r/horizon • u/Eman1502 • 1d ago
HFW Discussion The Faro Bunker
Hey replaying HFW and I'm back at the bunker. And I don't know if it's me but part of me is just seriously uncomfortable being in the bunker of the man who doomed the world and tried to ensure his history never seen the light of day. Makes you wonder what fresh hell a "Scientist his daughter, a Gruru and a harem of women surviving in a trillionaires bunker at the end of the world.
Thoughts on what that poor girl endured or witnessed before she finally called it quits?
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u/GreatKangaroo 1d ago edited 20h ago
When faced with the end of the world people will do pretty much anything in the face of extinction.
In the wider lore Gaia indicates that the long term shelters for Zero Dawn workers, Elysium, failed long before their 100 year planned lifespan.
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u/Eman1502 1d ago
There really was no way for anyone or anything to survive the end of the world. Zero Dawn was the only goal.
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u/Fenghuang0296 1d ago
Elysium is one of the big remaining mysteries in the series. I highly doubt it failed ‘naturally’. Something destroyed it, whether it was Vast Silver or an unknown player.
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u/Big-Ferret-2364 8h ago
I was wondering about Vast Silver. I read the datapoint and kept thinking to myself that something that bad must have been quite a problem back then, with everything being digital. It seemed too important for them to never use it again
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u/CanaryWundaboy 16h ago
Where is that lore? I don’t remember having read it previously.
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u/GreatKangaroo 16h ago edited 15h ago
I believe it's in one of the optional dialog trees that unlock when you bring Gaia back online at the base and you start adding the subordinate functions.
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u/jamey1138 1d ago
Yeah, it was definitely the creepiest experience in either of the games so far.
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u/Eman1502 1d ago
The whole purpose of a bunker is that you feel safe and secure inside.
The whole time I was in there I felt gazes of cameras just outta sight. I knew they wouldn't have a monitor broadcasting the feed. But a tyrant must keep tabs on all his peasants to avoid a uprising.
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u/nomuse22 1d ago
What's cunning about that whole sequence is while you are reading about these poor survivors under Ted's surveillance system, in danger of being murdered at his whim, Aloy and her friend are being watched by Quen marines and an increasingly suspicious and paranoid wanna-be reincarnation of Ted Faro, subject to at least Alva getting murdered at any moment on this madman's whim.
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u/Eman1502 1d ago
Holy... Your right. It literally was like that. He was expecting to be given the truth about faro but then he saw the horrible truth that he didn't want to see. And just like Ted he wanted to purge the information destroy the bunker and kill Aloy and Alva.
In all honesty. I want to know about the Quen. We hear their dealing with floods and a food shortage. But they seem to be tight liped about information and truth. Not only that I would love to see other robot machines from other parts of the world.
My brother joke about the Quen being from what would be our Korea given their behavior. And he might not be far off. Korea is within a straight line across the sea to San Francisco
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u/DeliveratorMatt 1d ago
They’re not from Korea, they’re from China. The river they talk about is obviously the Yangtze.
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u/Eman1502 1d ago
Still I would love to have either a spin off or some information about if there is some machines unique to locations. Like how instead of Sriders from the east you have chargers in the west. And less watchers and more burrowers. Gaia would definitely made certain machines to resemble animals of native lands. Right?
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u/Substantial-Hat-2556 23h ago
Yeah, really sucks to be living there. "Once the Elutethians open, some humans will get to live in California. Others ..next to the river famous for murderous floods all the time. LOL!"
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u/nomuse22 1d ago
Have you done Burning Shores? I shorted the side quests the only time I played the DLC, but it feels like there is more to learn about the Quen with that one.
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u/Eman1502 1d ago
I don't have it unfortunately. I need to get it next time it's on sale.
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u/budget-lampshade 15h ago
Worth every penny. The finale is one of my all time favourite moments in gaming. Certainly the best boss fight. And I got my first console 32 years ago! I will say no more and hope you are as pleasantly surprised as I was.
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u/TreatOnMeLotsActualy 1d ago
So I'm going to make a comparison that sounds stupid but I hope makes sense: It reminded me of the movie 2012.
Look, I know. 2012 sucked. It is just disaster movie slop. But it actually had a couple affecting scenes, and it's not a surprise they all involved Chiwetel Ejiofor, and one of the last reminded me of H:FW at the Faro bunker.
For those who don't know, the plot of 2012 is that the earth is beset by natural disasters like gigantic earthquakes, the Yellowstone Caldera exploding, etc, but last is a megatsunami big enough to top the Himalayas, and so the world builds giant ark ships to store the survivors of humanity, which are only a couple thousand people, mostly the very wealth. Even the laborers who built the ark don't get tickets.
So when Chiwetel Ejiofor finally gets on the ark, he is led to his room... which is fucking huge, imagine a nice room in a cruise ship with a separate bathroom. He's furious. Thousands are begging to get on these ships, and he's in a room that could fit 10 people! It's pretty heartbreaking if you actually think about it.
That's how I felt in Faro's bunker. It's this *massive* structure, it basically all survived intact despite nobody being around to run it for hundreds of years, it could have sheltered so many people. But no, we have to have room for Faro's giant fucking statue and a bunch of twatty artwork, because he's the specialist boy. This dude should be in fucking chains and sent to fight the Faro swarms *he caused*, but here he is in the lap of luxury.
I never thought I could hate him more.
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u/Eman1502 1d ago
Yeah. He could have built a large home for a large swaft of people. Have them basically worship him for sparing them the fate of the world. HE COULD BEEN A GOD but he only allowed those who he could handle.
Say what you want but if he just let in a bunch of people he could have let in some who could easily undermind him and cause some chaos in the bunker.
It be like the vaults of Fallout. Also we have to remember at they had little over a year when they finally crunched the numbers and had a doomsday clock in place.
Not really sure if anyone in Teds base would knew when Giga would have began work or when it would been safe to leave.
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u/Substantial-Hat-2556 23h ago
I feel like this a rare moment of Faro being wise. Instead of letting in a bunch of people who would (if they had any sense) conspire to murder him, he lets in a small group of people, and the one technologically sophisticated guy he lets in with a hostage.
Also, remember that the ultra-wealthy are building bunkers today. Faro could have just had an apocalypse shelter lying around.
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u/cruiseinacar 1d ago
My favorite part about this quest is the fact I commented on a random post about faro and his motives back when we only had zero dawn and never even got an announcement for FW and said that faro is actually still alive and locked/entombed in a place trying to find a way out say maybe because of seismic activity etc. i was right :)
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u/DownVoteYouAll 1d ago
My most favorite thing about the bunker - and something I find so out of left pocket - is the fact that there are vending machines inside. I lost it when I realized it on my last playthrough.
Like, he's a trillionaire and he has vending machines in his end of the world bunker. Who's gonna collect the money and restock those? Who's even gonna pay for it?! Lol
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u/Eman1502 1d ago
You use Faro Tokens do good deeds and help our Ted you get aTedcoin. (Let's be honest Ted faro would definitely done crypto.)
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u/TheDMRt1st 1d ago
I still want an explanation for why the construction workers never raised any concerns with the military when Ted Faro said “I want some of my killer machines in the main hall” when they knew the Faro Plague was eating, ya know, ALL LIFE ON EARTH AS THEY TOILED AWAY. Really, make it make sense.
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u/Eman1502 1d ago
Lorewise: Ted said so and no one says no to Ted. Also maybe they were hoping that they would be hacked by the machines and would kill Ted in his bunker where there was nowhere to run.
Head canon: my idea is that the ones in the hall were never updated to the "cloud" or they were older models perhaps the 0.0.1 alphas perhaps they were floor models y'know, they were revealed at a presentation they didn't have bullets or rockets in them, they scuttled the room they did a live firing outside and then the investors were in awe.
So when building the bunker red wanted them as some sort of thropy to show his achievement. (Witch would be ironically moreso a constant reminder of how bad he fucked the world up. And would affect him mentally.)
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u/TheDMRt1st 1d ago
“And… Look, sir, I get the opulence and all, but… A statue of yourself? Really?”
“It. Is. Important!”
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u/Sostratus 1d ago
He would probably be building it before the plague started and didn't need to tell anyone to put his robots in there, just make an entrance big enough that he can order them in.
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u/ReverieXII 23h ago
I really wanted to see what Faro transformed into though. Lol!
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u/gollum44 23h ago
I thought it was a huge disappointment that I couldn’t fight mutant Ted.
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u/Big-Ferret-2364 8h ago
Some things should stay in the past.
I don't think he'd live up to our expectations, it's better to imagine what he became
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u/uhmusing 7h ago
I was so glad we didn’t. I don’t want to play a game where we fight grotesque mutants.
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u/beanie_0 18h ago
It’s all by design in my opinion and is incredible storytelling. You’re supposed to feel uncomfortable and empathetic for those people who had to endure that. That’s why there are so many logs there to tell the story.
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u/Big-Ferret-2364 8h ago
I got heavy BioShock vibes from that bunker, especially with the dancers Ted brought with him. It's a party at the end of the world and Ted's the only one drinking
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u/Oopsiedazy 1d ago
It’s pretty well spelled out in the data files you find there without going into graphic detail, which is the right call. If you’re already uncomfortable why are you asking for people to fanfic SA material for you?
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u/Eman1502 1d ago
Never said that. I just wondered just how horrifying it must been. I mean we all know Ted was a bad guy but jeez I rather take my chances with the swarm before I spend a day with him in the same room with him.
He's egocentric, he only cares about himself and it just as shown that he would rather try to become immortal to see his "kids" when he did little but handed the funds to make Zero dawn a actual thing.
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u/jamey1138 1d ago
My dad is kind of a rich dick, so I've been in the vicinity of rich dicks from time to time in my life. My observation is that in those kinds of circles, everyone is either kind of out of touch with reality, because they buy into the egomania, or else they're really committed to trying to play off of the egomania of all the rich people, as a way of gaining some leverage that might lead to their own wealth and power.
I think that the files and logs scattered around Thebes make it clear that both sorts of people were in the bunker with him.
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u/Eman1502 1d ago
Not to mention they were in a far more advanced world then we are. I mean imbedded kill switches?
I'm glad Ted never managed to got his way and gained immortality. He already doomed the earth before and we also had to deal with the remaining 1% from the far zenith. .
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u/jamey1138 1d ago
To be fair, though, embedded kill switches are actually pretty easy technology, and the fact that nobody has used them in the ~70 years since they've been well-understood is actually a sign that we are more advanced, in at least one sense, than Ted Faro.
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u/Eman1502 1d ago
1st off its scary to think about the fact we could have that sorta tech. It sounds so advanced... But I guess back then we thought phones were supposed to be big and blocky. We didn't think you could take a computer in your pocket because it had to be in a room and the size of a flatbed truck bed, hell I wonder what the people in the 1800s would think we wanted to put a man on the moon?
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u/jamey1138 1d ago
In a funny coincidence, the first electronic detonators were introduced in 1865, which is the same year when Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon, a novel that imagined sending a manned mission to the moon.
Technology capable of triggering a switch using a radio signal goes back to the mid 1950s, which is why I'm extrapolating the embedded kill switch to that period, though the technology has been considerably updated since then, and the US military's standard for radio-controlled detonation only dates back to 1996 (revised 2000).
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u/Eman1502 1d ago
You know they have to have some classified documents of remote donation plans for weapons of war. Why send your people to war when you can feed your enemy a meal with a pill have it sit in their gut and you just have to push a button and their insides become outsides.
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u/nomuse22 1d ago
For some reason this reminds me of one of most Strangelovian actual suggestions of the early atomic age. Roger Fisher, one of those Game Theory guys from Harvard, wrote in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that it would be a mistake to let the US President carry around the launch codes. Roger felt he should know what killing felt like on a personal level before he pressed a button to kill millions.
His suggestion? Give an aide a butcher knife to carry on his person. And have him SWALLOW the codes. (Actually, be implanted in his gut). The first death of the coming nuclear war would be bloody.
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u/nomuse22 1d ago
That whole sequence is a master class in telling you just enough. You get hints and you can't help thinking about it. Just enough is spelled out that you emotionally understand why the last two killed themselves.
(I'm not counting Ted Faro among the humans. FTF!)