Prologue

We open on Aloy a few months after the events of Horizon Zero Dawn leading a tribe of Nora and Oseram warriors across the high desert in the far north of the Carja Sundom's territory. The group speaks in hushed tones as they finally come upon what they've been searching for: the ruins of some ancient buildings situated in the middle of an unassuming valley. Ruins that are crawling with Eclipse cultists of the Shadow Carja. The game opens on a mission to scout the area and we learn that the Eclipse has been traveling to this place for many weeks, and Aloy was specifically asked by Sun King Avad to track them after the cult's activities became increasingly erratic around the Sacred Lands.



By the time we enter the ruins, it is clear that the Eclipse's real interest is below ground. While Aloy expects to find another cradle facility, what she and her friends discover is a room filled with rows of strange black boxes stretching for what seems like miles in every direction. The Eclipse kills the lights and a fight breaks out (cue cool new Nightvision mechanic), by the time its all over only one of the cultists is still alive, hidden deep in the rows of ancient, very much still active computers of the NSA's Utah Data Center. The remaining Shadow Carja priest is fumbling with an ancient computer interface before turning to face Aloy. He waxes about how this "shrine" will return the "Buried Shadow," before one of the Nora Braves simply shoots him mid-sentence. Aloy is displeased but more interested in learning what this place is, using her Focus to interact with the system.



We quickly discover that most of the information stored here is still encrypted and inaccessible, but the surface level data is still very much intact. Perusing through this information Aloy discovers the last message sent to this facility was from NASA flight director Noah Kraft who sends his thanks to the men and women of the National Security Agency who helped NASA carry out its final mission, and makes reference to "when we go dark," before stating the importance of keeping this facility, and several others, operational for at least the next century.



Aloy leaves, confused, but evidence suggests that the Shadow Carja may have sent a splinter team to one of the other facilities, this time much further South in a land far past the edges of the Sundom's territory. Aloy and crew prepare to make chase but the Carja have at least a two day's ride on them, and the journey is expected to take many weeks. Aloy decides that to discover the meaning of Kraft's message she must beat the Shadow Cajra to the site, and to do that the player enters a quest to capture a Stormbird and hack it to be suitable as a mount. This quest also establishes the player's initial equipment and ability set as a maxed out, but simplified version of what was achievable in the first game.



Journey to Truth

Once the player captures a Stormbird, we fly south-west toward the heart of the Great Basin. When she arrives she finds that the land is blasted with sun and swept with sand. However, she eventually comes across several unusual machines that could not have been designed by Gaia. They look like more utilitarian version of the ancient Faro robots, and they only seem concerned with clearing away sand that surrounds an ancient and long abandoned series of runways and satellite dishes. Aloy lands her Stormbird at the base where her Focus reveals augmented reality signage for Nellis Air-Force Base. The Eclipse is no where to be seen, nor is anyone living for that matter.



As Aloy explores the ruins of this ancient military base, she discovers that the satellite arrays are still operational. A surprisingly advanced AI, comparable to CYAN, is managing the arrays in addition to the base's cadre of robots. The AI in charge, called NAFBAN (Nellis Air Force Base Analytical Network), received a message some time ago from what it believed to be advanced human civilization, however as this AI was designed for the military, it dismissed the incoming message as a potential attack, and put its considerable processing power to work decoding and determining the origin of said message. The message, the same one that caused HADES to go rogue, is revealed to have been bounced off several communications satellites in GEO that were still partially active, but had not been used by NAFBAN in many centuries. As Aloy probes the AI to ask what it does here, the machine begins to give more abrupt answers, before eventually responding, "that's classified." Confused, Aloy attempts to act like she is Elisabet Sobeck, which normally provides her access to virtually any facility. Aloy discovers that Sobeck does not have the clearance to access this facility, and when Aloy probes deeper she discovers that while all civilians are banned from accessing this, NAFBANs masters were quite specific that Sobeck and the other members of the Zero Dawn project (which the AI shouldn't even know exists) should not be given any access to this facility. As the argument with this ancient machine becomes more heated, Sylens arrives.



The founder of the Eclipse reveals that he's been traveling to several other facilities as a result of his own research, and knows how to access NAFBAN's information. Much to Aloy's horror, Sylens is in possession of the remains of the HADES AI. After she demands that he destroy it, Sylens explains that this facility is not connected to any of the cradle facilities and cannot effect the other robots as a part of the Zero Dawn program. However, HADES is effectively a master key with a way to access the Nellis AI's deeper knowledge, which Sylens believes will unlock the secret of the Masters, the beings who corrupted HADES in the first place. HADES is used on NAFBAN and indeed they gain access. NAFBAN reveals that the message it received was indeed from the Masters which was bounced around several dozen satellites, but ultimately traced back to Mars. When asked why it would come from Mars (and upon explaining to Aloy the concept of planets other than Earth), it states that its only possible conclusion is that the message was sent from the Odyssey Colony.



The Odyssey Project

Aloy asks Sylens if he knows what NAFBAN is talking about before the machine explains that the Odyssey Project was initiated many years before the Faro Plague as an interstellar generation ship, and was in many ways the progenitor to Zero Dawn. After the project was scrapped, the ship laid adrift in orbit until it was acquired by Far Zenith. Originally, Far Zenith was another private company founded by Futurist businessmen with god complexes. Once the Faro Plague broke out, Far Zenith was taken over by the US Air Force Space Corps. Its members were promised seats on the spacecraft if the cooperated, and the project was completed, having siphoned off Project Zero Dawn's own terraforming efforts. The Odyssey program was in effect a backup to Zero Dawn, and would carry out a terraforming program on Mars to double the odds of survival for human civilization. To ensure success, General Herres ordered the NSA's AIs to prevent all contact between the members of both projects and to fake messages of failure to both teams during the final weeks of Operation Enduring Victory. However, where Zero Dawn only succeeded in preserving human life, but not our civilization, Odyssey succeeded entirely. Nellis is one of several dozen automated relay stations that were charged with keeping in regular contact with Odyssey and the network of satellites that assisted with its flight out. After Odyssey landed and terraforming began, the terrestrial stations acted as a backup to the Odyssey equivalent of Gaia, given that it was assumed the longer terraforming time and lack of infrastructure would provide greater risk to the project.



The AI reveals that while Earth took roughly 3 centuries to achieve minimal life support, Mars only achieved habitable status a little less than a century ago. It now has a population of just under a million human residents, all of whom have received the full APOLLO education program, and as such have advanced to match or exceed the technology of the Old Ones. That's the theory anyway, as the Nellis AI and the broader Far Zenith AI network has lost most of its monitoring capabilities as planetary imaging and communication satellites have seen their orbits degrade over the centuries. However, regular updates from the original landing sites on Mars still provide basic information on the planet's surface conditions, and apparently someone is still sending updates on population growth. It is at this point that NAFBAN begins acting erratically, as the HADES AI attempts to corrupt it; Aloy and Sylens attempt to disconnect it, but when they do the NAFBAN can only passably communicate that a signal was sent to the Masters of Mars.



The Story Begins

Aloy and Sylens have no time to discuss this revelation as the Eclipse have finally reached them. A fight breaks out as the player must escape with Sylens aboard Aloy's Stormbird, but the machine is destroyed and the two are stranded in the Mojave desert, surrounded by the Eclipse. Before all seems lost they receive help from a population of people who appear to emerge from the landscape itself. Clad in clothes that seem to shade them and appear from a distance like rocks, these strangers take the wounded Aloy and Sylens to the primary map of the game.



Flying on a small airship constructed from the remains of some as of yet unknown machine, the Aloy and Sylens are taken to what will be revealed to be California's Central Valley. They, and a handful of survivors from the Eclipse are sold into slavery by the airship caravan that brought them to this strange land. In the Central Valley map there is a kind of neo-feudalism at play, but where the Sacred Lands of the Nora and the Sundom had barely reached produced a single City State, the people of the Central Valley have achieved something between Roman Aristocratic Republicanism and outright Feudalism. However in recent years this once prosperous land has come under the yoke of a new oppressive regime that came to power not long after the Derangement. The player will spend their time in the Valley freeing themselves and the other slaves they're first introduced to and trying to get back home, only to get swept up in a struggle for power among freed slaves, local lords, and the competing religious orders in this new land. All the while, the larger plot overlaying the story will be to discover what became of the HADES AI, the Odyssey, and the Masters that now threaten Earth. After being captured, the player will lose all their equipment and will need to recover what they can and add to their arsenal new tools and skills of this strange land.



Midway through the game, the Masters will arrive, having landed at Nellis and followed the signal from Elisabet Sobeck's focus to the Valley. The Masters of Mars are revealed to be, like all Martians presumably, genetically augmented and technologically advanced, capable of slaving the various robots and forges to their will with their own Focuses. They stand nearly half a meter taller than your average human, are lean, paler than their Terran cousins, and wear exosuits that are a necessity for them to walk on Earth for extended periods of time. These also make them and their own robots the fastest, most difficult to kill enemies in the game. Through dialogue you learn that the Masters are actually a radical splinter group on Mars, who upon discovering how little Earthlings had advanced since leaving the Cradles, have adopted a philosophy of destroying what they saw as the "savage" population of Earth. From this point in the game the player must find a way to stop the Masters from reactivating the HADES program and the Faro Plague. From here you gain access to a much more advanced suite of tools, based around a stolen suit of the Masters power armor that you will be able to upgrade with tribal enhancements. The armor will also give you a major advantage, as the clone of Elisabet Sobeck, you now possess the technological advantages of the Masters over the machines, AND the master override codes that the Masters need to re-engage the Faro Plague. Now you must arm your allies for war against the Masters and their hoards of hacked machines, changing the game into a kind of post-apocalyptic robot/tribal version of Total War.