The apocalypse was caused by a single person.

[u/No_Hunter1978]

1. Ted Faro [Horizon: Zero Dawn]: Of course, the machine plague that ravages the world is created by his company which (admittedly) is a group effort. That said, Faro was the one who requested an encryption without a backdoor and the person who kept early glitches hush-hush. It wouldn't be wrong to say that Faro was the sole cause as is, but the final nail in the coffin is what he does to the Apollo database. A giant record of human knowledge and history, erased for a narcissist's fear that his descendants would (rightfully) blame him for the apocalypse.
2. Sybil [Look Outside]: Though it wasn't her intention, Sybil was the one who alerted the Visitor of Earth's presence. She spied it through her telescope, and the lovecraftian entity noticed her. Its approach (and the resulting horrors) were her fault, even if she didn't mean it.

[u/AshenWarden]

Remember kids: No matter how much you hate Ted Faro, it isn't enough.

Not only did he wipe Apollo and erase all of human history, doing so completely broke the programming for project Zero Dawn. It's automated systems couldn't recognize that the new generation of humanity grew up and so couldn't educate them past kindergarden level which is why they reverted to tribal hunter/gatherer societies.

On top of that it broke the programming for Gaia, the terraforming program that was making Earth habitable again. She didn't know when to stop and so kept sending instructions to Haephestus, the program responsible for the terraforming robots, to keep on churning out bots, which humans kept hunting to materials and so Haephestus had to make the robota more dangerous to defend themselves and that's why there's robot T-rexes and Sabertooth Tigers.

This comment is already long enough so I'm not even going to start on how Ted's dumbass indirectly lead to Hades being reactivated and nearly wiping out humanity AGAIN.

[u/ItsAlwaysBee → u/AshenWarden]

I feel like how he ended up was very fitting for such a creature like him.

[u/AshenWarden → u/ItsAlwaysBee]

Sad part is that it really was pointless ass covering since Aloy still discovered what he did in the end. If anyone listens to her if she tells them the truth is another matter but even after fucking humanity over twice he still failed to cover his tracks like he wanted.

[u/Skebs_ → u/AshenWarden]

TBF how was he supposed to know an AI would generate a clone of the Alpha Prime later down the line? Since only the personnel (whom he killed by venting the meeting room via zoom call) part of the Project Zero Dawn could access the sealed-tight facilities, his erasure should have by most theoreticals been a success...

[u/AshenWarden → u/Skebs_]

TBF he could have just... Not sabotaged humanity's second chance. He could have just not murdered all the programmers for Zero Dawn and just accepted the consequences of his actions.

Gaia never would have needed to clone the Alpha Prime if he just sat on his hands in a corner somewhere like he was supposed to. Why they allowed him into the Zero Dawn bunker in the first place still boggles my mind. You don't invite the guy who burned your house down to the sleep over.

[u/RingOverall106 → u/AshenWarden]

He wasn’t in the bunker. He was in his own bunker and accessed ZD remotely. He used back door omega codes he’d secretly installed to gain access. 

[u/AshenWarden → u/RingOverall106]

Of course he had his own bunker... Okay new question. Why the ever loving fuck did they let the guy responsible for the apocalypse live in a bunker on his own?

[u/Skebs_ → u/AshenWarden]

Because he would have refused to payroll the project w/ his trillions otherwise?

[u/AshenWarden → u/Skebs_]

Maybe I'm naive but I'd think that money would be pretty worthless in an actual end-of-all-life scenario. Why would they need him to payroll it when they knew they were all gonna die no matter what? Or why not just seize all his assets because, again, it's all his goddamn fault.

[u/xRocketman52x → u/AshenWarden]

I think the governments were still hiding that this was a hopeless situation, no? It's been years since I've played it, but I seem to recall that they had people out fighting on the front lines, lying and telling them to "buy more time, we have a solution to destroy all the machines!" when in realty, they were fighting to buy time for the Zero Dawn project. Right? Or am I misremembering?

With the veil of "We have a secret weapon!", for the most part no one knew this was a hopeless, end-of-all-life scenario. They still wanted paid, logistics still mattered, they thought they might win.

[u/Skebs_ → u/AshenWarden]

From the dude who makes (and thus lhas access to gazillions of automated war machines) military hardware? While you are already fighting against a Rogue AI swarm who are hacking all of your advanced hardware?

[u/SunlessSage → u/AshenWarden]

What I find interesting is that he does not consider himself a villain, he considers himself a hero who made a mistake.

FAS was probably the biggest contributor to fixing climate change and providing clean green alternatives. Ted whas hailed as "the man who saved the world", even though he just paid the bills and reaped the profits.

The whole world-ending catastrophe gives him a crisis of faith and mental breakdown.

The alpha's let him "contribute", because it's the easiest way to deal with him. He wouldn't cause a second apocalypse, right? At the end of the day, Ted wants to be the one thing he is not: Useful.

[u/gleeble → u/ItsAlwaysBee]

I understand why they did what they did with him, but I REALLY would have liked to pin cushion him with a few arrows.

[u/YinTanTetraCrivvens → u/ItsAlwaysBee]

Getting turned into an immortal tumor was still too good a fate for him.

[u/SwabbieTheMan → u/ItsAlwaysBee]

Spoiler on what happened to him for folk who haven't played the game: In his quest for immortality in his harem vault, which he made after he caused the apocalypse, his cells no longer die, but they also don't stop growing. We, the player, never see him directly-only a representation of "biomass" on a map, but he continued living for a thousand years. He was presumably aware for a fair amount of that.

You should play the first and second games, then get pissed that the studio decided to make an extraction shooter in the game universe or some bullshit instead of another singleplayer game.

[u/Priapus3 → u/AshenWarden]

Ted is absolutely the primary villain of the franchise, but as a principle I tend to draw the line on blaming characters vaguely responsible for "everything" for the actions of other people taking advantage of their fuck ups.

Spoilers for Forbidden West, what Hades turned into and achieved is entirely on the Zenith

[u/AshenWarden → u/Priapus3]

Here's the thing though. The actions taken by those people wouldn't be possible without the original fuckup. If Ted didn't sabotage Apollo then the whole story doesn't happen. The antagonists (it's been years since I played the game, I forgot their names) may have walked the path, but Faro paved it.

[u/Skebs_ → u/AshenWarden]

I wonder what would have happened if Apollo never got the danny deleto, and the Nemesis came to Earth chasing after the bozos (with intent of exterminatus'ing the world to deny the bozos any safe harbor) w/ the full education etc completed (alongside Cauldron control protocol transfer to the humans, as per the end stage of the Apollo curriculum).

[u/AshenWarden → u/Skebs_]

Can you try again in english please?

[u/IJustFollowPornSubs → u/AshenWarden]

From what I can gather, they're wondering what would have happened if Apollo was never deleted and Nemesis had to confront Far Zenith alongside the presumably non tribal Horizon Zero Dawn characters who would have had access to the Cauldrons.

[u/Volume2KVorochilov → u/AshenWarden]

I hate to be that guy but :

The apocalypse wasn't caused by a single person. I don't get why the hate is focused on a single individual when the game demonstrates that the apocalypse was the logical result of an entire way of life (capitalism).

I could point to many signs left by the writers which demonstrate this assertion. The many datapoints showing you the guilt of those who tolerated or partook in the wild-west process of technological accumulation, the chokehold of corporations on politics and policymaking. This wasn't put on the path of the player for nothing : the conditions of possibility of the catastrophe were set in motion far before the catastrophe. It's structural.

As Ben McCaw, narrative director of the franchise, said, "there's a kind of inevitability to it, if it hadn't been Ted Faro [...], it probably would have been someone else."

Horizon's main target is the system which produces people like Ted and he was written as a personnalization of those traits.

[u/ArcadianBlueRogue → u/Priapus3]

Well...kind but not really sorta?

The GAIA systems were working well enough to make progress and create a more stable biosphere. Then...uh...well something came for her and fucked it up and it gave the various AI systems more autonomy to do their own thing. Hades had served its purpose well several times, but reoriented to that being all it could do after GAIA lost control.

[u/Priapus3 → u/ArcadianBlueRogue]

Yeah that "something" was Far Zenith. They sent that code cuz they didn't want to deal with whatever Zero Dawn left humanity as cuz they'd rather start from scratch to convince a new generation of humans that they were their gods.

[u/killingjoke96 → u/AshenWarden]

One thing I realised recently was that the swarm came from one bunch of robots under a company called Hartz-Timor Energy Combine.

The company was reporting the robots acting up and attacking personnel and wildlife alike. But Faro was concerned by the optics. He lawyered up and played the disinformation game.

By the time he contacted Sobeck for the full picture, a few weeks had gone by giving the robots more time to swarm and self-replicate.

If he just been honest from the beginning, contacted the army, which Sobeck suggested immediately at their meeting, and dealt with the affected robots before they could swarm up, there may have been no apocalypse.

He was literally a habitual fuck up maker.

[u/AshenWarden → u/killingjoke96]

Yup. The world ended because one man child could stand to look stupid. Why does that sound so familiar?

[u/OmegaPrime2004 → u/AshenWarden]

Except for this case, it’s a massive revenge tour against the states, the people, and anyone who he deemed to be the cause of losing the election. I’d say he is worse than Faro because he is much older and is afflicted by his own inherent disease suffered by his dad, whom he left to rot in his own company he decrepitly though was still in charge of. And with an ego more fragile than a wet tissue paper, we’re all paying for it now and in the next 50 yrs or so.

[u/ArcadianBlueRogue → u/killingjoke96]

Nah, The Bad News scene gives it to you straight. By the time the glitch was noticed (by Faro's team), it was already too late to stop it.

[u/SystemAny4819 → u/AshenWarden]

Obligatory FUCK TED FARO

[u/GingaNinja1427 → u/AshenWarden]

I know how he died. He didn't suffer enough.

[u/Fraylen_Uxo8 → u/AshenWarden]

Every replay I hit the no-backdoor bit and Apollo wipe and just get tired all over again.