History HorizonZeroDawn / TropesAToM

** Throwing stones is mostly superfluous in regular gameplay thanks to the aforementioned Lure Call, but on Ultra Hard difficulty it suddenly becomes very useful due to the severe restrictions this mode places on the Lure Call ability. Luring hostiles with stones is a bit trickier than whistling at them, but unlike the Lure Call it won't alert the entire hostile force if you use it more than once. It also makes the Outlaw Dark Box you can purchase in Meridian much more practical as it multiplies the amount of stones Aloy can carry.

* HarderThanHard: Ultra Hard difficulty reduces Aloy's damage output to 70%, doubles the damage dealt by enemies, massively increases their detection range and sensitivity, disables enemy health bars so you have no real idea how much more they can take, multiplies all merchant prices by a factor of 5, and reduces the amount of healing medicinal plants add to Aloy's pouch. It makes knockdown and elemental effects much harder to apply, makes enemies much more aggressive, disables MookChivalry and makes it so that Aloy's Lure Call ability can only be used once before the entire herd immediately converges on her location. Needless to say that Aim Assist is also disabled by default. The general consensus is to not attempt this until you've acquired all the upgraded gear from a previous NewGamePlus run, which of course hasn't stopped masochistic {{Challenge Seeker}}s from [[NintendoHard starting an Ultra Hard game from scratch]].

** The Shield Weaver outfit projects a rechargeable force field around Aloy that allows her to tank a lot of damage without losing health. If you try at least to stay in motion during battle, this outfit should keep you safe from just about anything until you tackle the harder difficulties, but even on Ultra Hard its defenses are strong enough to neutralize any one hit that would've instakilled Aloy otherwise.
** On a more specialized note, there're outfit lines dedicated to protecting Aloy from one specific damage type. Physical resistances can go up to 90%, elemental resistances can reach outright immunity, and most enemies rely heavily on one single damage type. If you're skilled enough to evade any secondary attacks, switching between specialist outfits depending on the enemy you're facing can make Ultra Hard a lot more manageable.

* HorseOfADifferentColor: Aloy gains the ability to use to certain robots – horse-like Striders, bull-like Broadheads, or ram-like Chargers -- as rides.

** The Blast Sling in all its various incarnations. It does high splash damage, staggers machines out of attack animations (even large machines like Thunderjaws), and can ignite Blaze on machines. The only drawback is the ammo is expensive to craft and you can only hold 3 shots at first and 12 when fully upgraded. Combine it with freeze arrows and you can tear apart everything below Stormbirds and Thunderjaws with ease.

* EldritchLocation: A scanned glyph found in one of the Carja towns describes the differing, outlandish locations that aren't even featured in the game called "The Forbidden West". The one who penned the entry seemed to be a healer, who recalls his wards' tales about the "Western lands" and their travels----which incidentally seem to be the cause of their injuries, illnesses, and ultimately, dying or maddened states. The healer continues his recall of the ruined cities his wards mention, as well as even wilder, stranger, and more dangerous machines and the strange tribes of people that roam the land far to the West of the Nora, Carja, Oseram, and Banuk lands. (Though keep in mind, these people are frightened by a description of what's obviously the ocean, and the Carja writers especially have a habit of sensationalising.) Near the end of the entry, the healer recalls how his wards came back with next to nothing, except for small souvenirs from these Western lands, including that of a seashell. Geographically, if the game's map covers Colorado and Utah up to Yosemite, then "The Forbidden West" is presumably the West Coast; California to maybe Oregon. The trailer for the sequel shows a glimpse of at least San Francisco and the Bay Area, and the former is now mostly underwater.

** Corrupted specimens are more dangerous than the vanilla versions, and "daemon" versions are stronger still.
** More particularly, Redeye Watchers are a little stronger than regular Watchers.

* EmergencyWeapon: Zig-zagged with your Spear. As a tool that requires no ammo or aiming, it will obviously be always available when you need it. It's also pretty effective against the earlier enemies of the game should you be having trouble with the bow. But as the game goes on you'll find more and more enemies against whom deploying the spear is too risky, and if your ever-expanding arsenal of ranged weaponry is out of ammo or otherwise not up to the task, sticking around with your spear will just get you killed.

* Notably, standard racism is absent, despite humanity being made up of the same racial diversity as its origins. [[spoiler:This is because the current generation of humanity is descended from clones randomly produced in cradle facilities. Skin color is as much an arbitrary feature as eye or hair color, with no special history behind it and no reason for anyone to have a grudge against one color over another.

** First, he nearly kills Aloy at the beginning of the game via SlashedThroat, only being stopped by [[spoiler: Rost's]] intervention. After fighting [[spoiler: Rost]] off and mortally wounding him, he then decides not to finish either incapacitated Nora off in favour of setting up explosives to blow the whole mountaintop up, giving [[spoiler: Rost]] just enough time to push her to safety.
** Later in the game, he has Aloy at his mercy, but doesn't kill her outright. Instead, [[EvilGloating he explains his plans in detail]], then throws Aloy into the Sun Ring, figuring that his machines will kill her in a [[ComplexityAddiction suitably dramatic fashion]]. Instead, Aloy outsmarts and outfights the machines, [[spoiler: giving Sylens plenty of time to (literally) [[TheCavalry ride in and save the day]].]]

*** Both challenges follow a similar format: [[spoiler: a firefight that is mostly ranged, followed by some platforming, and then another, more intense fight against advanced enemies.]]
*** Just before the Proving, Rost gives Aloy his necklace for remembrance. [[spoiler: Sometime after the finale, we see Aloy finding Elisabet's body and taking a necklace from it.]]
** The first significant thing Aloy does in the game is rescue a fallen Teb from prowling machines. In the finale, [[spoiler: after Aloy is knocked out by some falling masonry while protecting Meridian, Teb is the one who comes along and helps her up.]]

** [[spoiler: Far Zenith apparently tried anyway, and apparently had some pretty advanced technology. Some people in the Zero Dawn project believe that it might even have a chance. You find a text message stating that the telemetry data indicated that the ship's antimatter containment failed and it blew up en route, making Zero Dawn the last hope for humanity.]]

* CutsceneIncompetence: Inside the Zero Dawn facility, [[spoiler: Aloy suddenly forgets how to duck when Helis throws a grenade at her, resulting in her being knocked out and captured. In the arena sequence that follows, pitting her against two Corruptors is treated as insurmountable odds. Whether it actually would be depends on what level the player is at the time.]]

* FantasticRacism: There is plenty of prejudice, CulturalPosturing and various levels of verbal sniping ranging from friendly banter to lethal insult between all groups in the game, as catalogued below, but none of it is actually based around what we today would call race. All the tribes are about as phenotypically varied as modern-day America, and it is never brought up in any way. [[spoiler: This is because their ancestors were intentionally created as such by GAIA. For the people of the tribes human populations have always been a collection of different phenotypes and the idea of categorising people based on appearance alone likely never even occurred to them.]]

* Notably, standard racism is absent, despite humanity being made up of the same racial diversity as its origins. [[spoiler: This is because the current generation of humanity is descended from clones randomly produced in cradle facilities. Skin color is as much an arbitrary feature as eye or hair color, with no special history behind it and no reason for anyone to have a grudge against one color over another.

* InferredHolocaust: In contrast to the very ''explicit'' holocaust that befell the Old Ones, the second one is not elaborated on. [[spoiler: The ELEUTHEA facilities, crippled by the removal of the APOLLO system, are forced to release untrained teenagers with only a kindergarten-level education out into the wild when they run out of resources. This first generation of new humans must have died in droves before they figured out basic survival skills.]]

* KilledMidSentence: [[spoiler:The proctor who was in the middle of her declaration of elevating Aloy to becoming a Brave gets shot by an arrow from Eclipse Cultists]].

** The Nora, a hunter-gatherer tribe with fairly small settlements, have a Native American feel to them. They also wear blue face paint, which some Celtic tribes were known to do, and their architecture, especially in their "capital" Mother's Heart, resembles the Norse.

** Zigzagged. The story says that the combined might of the world's military, including railguns, nukes, and whatever new weapons technology the future has developed, didn't stand a chance against the horde of Faro machines, and it was ultimately only a decades-long hacking effort by GAIA which rendered them inert. But by the time of the game, even the biggest and nastiest biosphere-restoring machines GAIA created can be taken down by a single short, skinny redhead with a spear and a bow. Even the restored Faro-era machines such as the Corrupter and Deathbringer aren't ''that'' much of a threat, though this is said to partly be because of damage they suffered during a millennium buried underground. Additionally, these were only the "footsoldiers" of FAS's Chariot Line: the "Metal Devil" atop All-Mother Mountain is an example of the unstoppable Horus-class titans; Aloy never has to fight these Titans, as they are never reanimated.

[[center: [- [[VideoGame/HorizonZeroDawn Main Page]] | '''Tropes #-M''' | [[HorizonZeroDawn/TropesNToZ Tropes N-Z]] | [[HorizonZeroDawn/TropesFromTheFrozenWilds The Frozen Wilds]]]]-]

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!''Horizon Zero Dawn'' Tropes #-M

* CallARabbitASmeerp: All of the machines are imitations of real, though extinct, animals, but since the people of this time don't know the names of their inspirations, they instead name them based on either their physical properties (tallneck, lancehorn), or behavioral patterns (watcher, thunderjaw).

* FlunkyBoss: All bosses either have backup from the outset or start calling some in soon enough. Unsurprisingly, the FinalBoss takes this UpToEleven.

* GreenAesop: Present, but not too heavily repeated, with the 2040s apparently having had a severe enough climate change that New Zealand and other island nations disappeared under the ocean due to rising waterlines. The "Great Claw-back" gave rise to green robotics technologies, and Faro Automated Solutions capitalizing on that. [[spoiler:Their military robots only [[UpToEleven made the climate even worse]]]].

** Boars. The ones running around are just a few feet long and flee from people, [[spoiler:and are part of a balanced starter ecosystem]]. It's easy to assume they're supposed to be ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_boar Sus scrofa]]'', the wild version of the domestic pig. The thing is, wild pigs are '''bastards.''' Boars in HZD are either heavily modified, or some different type of pig.

###They breed fast, grow up fast, and given enough food and an absence of large predators, they can grow to the size of ''[[BearsAreBadNews brown bears]].''
###They are ''vicious.'' A defining feature of historical spears designed for hunting boar is the crossguard, which prevented the animal from [[TakingYouWithMe shoving itself right through the spear to savage the spearcarrier]]. [[spoiler:Considering how ''every human alive'' is descended from a clone released into the world with the life skills of a ''kindergartener'', they would not have survived if there were standard wild boar out there]].

* AnimalMotifs: It doesn't require a lot of imagination to see how some robots are clearly designed to appear similar to their organic counterparts. The term "Faro Robot" when mentioned in conversation, can easily be heard as "Feral Robot."

** At the end of the Proving the proctor says an outcast could never win the Proving, [[spoiler:because Aloy's a Brave now--she clearly did it intentionally because she thought Aloy deserved a big moment.].