I'm open to being corrected and/or informed, but there are quite a few things that I am bothered by. I read every text log and listened to every audio log I came across. It's not that I don't think it's a cool story, but I think there are too many glaring issues that just kind of ruin it for me personally. I'm sure some of my interpretations are subjective, but here are some things:
-Why do so many of the new animal machines have such crazy defense mechanisms if they are there simply to cultivate life and build the new earth's systems? Do they really need lasers, guns, crazy melee abilities, etc?
After GAIA was split with her subordinate functions, HEPHAESTUS (the one in control of designing/manufacturing robots) deemed humans as threats. Therefore designing some to protect the weaker ones, some to be more formidable, and all of them to be aggressive.
-How the heck did Zero Dawn's new animal machines even stay in existence without resistance of the "bad" machines? If the "bad" machines were gone when the new ones came around, I don't understand how they were gone in the first place. The tech in this world seems to be powered indefinitely, if not for a very very long time. Some of the tech from before the crisis is still powered on and working, so it doesn't really add up to me.
The ancient machines (Corrupter/Scarab, Deathbringer/Kopesh, Metal Devil/Horus) would all still be active via renewable energy if MINERVA didn't crack the code over half a century after Earths extinction event in 2066. That was the first step for GAIA. Disable the biomass eating robots. Otherwise, terraforming would be futile.
-There are so many huge carved out under ground systems just for the old world and Zero Dawn. Where did they displace so much dirt and stone and how could they possibly do that during the dangerous context of the world crisis? Seems outlandish.
Project Zero Dawn headquarters was located in a pre-established orbital base. USRC was pre-established. Robots terraformed the whole planet. Moving around some dirt doesn't really seem to be all that big of a leap. GAIAs machines have been messing around with earth for nearly 1000 years. This is a really weird thing to question.
-How does Aloy know how to perfectly interact with the old tech right away? I really hate how nonchalant the game is about it. She just waves her arms and hands around and perfectly does it.
She puts the focus in her ear because she finds it on a corpse with it in its ear. Pretty easy to understand that. As far as doors go, touching the glowing light doesn't seem all that difficult a concept to grasp and once you've opened one door, you'll open a similar door the same way. Its not like she grabs a mouse and keyboard and writes code. And lets not forget the Focus lets her interface with all that tech. The Focus is literally the first thing tech she interacts with, maybe it told her how to open doors but we don't see it. Kind of like how it showed her the word "BOW" that ones time, but we don't see it label everything we come into contact with.
-The entire concept of them coding an entire AI that is capable of not only simulating the earth and all of its systems, but capable of simulating emotion and empathy. The task alone of doing such a thing, including storing all relevant data in order to do this, seems completely ridiculous. They did this incredibly advanced thing in a short time, but somehow couldn't crack the code/glitch/hack that the machines were using on the surface.
Cracking a polyphasic code, or whatever, will always be time consuming and a program will always be able to do it faster than a human. A human (and apparently true AI), however, can create. And when you take the top minds of a technologically advanced society and light a fire under their asses, shit's going to get done. Suspension of disbelief dude... do you have it?
-The idea that the machines were programmed to use biomass as an emergency energy source is a convenient plot point to set up sci-fi Armageddon. Look at how all of the "old world" technology can just sit there dormant for so long with lights and monitors and computers working properly. They don't need biomass, they just keep running. Seems they have perfected energy sources to keep things running for a very long time, without the need for some crazy dolphin slaughtering biomass meal (from a text log) to keep running LOL. Also, the machines can create other machines on a "as needed" basis, so the idea that they even needed an alternate energy source is just goofy.
Because computers sitting in a base use the same amount of energy as highly mobile giant as all hell death machines.
-I really hated how there are these secret ruins, but the game throws human enemies at you that somehow just drop from ceiling vents in rooms behind locked doors that you have to solve to open. I rolled my eyes so hard.
Honestly don't remember when/if this happened.
-Apparently you take down the "focus network", but can still communicate with Sylens after doing so. LOL okay. If you want to argue that it was just for the villian humans, the game should have told me so. And if that is the case, how did they create a private network when they don't have much understanding of the old tech. Hades just magically assists the bad humans it seems.
Does the game really have to spoon feed you every single thing? If you and Sylens can still speak over comms then logically, your connection has not been severed. Sylens created the entire network. You think he couldn't make a second private one?
-I found the Nora tribe to be incredibly stupid. Felt like a set up to make you compare them to ancient tribes, but just because ancient tribes believed in various gods that controlled nature, doesn't mean they would react to a giant metallic door that says the same thing over and over. Aloy even walks through it and the people could clearly see into it and it was just a bunch of rooms with ancient tech. You could argue that their reactions are plausible, but it's just not fleshed out in a convincing way to me. Especially considering the matriarchs are only allowed inside one of the ancient ruins in the mountain. The fact that the "old mother" was the one that delivered Aloy in the mountain next to the door, but the tribe rejected her is just so strange.
So a bunch of people who never interact with any tech at all, see tech for the first time and are supposed to act how? They have no idea what is going on. To them, it is magic. A voice comes out of no where and speaks to them. They don't know.
There's more I could say and more I could nit pick, but it's probably not worth it. I haven't finished the game (near the last mission), so maybe some of this stuff is explained, although I really doubt it. I just feel like the story has too many questions up to this point and it's starting to hurt my enjoyment. It didn't help that I called the plot set up after the first 2 hours of the game, so by the time I got there I just chuckled. It's a story that is fairly well told, or at least written, from a human character point of view. Just not sure it works as a whole.
