All spoilers on this page are unmarked, per wiki policy. You Have Been Warned!
- At the beginning of the game, it's made clear just how dangerous the machines are. And yet Aloy, a six year old, doesn't hesitate to sneak among a group of hostile machines in order to rescue a boy from a tribe that considers her a curse. Notably, Rost has, up to this point, dismissed Aloy's Focus (the device that lets her scan machinery) as a toy. When she uses it to effortlessly sneak around an entire herd of machines, he changes his tune.
Rost: So, it is no plaything...
- Also, when Aloy falls into an abandoned ruin (again when she's only six), she uses her survival skills, intuition (and her Focus) to get out safely without any help.
- When Bast throws a rock at Aloy, she catches the second one without your input. And while repaying him in kind is tempting, you can show devastating cunning and accuracy by disarming his third rock. Alternatively, you can absolutely refuse to sink to his level, in which case a Nora child will stand up for you. Again, Aloy is showing this level of guile or maturity at the age of six.
- Aloy successfully winning the Proving after training for more than ten years. Sweet, sweet victory indeed.
- The first appearance of a Tallneck, the slow thundering footsteps and the build can really give one some serious "welcome to Jurassic Park" vibes.
- Taking down a Behemoth, Rockbreaker, Stormbird, or Thunderjaw for the first time. It's both exhilarating and a massive learning experience for taking down future Heavy Machines.
- This really needs to be put in perspective. Your main protagonist is essentially a Native American huntress armed with little more than a bow and a spear, fighting a rhinoceros that can manipulate gravity to throw huge rocks, or a giant mole that can tunnel underground like it's swimming through water, or an eagle the size of a stealth bomber that can control lightning, or a T. Rex armed with as much firepower as a Navy destroyer. And she still wins.
- When Aloy and Talanah finally take down Redmaw. Not only is it a Moment of Awesome, but the record of the hunt of Redmaw makes it as dramatic as possible (while also Flipping the Bird at Ahsis).
Amendment to the Record of Redmaw by Inquiring Jandiniman, Historial-in-Residence at the Hunter's Lodge:
"In time, all creatures fall, all legends fade away. Such it was with Redmaw, deadliest of Thunderjaws. In the summer of the third year of the reign of the Sun-King Avad, Sunhawk Ahsis received word of a sighting and set out after the beast. Talanah, Hawk of the Lodge, went soon after, quickly followed by her Thrush, Aloy of the Nora. Fearing Talanah might take Redmaw first and thus supplant him as Sunhawk, Ahsis resorted to treachery, laying a trap for the Hawk. Nine mercenaries ambushed her, but aided by her Thrush, Talanah defeated them all (six shot, three blasted).
Hawk and Thrush continued after Redmaw, arriving just as the legendary monster took Sunhawk Ahsis out of the fight (lash of the tail). Working together, the two women finally defeated Redmaw in a fight for the ages. Alas, the wounds that Ahsis sustained were mortal (crushed internal organs,
evidence of bowel failure) and he did not live to see Talanah take his place as Sunhawk.
So ends the Record of Redmaw, most murderous of machines."
- Though Dervahl is a villain, the sheer degree of planning he demonstrates is impressive for a tertiary antagonist. His first plan: Incapacitate Avad and his guards with his sonic weapons (which is in itself a Moment of Awesome: Dervahl not only reinvented the phonograph, he even managed to weaponize it) and force him to watch as he sets off a colossal bomb he smuggled into the city. When Aloy manages to destroy his bomb and find a way to block his sonic weapons, Dervahl and his men take you on themselves, having the foresight to arm themselves with conventional weaponry as well in case someone bypassed their secret, unblockable weapons. And when that fails, and Aloy has him cornered…
Dervahl: Any good Oseram tinker will tell you-
always have a third plan! (Dervahl pulls out a machine lure, summoning a flock of Glinthawks to attack Aloy) - Even Avad has to admit that Dervahl is a brilliant man. Conversely, his cunning is a testament to Aloy’s own skills. She manages to match wits with him at every turn, exposing his frame job and secret plans, as well as powering through all of his backup plans.
- The first time Aloy meets Sylens through a hologram communication at The Maker's End, he arrogantly tells Aloy he hasn't got enough time for all her questions. Aloy responds by threatening him with what's basically a mute button on her Focus. He concedes.
- There's also the time when Sylens informs her the Earth is round, not flat as (he assumes) she believes it is. Aloy immediately proves his assumption wrong; she's seen an eclipse of the moon before, worked out that the blackening was the Earth's shadow instead of some superstitious explanation, and since the shadow it cast was round, it meant the Earth was too. We already knew she was smart and resourceful, but it's this moment that truly foreshadows her being a clone of the world's most brilliant scientist.
- When Aloy goes into the DLC, assuming she's in contact with Sylens, he'll strongly encourage her to turn back, bordering on panic. Aloy tells him in turn that she's figured he's a Banuk, since Rost used to tell her about Banuk shamans' tradition of machine cables sewn into skin, and his panic just confirmed her suspicions.
- The fact that there is a Hunter's Lodge at all: the people who hunt down machines for sport with nothing but bows, arrows and primitive gadgets.
- At one point, a hunter will tell you that he's planning a new hunt. Why? Because he was talking to some Oseram, and heard about a tribe that lives near machines the hunter has never heard of. This man has basically no information about these machines - and anything beyond the borders of a Tribe is basically guaranteed to be a machine-ridden Death World - but his first instinct is "I should go fight these." And he's not even a member.
- The Massacre at the Sun-Ring is a true Offscreen Moment of Awesome for the hawks of the Lodge, which Aloy learns about from Ligan after her first hunt with Talanah. When some of the Lodge objected to Sun-King Jiran's slaughters in the Sun-Ring, he ordered them put to death in the arena. While most who went up against the deranged machines died after minutes to the cheers of the crowds, the Lodge's hunters kept fighting from morning to nightfall, taking turns resting while the others fought. Their skill and bravery was such that the crowds that had called for their deaths soon began cheering them on. Ultimately, Jiran released two Behemoths into the arena, which predictably ran amok and attacked the audience. Forced to defend the audience from the beasts, the hawks fell, but only after saving the lives of the people who had cheered for their deaths just hours ago.
- When the Behemoths went wild, members of the lodge that were watching in the audience brought out their concealed weapons and joined the fight. Ligan laments that he didn't bring his own weapon, making it clear that despite being quite elderly even back then, he would gladly have joined his brothers in arms in a hopeless battle.
- The first behemoth was slain by Talanah's father, who climbed onto it, and killed it with a spear. Even Aloy can't boast such a feat.
- Heading down into the depths of Cauldron XI and fighting through the cultists to the mainframe and your override basically resurrecting the place and unleashing mechanical hell on the cultists. Sure, the machines end up trying to kill you too, but seeing those bloodthisty zealots cowering in the bushes trying to hide from roving Stalkers makes up for it.
- Just about everything involving Dr. Elisabet Sobeck.
- The sheer, mind-boggling scale of Dr. Sobeck's masterpiece, Project Zero Dawn. Things are looking bleak indeed. Humanity is quite literally fighting a Hopeless Robot War. The very biosphere will be consumed in less than two years' time, rendering Earth a toxic, sterile rock infested with Killer Robots. So what does Elisabet do? Why, spearhead a project to create GAIA, an AI with the requisite facilities to re-seed the entire planet. Not only that, but one that had to be hidden from the Faro Swarm and completed in less than five hundred days. And it worked.
- The Nora in the Embrace can look at All-Mother Mountain and see the dead Metal Devil half embedded in it, which they see as the work of the Goddess. Within the "Womb of the mountain", as they call the facility, one of the Metal Devil's tentacles has breached the ceiling. Clearly it was killed just in time. That's pretty much exactly what happened. Project Zero Dawn's success rested entirely with GAIA, who could work through the fifty years needed to generate the codes that would shut down the Faro Swarm, and who could use one of her subsystems, MINERVA, to build broadcast arrays that would send it out. One of the Horus Titans found this Cradle facility, meant to generate and release new humans, just before it was shut down.
- All of GAIA's subsystems and the people who programmed them deserve mention for the sheer scale of their accomplishments; APOLLO is a complete chronicle of all notable human knowledge, including history, fiction, science, poetry and everything else. MINERVA is an AI that could brute force her way through the most advanced hacking protection ever conceived by humanity by sheer force of trying everything until it worked. ELEUTHIA is the All-mother worshipped by the Nora, having both cloned a new generation of humanity and raised them as best she could without access to APOLLO's archives.
- GAIA performing a Heroic Sacrifice to save the world from HADES and initiate a gambit to create Aloy, trusting her to one day carry on Elisabet's work.
- Sylens' Big Damn Heroes scene where he rescues Aloy from the arena in epic fashion. Have a look.
- Just before that, Aloy was captured by Helis, stripped of her weapons and armor, and had her Focus destroyed. He intends to kill her in a spectacle after giving a speech about how the Shadow Carja are blessed by the Buried Shadow (HADES) and machines in darkness (Corrupted) are stronger than anything. What was supposed to be a public execution and show of power ends up being demoralized by Aloy's quick thinking in terms of using the Behemoth's strength to knock down the pillars and then taking it down like any other machine. In that moment, Aloy proves Helis' claims wrong and he can only stare in shock and bewilderment before sending the Corrupters her way next. Cue Sylens' entrance.
- Most of Operation: Enduring Victory. Faced with a self-replicating, virtually unstoppable swarm of machines that consume biomass, there is very little hope for humanity. Instead, to buy enough time for Project Zero Dawn, the entire combat-capable population of humanity performs a Heroic Sacrifice and delays the machines for over a year. Many other civilizations would have fallen in a fraction of that time.
- It turns out the whole thing was a huge propaganda campaign. But honestly, in a brutally pragmatic kind of way, the fact that the military managed to convince billions of people to die for a fairly vague cause is pretty impressive too.
- Extra points go to the 9th Mechanised Response Brigade. You know how Aloy has trouble fighting a Deathbringer? Deathbringers are created and transported by Horus-class Titan robots, which are basically mobile Cauldrons the size of skycrapers, and which Aloy never gets to see in action let alone fight. The 9th MRB took down three of these with almost no casualties, with basically modern-day non-machine weaponry.
- Horus-class robots are basically land-based Reapers. They're so big that their bodies and tentacles - noted as being half a mile long - sprawled across the landscape look like architecture. And these people had tactics for them.
- General Aaron Herres, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and head of USRC a tear-jerking bit of awesome, if possible: He absolutely made sure that the decisions he had to make and orders he had to give would be remembered and known to the resurrected humanity. Even after everyone agreed he wasn't at fault, he wanted future generations to learn. It's implied that even if his actions were justified, he still sees himself as a monster, taking responsibility for his part in bringing about the apocalypse (by pushing for military automation), offering himself up to be judged by the generations to come, his actions laid bare. Contrast that with Ted Faro who did his best to hide his actions from future generations.
"It is my hope that there will be no need for men like me in the world to come. If you are one of the people of that future world, listening to this message, please know that I am sorry, and that I wish you well. Sincerely, General Aaron Herres."
- Aloy killing Helis and avenging Rost at the beginning of the final story mission. Just before delivering the final blow, she gives one of three speeches, each awesome in their own way:
- If the aggressive option ("I hope this hurts") is chosen, she impales him and gives a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech as he dies on her blade.
Aloy: You're done! HADES is next.
Aloy: None of this was meant to be, Helis. You made it happen. Followed your orders, butchered so many — and for what? To die on your knees, used like a pawn by a power you don't even understand.
When Aloy finds Olin at the Eclipse dig site, when Sylens shuts down the Eclipse Focuses (including Olin's), Olin immediately turns on them. * As soon as they could no longer see through his eyes and he could freely act against them, he does so with a
vengeance, clearly intent on exacting retribution for making him an accessory to their crimes. On top of that, his form of betrayal involves picking up his hammer and wading into melee against
two Corruptors. If you end up sparing Olin, he doesn't just drop off the face of the earth. Sometimes you can find him wandering around; this means it's possible — unlikely, but possible — for him to show up when Aloy is being swamped by tons of machines.
He'll stick around to give a helping hand,
showing he's every bit as good as his word.
