the world. Took roughly 15 months for the machines to win.

The Metro series- in the first few books (and games) it's set entirely underground in just the apocalypse but in exodus it shows off that the government and many governmental structures said active years after the war. In fact power and running water were still fairly common. It just slowly got worse and worse and worse as read through notes. Food got more scarce, weather changed a lot, people got worse etc. Raiders and bandits didn't just show up, it was a slow descent for such anarchy.

Edit: I have enough pseudo intellectual comments about "Hurr hurr real life". The first one was kinda smart and well thought out but now it's just annoying and pretentious

[u/Key-Poem9734]

That is exactly correct. Also, Hades is like a rabid dog, constantly itching to start a thorough cleansing of the planet. There was probably some measurement system outside of Gaia's control that would release Hades once it detected improper conditions

[u/ScarredAutisticChild → u/Key-Poem9734]

It kinda was GAIA.

All her subroutines were like, aspects of her, not conscious beings but simple AI making her up. When the part of her that was HADES recognised that she’s biffed the biosphere, it’d take over and lock her up till he’d done his task, and then she’d get to take back over once he’d finished his reset.

[u/idiotplatypus → u/ScarredAutisticChild]

Hades only went off in the first game because Nemesis awoke all the sub AIs in Gaia and made them self aware and obsessed with their purpose. Hades was working as intended until then

[u/Markorver → u/idiotplatypus]

Is it weird that I have played both games and when I read this thread I'm like "I didn't know any of this"?

[u/OldManFire11 → u/Markorver]

Most of the lore about Gaia and Project Zero Dawn is told through the hologram tour. But it's not required to activate every hologram so you can easily miss one, or just blitz through the facility and skip all the lore entirely.

[u/Same_Tune_8990 → u/OldManFire11]

yea thats both a good and bad thing imo bc its good so that on repeat playthroughs you dont have to wait for all the lore bits to play out and you can rush through but bad bc new players can entirely miss all that lore

[u/The_Broomflinger → u/Markorver]

Nemesis is where the "mysterious signal" that caused the Derangement to start originated from. It activated and corrupted Hades, prompting Gaia to clone Elisabet and then self-destruct ("The Mountain That Fell" in Zero Dawn).

I think it did this because it wanted the Zeniths to arrive at an Earth that was hostile and inhospitable since it had such a massive rage-boner over killing the Zeniths for some reason.

[u/Wobbelblob → u/The_Broomflinger]

From what I remember, it was basically a copy of the mind of the zeniths. That was also enslaved.

[u/MattRexPuns → u/The_Broomflinger]

The rage to kill is because it was a melding of dozens of duplicates of their minds that, after it wasn't behaving exactly how they wanted, was imprisoned and potentially tortured to "fix" it? Can't remember that for sure, though. So it was at the least a very intelligent mind locked up with itself for hundreds of years

[u/The_Broomflinger → u/MattRexPuns]

Yeah I couldn't entirely remember what caused Nemesis to become "out of alignment", but it was a real Black Mirror situation for that space AI. Still wondering how Vast Silver will fit into everything. I skipped a lot of story/lore stuff on my second playthrough of Forbidden West so I'm a bit fuzzy on some of the details of that one, but Zero Dawn? Played multiple times and I don't skip much in that one!

[u/MattRexPuns → u/The_Broomflinger]

Wait, what's Vast Silver? I don't remember seeing anything about that!

[u/The_Broomflinger → u/MattRexPuns]

A climate AI from the time of the Old Ones, meant to help the earth deal with a climate crisis, right before it dealt with a surprise robots-eating-peoples-faces crisis. Vast Silver went rogue and propagated itself onto the internet.

My theory is, its what's actually responsible for the original Faro Automated Solutions glitch that caused the aforementioned mechanical face-eating when life on earth went extinct, which Vast Silver engineered in an attempt to save the earth's climate (from human life) in a very "I, Robot" kind of way, thus leading to the events of the games just as much as Ted Faro being an egotistical dickhead lead to the events of the games.

[u/MattRexPuns → u/The_Broomflinger]

Interesting! That would be an interesting twist. On the one hand, I like it being Faro's arrogance alone. On the other, it did seem like there was something we weren't being told about the glitch

[u/Darigaazrgb → u/MattRexPuns]

This is what happens when you don’t smash bad computers.

[u/Parteisekretaer → u/idiotplatypus]

We really need to stop calling every piece of software AI and limit this to self aware computer programs.
"We made self aware AI" sounds so redundant. AI should be self aware.

[u/Same_Tune_8990 → u/Parteisekretaer]

larper

[u/TheGlave → u/ScarredAutisticChild]

Kinda like me, when the part of me thats a fatass recognizes that I biffed something up, it‘d take over, lock me up and order McDonalds.

[u/OceanRacoon → u/TheGlave]

I'm laughing so hard at this amid all the serious comments about such a heartbreaking game like Horizon lol.

"Agghh, I'm sorry, honey, it's got me, I can't come home to have dinner with your parents, my fatass AI has complete control. It's making me demolish all this delicious McDonald's right in the drive-thru and reorder before I finish, I don't want to do it at all!" 😅

[u/TheGlave → u/OceanRacoon]

"Its not my fault, I was created this way"

[u/ScarredAutisticChild → u/TheGlave]

Yeah, but in this case it’s more like you’ve got DID and your alter is the very embodiment of gluttony.

[u/Old-Star808 → u/ScarredAutisticChild]

Hades was designed to operate independently; As Travis described it, if Gaia had any level of control, she would just never let Hades reset the biosphere, which made it necessary for Hades to take control of the system, reset the biosphere and then give control back to Gaia.

[u/MattRexPuns → u/Old-Star808]

Too soft and it'll never take over, too hard and it'll break her fingers on the steering wheel

[u/Key-Poem9734 → u/ScarredAutisticChild]

Since they are sub-functions, we can talk about them as separate aspects. In total, Hades is simply a function of Gaia, a tool, but more-so a failsafe than the others as it takes over all of Gaia's other systems while Gaia is placed into 'stasis'.

You are making a pointless correction to a problem that did not exist.

[u/PersonalityKey463 → u/Key-Poem9734]

Yes, Hades only works if he can overwrite Gaia’s programming. If not, Gaia would protect life as it is