Tropes #-M | Tropes N-Z | The Frozen Wilds
- Abdicate the Throne: Aloy gives up her title of chieftain and returns it to Aratak at the end, as she never had any desire to lead the werak. She only earned it so that she could overturn Aratak's laws and go to Thunder's Drum to find the cause of the machines' Daemonic possesion.
- Adorkable: Varga is just so excited when she gets the chance to work on unusual Banuk weapons.
- A Good Name for a Rock Band: Aloy finds several datapoints left by a pair of dam workers recording their last day on the job before being replaced by Faro robots. They decide to use the dam's incredible acoustics to play some music on electric guitars, calling themselves "Concrete Beach Party" after an incident where they brought towels and a beach ball to hang out on the spillway.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- To help with the increased difficulty of the expansion area, the new medicinal plants in The Cut fill a larger portion of your medicine pouch than the regular plants in the main game area.
- After completing Cauldron EPSILON, the next part of the main quest is on the opposite side of the map. To make the trip easier (in case the player doesn't like fast travel), there's a pack of Chargers just close to where the quest drops you of, so you can get a new ride easily.
- Artificial Meat: An old article
mentions an old ranching family switching over to more industrialized meat-growing operations as raising cattle gets increasingly expensive. - Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Leadership in Banuk society is reserved for the most accomplished hunters, and Aratak is definitely the Cut's most formidable warrior. Aloy herself becomes the werak's new chieftain after she defeats Aratak in a challenge for the position.
- Awesome, but Impractical:
- The three elemental weapons you can acquire. While they can do a lot of damage and apply elemental effects quickly, especially when you get them upgraded, they chew through ammo fast, and the ammo in particular is very expensive to craft. The upgraded Stormslinger also hurts Aloy for increasing amounts with each successive shot: its "magazine" contains more than enough shots to kill the user if shots aren't timed far enough apart for the charge to die down.
- Repairing overridden machines sounds cool in theory but is pretty much useless in practice. Overriding a machine that's part of a herd usually results in that machine attacking its herd and being destroyed, so there's nothing left to repair. Even if it does survive, you can't order it to follow you around, so all you get is a machine in mint condition that despawns the moment you leave the general area. Repairing a mount is rarely necessary because most players will unlock the "Call Mount" skill sooner or later, so even if you lose your mount you can immediately call a new one. Last but not least, repairing machines is expensive. Restoring a heavy machine like a Thunderjaw from near death can cost you hundreds, if not thousands of shards for little to no gain.
- Overriding HEPHAESTUS' control towers stuns every hostile machine in the area for a few seconds and... that's about it. Blowing it up from a distance is much easier to do than sneaking up to it in plain sight of the herd, with the added benefit of dealing massive damage to anything near the tower when it explodes. The XP reward is the same either way, to boot, and the associated achievement for stopping all of them is granted regardless of how you deal with the towers.
- Bears Are Bad News: Two of the three new machines introduced in the DLC are based on bears: the Frostclaw and its improvement, the Fireclaw. They're enormous and intimidating, they move fast, they have melee attacks that are extremely difficult to dodge, they have ranged elemental area-of-effect attacks that ignore line of sight and appear on the ground you're standing on, their weak points can be difficult to hit due to their movements and their armor, they're extremely durable (even destroying all three weak points won't kill them), they're hard to tie down with the Ropecaster, they don't have weapons you can break off and turn against them, and as their names imply, their attacks can burn or freeze you. They're like Thunderjaws, but more durable, more agile, and less cuddly.
- Beef Gate: The mountain pass that leads Aloy to The Cut, the region where The Frozen Wilds takes place, is guarded by a Demonic Scorcher, a high level enemy who in part ensures that the player is a high enough level to tackle the DLC missions. Though the area's layout provides a convenient way to sneak past, so it's not insurmountable.
- Bittersweet Ending: CYAN is freed and HEPHAESTUS is purged from her system, but Ourea sacrifices herself to achieve this and it also comes at the cost of a large portion of the Firebreak facility. HEPHAESTUS is also still out there somewhere and is continuing to make deadlier machines.
- Brick Joke: One of the dam workers notes in a datapoint that she saw security chief Dod Blevins ripping up the landscape in an old fashioned gasoline powered snowmobile and switched two trail signs, hoping he'd wipe out and have to take a walk of shame back to the lodge. Later you find another datapoint, which notes that after a snow melt, Blevins' body was found by the wreckage of a snowmobile, after disappearing 15 years before.
- Canon Discontinuity: The official Collector's Edition guide for Horizon Zero Dawn includes some information about certain tribes and characters which doesn't make it into the game. One tidbit is that the Nora hunt deer, not just Grazers, and some of their art does resemble deer more than it does canister-bearing Grazers. Presumably they simply don't show up to players. However, a quest in the Frozen Wilds has a Banuk shaman looking at a hologram of a deer and not having any idea what it is. Either deer just don't come as far north as the Cut, or the material for the guide was written up before it was declared that there were no large animals in this world.
- Canon Universe: It is later revealed, in Horizon Forbidden West, that the events of The Frozen Wilds are tied in to the first game, when Aloy converses with the rebooted GAIA about CYAN, as well as Aloy mentioning about visiting The Cut before the Battle of Meridian. Double, when the DLC's Big Bad HEPHAESTUS makes a major appearance in the sequel, serving as a Living Macguffin to stop the derangement and degradation of the biosphere for good. Additionally, Ted Faro's reputation as the 'man who saved the world' revealed in this DLC becomes important when Aloy encounters the Quen, a tribe from the far western lands beyond the sea, and finds out that their leader earnestly believes Ted's public reputation was the gospel truth, thinking he was the one who saved the world from the Faro swarm, when he actually caused it.
- The main sticking point is that, given how closely-paced the story beats are in the main quest, it's unclear when exactly Aloy decided to take time out of her quest for answers about the Old Ones and the Eclipse's sinister plans to go chasing up rumours of dangerous machines in Banuk lands. This is especially so since the sequel makes it clear she left Meridian the same night they defeated HADES, so she had to have done it before the Final Battle. The most "comfortable" spot is right after The Heart of the Nora. Reasons
- Comically Missing the Point: Enjuk is fascinated by the holographic recreations of long-extinct creatures, made by the great natural scholar... Montana Recreations.Enjuk: But as you say, it's one of seven, isn't it? The great Montana Recreations must have made more... but time has scattered them. The great Montana Recreations, the perhaps the finest natural scholar the Old World ever produced. His voice claims responsibility for the totems, the vessels for the knowledge he accumulated. Someday, perhaps, if I am persistent, I can earn his name... Enjuk Recreations.
- Convection, Schmonvection: The climax takes place in a cauldron built within a geothermal power plant inside the Yellowstone magma chamber. Nobody suffers any ill effects from the extreme heat, and Aloy can even safely touch exposed metal with her bare hands. Scattered through the area are various hot springs and geysers that similarly are harmless, and a datapoint says those were "cooled down" by the Project Firebreak, which is the only Hand Wave given.
- Dramatically Missing the Point: HEPHAESTUS creates machines as part of the terraforming process to preserve life on Earth, including humanity. It is so dedicated to this task that it responds to people hunting the machines by making increasingly large & aggressive robots to kill people.
- Eldritch Location: The assembly line cauldrons from the base game are creepy enough already, but the R&D Cauldron Epsilon in the Cut takes it up to eleven. Thanks to being utterly infested with HEPHAESTUS' purple tentacle things, the whole place looks more organic than anything else, which coupled with its dim lighting and being partially built inside a dormant volcano gives it a nightmarishly oppressive atmosphere.
- Entertainingly Wrong: Enjuk is trying to reconstruct knowledge of Earth's extinct megafauna based solely on a set of holographic depictions in a museum. As such, he comes to some bizarre conclusions, such as that the cougar was a burrowing animal with its sandy coloration, or that deer were predators that used their antlers to gore prey. He also thinks foxes have red fur because they eat meat (ignoring the fact that fox fur turns white in winter). At one point, he starts to muse that wolves and foxes may be distantly related, then gives up the idea as too absurd.
- Evil Is Burning Hot: Daemonic machines smoke constantly, as if they've been overclocked.
- Fallen Hero: While it was known that Ted Faro's company was into other things before shifting to war machines, this DLC reveals he spearheaded a number of initiatives that turned the world around after disastrous climate changes reduced the inhabitable portions of it. He was at one point hailed as "The man who saved the world".
- Fetch Quest: Lampshaded by a weapons maker named Varga, who asks Aloy whether people really send her on long hikes to retrieve things for them. For the quest that sparks this exchange, she insists on accompanying Aloy.
- Giver of Lame Names: The three Banuk Hunters you meet trying to hunt machine parts each keep trying to come up with a name for their group, and each time it's worse than the last, until they hit Sunshine Snowshoes and even Aloy is laughing. They don't end up figuring out a name until you help them complete their hunt, at which point they choose one based off of what Aloy says to them — "Nukoni's Arrows", "Scars of the North", or "Shattered Hearts".
- Grim Up North: The expansion is set in the northernmost part of the map in what was once Yellowstone National Park and its surroundings, but the area has since turned into a frozen wasteland where humans have to fight for their survival every second of the day. Aloy has a whole range of complaints about the cold, one of which is a quip about frost forming between her teeth.Aloy: Can't feel my...can't feel much of anything.
- Honor Before Reason: Mailen refuses any help from Ikrie even with a broken leg, insisting on passing the test to join the White Teeth werak by following the rules to the letter. When Aloy pulls Ikrie along to protect Mailen from a pack of machines, Ikrie lets Mailen limp back to the camp alone, after which Ikrie decides to journey on her own afterward. Mailen is accepted into the White Teeth, and Aloy gets to choose how to tell the story of what happened.
- Hypocritical Humor: The huntress Lauvuk has a good one, while discussing the origin of the hunting grounds:Aloy: I'm guessing you're not part of the Hunter's Lodge.Lauvuk: Every tribe claims they were the first to have hunting grounds. And every tribe claims the Carja stole it from them.Aloy: So who was the first?Lauvuk: We were.Aloy: And the Carja stole it from you.Lauvuk: That's right.
- Infinity +1 Sword: The Cut is the place where you can acquire the best weapons bar none. The Banuk Striker, Champion and Powershot bows are simply better than all other equivalent bows (at least, when used correctly), owing to their ability to be overdrawn for massively increased damage per shot. You'll need the improved firepower to handle the Cut's unique machines, though. The Banuk also offer several top-tier armors (ice, fire, and stealth) with an extra mod slot, as well as some that provide health regeneration, but their effects aren't nearly as impressive as the weapons'.
- Ironic Nickname: We find out from CYAN that Ted Faro - the Greater-Scope Villain for this entire series - was once hailed as "the man who saved the world" thanks to his environmental initiatives to combat the crazy climate change that made a lot of areas uninhabitable.
- Irony: Ourea was captured by the Mad Sun-King to help with his sacrifices, which he believed would stop the Derangement. Because of this, Ourea wasn't around to help CYAN when she was attacked by HEPHAESTUS, the one actually behind the Derangement.
- Love Is a Weakness: Several Banuk seem to believe this. Ikrie is one of the strongest prospective hunters in her werak, but she still fights to protect a friend who doesn't want her help, rejecting the value of self-reliance.Ikrie: In our quest to prove that all we need is ourselves...that was my weakness.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: Aratak and Ourea are brother and sister. Granted it's not a reveal to them, but to Aloy and the audience who realized their conflict just got a lot more complicated.
- Mêlée à Trois: Averted with the Daemonic machines. Another aspect that sets them apart from Corrupted is that they are not hostile to regular machines, and vice versa. Because both are controlled by the same entity.
- Misplaced Wildlife: A minor example. Badgers are one of the new animals introduced in the expansion, but badgers vastly prefer flat, open prairie environments to the forested mountains they're found in in the game.
- Power Up Letdown: The Improved Stormslinger is significantly more powerful than its standard model, but unfortunately this power comes at the cost of injuring Aloy herself with every successive shot, and this self-damage increases in severity just like its offensive output does. Anything more than five shots will damage Aloy. Unload most of its clip into enemies in a frantic fight and watch Aloy being killed by her own weapon. It'll make you think twice about using the thing at all after the upgrade.
- Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: As in the base game Aloy's usually willing to shrug at tribal customs she doesn't really agree with but grows angry at the truly harsh ones. When meeting some Banuk who start to question and reject some of those rules, like Ikrie and Inatut, Aloy immediately supports and encourages them.
- Sequence Breaking: You can unlock Frozen Wilds as soon as you reach the first Carja fort. If you're on a New Game+, and therefore strong enough to fight the new machines, it's possible to play through the main DLC storyline before you ever encounter Sylens or learn about Zero Dawn/GAIA. This will lock you out of learning some of Sylens' backstory because you learn it from Ourea, who dies at the end of the main questline. In addition, while Aloy and CYAN's conversations evolve as she learns more about Zero Dawn and the old world, their first conversation still includes the two of them discussing AI and some other features of the old world that Aloy hasn't received context for yet.
- Strange Minds Think Alike: The Banuk seem to believe that the cistern in Greycatch dam was meant to be a huge musical instrument, due to the harmonic properties of its pipes, with Laulai going on at length about their wonderful sound. Through audio logs, you can discover that the last human employees of the dam project had the same kind of idea, forming a band called Concrete Beach Party that played under the dam's main resevoir.
- Stylistic Suck: The recording you find of Concrete Beach Party's "Last Girls on Earth" is made of this. Justified in that it was recorded by two amateurs inside a dam.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: As it turns out, mankind as a whole was unwittingly responsible for their own most pressing current issue: the Derangement. Their relentless hunting of what's keeping them alive - GAIA's terraforming machines - is the sole reason HEPHAESTUS began designing and unleashing Combat-class machines, culminating in the truly scary monsters like Thunderjaws or Fireclaws, all in an effort to protect GAIA's work from those blissfully ignorant fleshlings. If mankind would simply stop hunting machines for parts and giggles, things would calm down real fast, but seeing how deep machine hunting is rooted in most tribes' traditions, the odds of that happening are slim to none.
- Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: One of the new weapons introduced in the expansion, the Forgefire. It's got pathetic range and it burns through its ammo entirely too quickly. On top of that, the ammo takes a lot of crafting materials to build. The enemies that have vulnerability to fire are typically too large and powerful to engage at the range of the weapon, and you'll run out of ammo at very inopportune times anyway. You're much better off just using standard fire arrows or fire bombs. Once upgraded to the Improved Forgefire things become a bit better since it now has a secondary attack that shoots a long-range fireball that inflicts heavy damage on the target, but the secondary attack still has low ammo and a long charge-up before it shoots.
