HZD: Yesterday I was mostly engaged in map clearing, so I'm going to get into some random mass guessing about what the hell is happening on this crazy old planet.
-I visited a robot factory! I'd been wondering. I'd assumed that not every machine you meet patrolling the wilderness could be vintage hardware--that kind of thing stretches credulity a bit in Fallout games and this is like four times the temporal distance since the fall of civilization. Generally, it does seem like someone working on HZD took notes from Earth After People in determining what degree of human construction would still be recognizable after this much neglect (I've met one dude with a working machinegun and it was terrifying). So I'd assumed someone or something had to still be making the robots. It looks more like something so far. I've yet to see evidence of sentience, for all that the robots can coordinate action as a pack, and it's presently easy to believe that mechanical processes begun a millennium ago are still chugging dumbly on just because no one ever told them to stop (though as a seasoned consumer of media I expect there to be another, possibly unnecessarily convoluted explanation provided in due time). There's even a kind of mechanical ecosystem apparent, overlapping with or replacing the natural one (I've yet to see any animal larger than a boar and am inclined to credit mass extinction for the absence). The robots are mostly designed after animals and often have an obvious ecological niche in this cycle of breaking down and rebuilding dead machines; the visual design aims to suggest muscle and tendon with tangles of wires and conduits, without ever adding outright biological components. There is a bit of Geth flair to it at times, but that's fine. It also must be noted that the aesthetics of the factory sequence were spectacular; it felt like something from another planet, designed to make most efficient use of available space without regard to human convenience.
I still have no idea how to deal with Corruptors. They move so fast and so constantly that I can barely line up a shot, much less scan them thoroughly for weaknesses. I can only hope the game doesn't see fit to demote them from boss to random mob anytime soon (I'm assuming it will happen eventually).
-Our tribe really does seem to use exile as the only punishment for any crime. I've yet to hear about any other kind of judgment being meted out. This might make it sound like the country would run out of people in no time, but being declared "outcast" can apparently be a temporary condition based on the severity of the crime, and what it usually means in practice is "No one is allowed to talk to you and you are not allowed to talk to anyone else," but you might just be relegated to some obscure corner of the country rather than kicked totally out of it. It's more like they consider being socially ostracized and Not of the Body to be the fundamental basis of all punishment. If you killed a dude then you are probably kicked out for good, though.
None of this really applies to the protagonist, who occupies an apparently unique position in being outcast from birth because no one knows where she came from and consequently one of the shaman crones put up a stink about her being devil spawn or something (my going theory is that
she's a clone of some important scientist from Beforetimes and the tribal matriarchs lack the scientific knowledge to figure this out.) This explains a lot about her attitude, which is aloof enough to be skeptical of dogma but not outright derisive because it's still the only culture she was ever exposed to growing up (even if it was pretty much entirely secondhand). It also makes for a natural introductory wedge for a player who is of course a complete outsider to the entire scenario, but executed in a way that makes sense in context--she knows enough to occasionally fill in the blanks for you, but is ignorant enough that NPCs still need to tell her things. Beneath that, she is basically your expected universally helpful videogame messiah, but again for reasons which make sense in context, because while yes, her foster father's parting message to her was a very on the nose exhortation to practice selflessness, it's clear that his lifelong example speaks louder (he adopted and raised her as a single dad).
This is nice because it means you actually have a reason to feel attached to your videogame father figure instead of him just sounding like Liam Neason.-Greeting a visiting delegation from the Sun King was striking not just because it's the first time you see outsiders, but more notably (to me, at least) because it's the first time in the game that you see any evidence that reading and writing have survived the apocalypse. Priest unfurls a scroll and it hits me that prior to this point, over several hours of game, we haven't seen any previous evidence of literacy in this world. The protagonist has a totally-not-a-Pipboy accessory that once or twice has flashed writing at her when she picked something up, but I've yet to see confirmation that she's actually learned to read from this example (she doesn't react in-character to datalogs that the player can find and read). It doesn't seem like our tribe retained the basic concept of literacy. I've wondered, as someone with a lifelong inclination towards dreaming up fictional scenarios and never doing anything with them, exactly how long after a global collapse it would take for an accurate recollection of said collapse and the circumstances preceding to effectively recede from collective human memory. It seems a little bit like with our tribe, that may be on purpose--it's clear from walking around their main town, when they finally deign to let you in, that the Nora went all in for oral tradition.
We're apparently neighbors with the Sun King, so I'm just going to assume that the ring of mountains around me is the Swiss Alps until the game states otherwise.
-Nope! By this point, it has been made emphatically clear that
we are in the former United States, most likely somewhere in the Rockies, which practically speaking does gel better with the broad ethnic diversity of this game than most other places in the world would. Also datalogs make it apparent that a prelude to the apocalypse was
the Supreme Court ruling that a corporation can run for president via a proxy candidate. Sounds reasonable, the way things are going.
Most of this rambling is just to demonstrate that I appreciate there being actual plot things worth speculating about while you are stalking robots to figure out the best way of making them explode spectacularly.
