Aloy was pretty bad in a lot of ways, yeah. Writing, voice acting, etc. all painted a rather irritating individual. She reminded me a lot of Lara Croft in the latest Tomb Raider so maybe it's some weird trend to have annoying female leads. She should by all means be completely incompetent after being shunned by society and isolated for 18 years but starts walking around like she runs the place with a confidence she hasn't earned. Bizarre.

I mean... I understand the reasoning here but I think I would hate the Aloy that she logically 'should' be.

So maybe it all works out.

In answer to the "how does she know about the Past World" criticism, I think you vastly underestimate the impact the Focus has. She spends literally her entire childhood plugged into a Focus that, demonstrably, has a humongous archive of information and knowledge (we see her scrolling through a bunch of info multiple times in the early sequences). That's far more than "a few facts". This is also a pretty good explanation for why she's more confident and capable than her peers, since a lot of the world doesn't hold the same amount of mystique for her compared to someone raised purely on the Nora tribal teachings (e.g. "That's a door, not a goddess").

As for the other criticisms, I see where you're coming from but I agree with @efesell. Playing a game starring a socially incapable naif could be interesting, but in this case I think it would have severely distracted from the broader sci-fi story and politicking that Horizon hinges on.

Finding random bits of meat and stuff in Cauldrons didn't make a lick of sense, though. Reminds me of all the times I'd go into an abandoned tomb in Skyrim and somehow all the candles are lit.

@efesell: As I said in my post, I understand that it's harder to write a consistent Aloy who is also likable. But I don't think it's impossible. Gravity Rush features a protagonist who has lost her memory and is constantly putting her foot in her mouth, but is extremely likable. Of course that game is a comedy, so the tone is different, but I think Aloy could have been both awkward and a likable character. She could have been well-meaning but clueless, or just prone to outbursts of understandable irritation. More of an outsider and observer than the compassionate friend to everyone she meets that she behaves like.

Alternatively, they didn't need to make her an outcast to begin with. She could have grown up within the tribe. This was a choice the writers made but didn't follow through with.

@banefirelord The focus has information, yes, but no context as far as I could tell, and I didn't see details on the before civilization. Regardless, you can't just give a child an encyclopedia and expect them to have the kind of nuanced understanding that Aloy seems to. Once again, I am not demanding that she constantly say "I don't understand" when presented with any situation; that would be very irritating. Instead it would have been nice if there were more nods to the whole thing and if she acted like someone having her mind blown on a regular basis not just by the specifics of the Zero Dawn program but by the way things used to be and how people used to relate to each other and everything else that's lost. Instead she acts like a pure stand-in for the player. Like someone who totally gets the whole context of what the world once was, and then is shocked in by the details of how it died.

Oh if she grows up as part of the tribe as normal then I don't know how any of this kicks off at all, I don't think that was ever much of an out.

I don't understand? The thing that kicks the story off is the Carja network seeing Aloy's focus and then Hades recognizing her. All of that could have still happened at the proving if she had grown up in the tribe. Then the attack, the death of Rost, Aloy gets made a seeker to get revenge and find out more about her origins, and boom you're off and running.

I don't see how her being an outcast is integral to any of the main storyline.

Why then would she even have a Focus? Or if her origins are not the cause of her being shunned why have the drive she does to learn about them?

Why is Rost even there or a part of her life in this new scenario?

I think the old saying for this is "a wizard did it" or "maaaagic." :-P

When in doubt, MacGuffin it out. The Focus. It's the answer to everything. "How does Aloy understand how stupid Nora and Carja societies are? She's never even seen a society before!" The Focus. It contained archival data about societies in the past, so she knows why these two suck. "How does Aloy understand concepts like 'directors' and 'party hats' when she's never heard them before?" The Focus. Remember when she saw a bow and the device gave her a name for it, a blueprint of it, and then did some bell chimes because why not? The Focus. It taught her those concepts later when she reviewed the audio dialogues. "How does she understand humor and comedic timing? She had rocks and a gruff mountain man for company!" The Focus. It had archival stand-up videos on it because it was designed for humans, who will goof off with tech whenever and however possible. Etc.

Any seeming plot hole and / or character oddity with Aloy can be dismissed by invoking her Bluetooth earpiece. I'd like to know where she learned to style her hair like a dreadlocked ginger-poodle. Then again, I already know the answer... :-D

@bigsocrates: Because if she was part of the tribe from the beginning, Aloy would be exploring places and meeting people she already knows which makes for less interesting video game-ness. Also, she most likely wouldn't have found that focus and possibly would never have had a reason to even run in the proving. Suddenly you don't have a story.

A lot of your complaints seem to be directed at Aloy's characterization and while I somewhat agree with one or two points, I think that the writers had a very clear idea of what kind of person they wanted Aloy to be and they fit her into their story as best they could. Whether or not it's well written is a matter of opinion, but I still think I'd prefer the Aloy we got over the more realistic meek, awkward, less intelligent, brooding yet enraged Aloy you'd seem to prefer. While that actually could be a more interesting character, I think putting that one into the game would make how she accomplished anything even more unbelievable.

Oh, and keep in mind that Aloy was created by GAIA. While this is pure conjecture and nature vs. nuture is a conversation for another day, I think being created by a supercomputer might give you some advantages in life.

She finds the focus because she falls down into the old installation. There's nothing to do with her being an outcast. She wants to learn because she's young and wants to learn (and because she has Elizabet's drive as we learn later.) Rost is still her guardian, he's just not an outcast. He's a dude who lives outside town and raises her. These are minor adjustments. People could still be suspicious of her and some could mistreat her, but if she could travel into town and talk to folks and had friends it would explain her normal social skills, and all that would be lost would be a little bit of the initial drama of the shunning scenes.

She could still have virtually the same origin, still be driven to learn about her mother and to be the best, none of that has to do with her being an outcast.

It was always really weird to me that they found a baby just outside the sanctuary of their god and were like "We need to make this baby an outcast!" It seems to me that in most cultures that baby would be somewhat holy.

Well on that last point its the All-Mother thing right? Not enough of them looked past the this child has no mother and is an abomination to see other implications.

As for just finding the focus the same as always I dunno I don't know that I can see the Nora allowing that to continue as it did when only Rost was there to try and take it.

Aloy, was the only character I liked. I hated the tribes, and their silly scuffles. I really only cared about how the world got the way it was, and I feel like Aloy was right there with me. Everything else in the game was contrived, but I felt like me and Aloy were telling everyone to "fuck off", so that we can figure it the real problem.

I took her character as someone who could read, in a world full of illiterate fools. I like her character.

@lazyimperial: I understand that you're half-joking, but the Focus seemed to have information about practical things, not old clips of culture and deep historical context. Or if it did, that's something they could have played with. Have a scene where she is at a campfire and replays her favorite old movie for comfort and familiarity. Or a sequence where she tries to tell someone about something she loved. Do SOMETHING to imply this is going on.

@theblue: I don't think it's that hard to make it interesting to meet old friends and explore places you know. They already have Aloy constantly narrating in her head. There are also plenty of games where people are in their familiar environs and the game does interesting world building anyway. And after the Eclipse attack everything changes anyway, so that concern is only for the first couple hours of the game and a few locations.

I'm also not saying that Aloy should be meek or less intelligent or brooding. I just wanted her to be more...connected to her history. More curious and less confident, like everything is old hat to her. I think I personally find characters like that more relateable. I'm not a person who has all the answers all the time or always says the right thing and I grew up in society and had a lot of education. I don't want her to be a cavewoman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but if she just didn't 'get' the idea of a Sun King or a Vanguard, the way she easily does, that would have made her both more interesting to me and more likable in a way.

I mean she goes from being an outcast from a small tribe to this huge city with soaring towers and a working giant elevator (!?) and is just like "Pfft...'sokay, I guess..." She also deals with side quests involving romantic love and aristocratic sibling rivalry and intrigue without reacting like any of it is new to her.

Nature vs Nurture isn't something set in stone; just depends on how you fall in the argument whether you accept Aloy as is or not. Now if you want to make an argument that she'd probably be a tribal warlord instead of a would-be savior; that's more compelling than just saying "No, I understand all the inner functions of the brain better than you, Horizon Devs, and I'm going to wag my finger at you." But there are incredibly exceptional people historically that have limited nurture, most obviously in the case of Military Leaders where frequently they just spring up randomly at different points, most of them being self taught; now the leaders that follow them tend to also be competent but are generally only shadows of the original; Scipio Vs Hannibal; Wellington Vs Napoleon; King Wen Vs King Wu and so on. There is no way to become exceptional through Nurture; because Nurture limits your scope of perception to those that came before you; unless you Nurture yourself by studying exclusively prior extraordinary people. If you're saying Aloy isn't doing that, well that would be tough to show in a Video Game so you just have to give her some leeway; she's obviously studying the material of ancestors with powers far beyond the present.

@fredchuckdave: This is not the point I'm making. My point is not that Aloy can't become skilled without formal education. My point is that nobody can be good at things they haven't had ANY exposure to. An uneducated person might, given a little time, be come a better engineer than someone trained in engineering if they are "exceptional." But they aren't going to learn Spanish without being exposed to Spanish. And they aren't going to know about relationships between adult lovers when the only person they've ever encountered is a father figure who is so distant towards her that he never even tells her about his tragic history.

I can accept that Aloy is an amazing athlete, astonishingly good at dealing with machines, and able to understand complex ideas with no education. Fine. She's got genius DNA. But growing up in isolation warps a person. There may have been "exceptional people" who "came out of nowhere" but there have been none who came from the kind of extreme isolation that Aloy experienced, at least not without a significant readjustment period (normally when they were young.)

You don't learn how to socialize without socializing. You don't learn how a society works without living in/around/within that society or at least intensively studying them.

Aloy doesn't show uniquely adept learning skills. She develops entire suites of abilities out of thin air.

Rost is such a waste of a character in that game. Literally the most interesting character in the entire game unceremoniously killed off at the very start. He could have been such a great foil for Aloy throughout the game, but then they just made her be all knowing, all capable, super being - all because an eye doohickey put labels over objects for her.

@bigsocrates said:

I think this is the place where the "supergenius" aspect is a reasonable explanation (though I agree that it doesn't explain why she's so easily sociable or any of her "street smarts"...she's definitely a poorly constructed character in some dimensions). Even without the Focus providing explicit context to its information, Aloy still has access to a vast amount of knowledge plus a massive intellect plus she lives among the ruins of the old world and has a noted penchant for exploring. To me, all those factors seems like a valid context for her to put a lot of twos and twos together about how things used to work. In that framework, I found it reasonable that she took a lot of the old world reveals in stride, outside of the main Zero Dawn infodump which could have benefited from a little more shock and awe.

@humanity: I would argue that he is pretty ceremoniously killed off. He gets to fight the henchman of the big bad, and dies saving his daughter/the messiah from an explosion. It's definitely not an undramatic death sequence, and it seems at the time to be meant to fuel Aloy's quest for revenge, except that she only mentions him like 4 more times in the game and doesn't seem to care that he's gone.

I also don't get his whole emo "I'm going to go where you'll never find me or see me again" speech the day before he dies. It's very moody-teenager.

I totally get that he would do that, it's very I will make sure you follow the rules no matter what.

His timing on when to spring this intent though is somewhat poor.

This is demonstrably false...there are multiple non-Rost characters she interacts with prior to the Proving that the game establishes she's known for a long time (the merchant and the old woman off the top of my head, as well as incidental encounters with other random Nora). I think you're greatly overstating how isolated she is and how little Rost tells her...while he's gruff and distant and impersonal, he's clearly educated her in a variety of Nora customs and traditions (she knows their religious lingo, their hierarchy, etc. well before The Proving). She also lives quite close to the Nora villages and has certainly had ample time to observe and study them. The game doesn't show her doing this, but it doesn't need to: based on what we know of Aloy's character early in the game (smart, inquisitive, skeptical and prone to rulebreaking) and what we see of her interactions with Rost and various Nora prior to the Proving it's perfectly reasonable to conclude that she knows what's up with the Nora society without it being explicitly spelled out. Yeah, the character could definitely be more awkward and naive but she's hardly some extremely isolated feral child to begin with.

@banefirelord: There is the merchant, who I mentioned, and a couple minor interactions with Teesa, but in fact I would argue the game goes the other way, and highlights the isolation. When Aloy rescues Teb not only are they not permitted to speak then and there, but they never speak again until she comes into town for the proving. So while yes she has intellectual knowledge of the Nora traditions, and some opportunity to observe how people interact from a distance, she's pretty darn isolated. She's never had an age-appropriate friendship, been part of a family, or seen large gatherings of people at anything but a large distance.

Again, I don't want her to be feral and totally unaware of how humans operate. But, for example, when she shows up at the Proving this is her first time in a crowd, and it's a big one, and she barely reacts. She sleeps in the bunkhouse, her first time sleeping near anyone but Rost, and she seems fine with it, even comfortable. It's that sort of thing, totally alien to her experience, that I'm talking about. If you want to say that bantering with a merchant she rarely sees has given her some kind of social interaction beyond Rost that's fine, but it's not enough to be consistent with her character.

I'm not even asking the game to be completely internally consistent, but it's all set up and no follow through.

Actually on at least one of those she is visibly uncomfortable in the bunkhouse, and it's one of the personality choice moments you get as well with one two out of the three basically being 'This sucks'. I wanna say there is also some trepidation with out how many people are in Mother's Heart before the Proving too but I can't quite remember. They definitely don't dwell on any of this overmuch but I guess it never really stuck with me as an issue.

The earliest sidequests are all helping Nora tribespeople who are willing to deal with an outcast and I have to imagine that didn't just suddenly start happening for the first time the day before the Proving. There's also ambient dialog that fires if you pass through villages prior to the Proving so that's probably not a terribly uncommon occurrence for her either.

@efesell: They do pay a little lip service to it at the beginning of the game, but it's very cursory.

I don't remember any sidequests before the Proving but I may have just not sought them out. To me the game stressed the isolation, with the Teb sequence, Rost's whole "I'm leaving so you don't have to violate the rules to speak to me" speech, and, of course, the part where Bast throws the rock at her head.

Anyway, my point is not whether or not she has ever met another person in her life. My point is just that her characterization is inconsistent with her history. She just...adjusts...to her suddenly and radically different life, and a life very different from the one she was preparing for. It doesn't ring emotionally or intellectually honest to me as storytelling, and I wish they had done more to stay true to the scenario they set up.; As I said in my initial post I didn't hate the Aloy character or anything. I thought she was fine. But the distance between the character they set up and the character they delivered was jarring to me, and I think the character they set up would have made for a more interesting and enjoyable story (as distinct from the worldbuilding stuff, which doesn't depend on this character.)

@bigsocrates: I agree with your takes on the bunkhouse/crowd. But in regards to the merchant/other minor characters and Aloy's social interactions with them, I took those interactions as representative of a larger history of social interactions. We see just a thin sliver of her life prior to The Proving, but in just those few days we spend with her immediately beforehand (not counting her years-prior interactions with Teb or the children at the very beginning), she's encountering and interacting with a lot of people. I don't remember exactly how many (or their names because I'm bad at that) but I think it was at least four (the merchant, the old woman and several Nora in various levels of side-quest distress) not counting Rost...that's quite a lot, especially for an exile.

I took this sequence as a "day in the life" section and viewed those interactions as sufficient and economical indications that she's had much more of a history of human interaction than an exile should under Nora customs (in keeping with various representations of the Nora's social customs as flawed and Aloy's penchant for rulebreaking), much more than just once-in-a-blue-moon random banter with a merchant. Thus, I don't really see her strong conversational abilities and interpersonal social navigation as inconsistent.

Now, the other things you mentioned, her comfort with broader social situations beyond interpersonal relationships, those are much more unfounded. I'm a relatively well adjusted sociable human being and I'm still not entirely comfortable with crowds or with roommates, let alone someone in Aloy's situation.

EDIT: Just saw your comment to @efesell...there was definitely at least one sidequest prior to the proving where she interacted with some Nora who were in a bad way and were more than willing to talk with her and get her help.

Yeah you get two, the kinda bad first impression quest that everyone saw with sister trying to help her brother who's having weird hallucinations and helping a wounded hunter save his daughter from some machines. Both are these are in pretty stressful situations and they're still not super enthused about speaking with Aloy but I still have to imagine that situations like this continued to happen during her life.

Now I too would have appreciated maybe a bit more awe and gravity to when she gets out into the greater world and especially Meridian, but at that point everything is moving along nicely and I'm just content to let it go honestly.

@bigsocrates: In the sense of the events surrounding his demise yes I agree it is all done very well with a big ol' fight. I meant more in the way the game is structured, it seemed kind of unceremonious to introduce you to this very important father figure who is supposed to have shaped our lead protagonist (although she seems to have taken very little from him apart from hunting prowess) and then he's gone, like you said, almost to be never mentioned again in any way. I guess thats life, sure, but it seemed really awkward to have him be just gone and then be replaced with the cardboard cutouts that make up the majority of the latter game NPC's.

Much more than Rost it was the complete introduction and throwing away of Bast and Vala that I thought was super weird. Rost at least gets a sendoff those two are real blink and you may miss it when they go down.

Hehe, all my joking aside... I think the Rost thing was less emo and more him trying to be a good "daddy." It is against the law for the Nora to talk with outcasts, and the village elders already hate Aloy anyway because they're a bunch of matriarchal lunatics mortified by her birth sans mother (the "goddess door" cloning chamber).

If she violated their laws by talking to Rost and visiting him repeatedly, she'd probably get booted out again REAL fast. There'd be no clemency. Rost knew this and wanted her to have an actual life in the village, so he made the hard choice of leaving his adopted daughter behind forever and going "where she could never find him" because he knew that'd be the only way she'd actually obey the darned law.

But foolish, proud daddy that he was, he lingered in the shadows to watch his darling girl win the proving... and died saving her life when the Carja Shadow blokes attacked.

Back to Aloy! If I had to give a non-joking response, I'd say that I think Aloy's characterization serves the ludo-narrative purpose of giving the player a window into this world similar to his or her own. We already know the "old world," and so does Aloy because of The Focus. We don't know this new world or the societies in it, and by large neither does Aloy. Her journey of exploration is ours; we're both seeing these areas for the first time. However, we've already seen giant elevators and big tech before (us firsthand, her through archival footage and data). The wow magic factor isn't really there for us (Oh, an elevator! Ooooo), and so it isn't for her.

I was impressed at how well Aloy synced up with the player's own journey (as opposed to Batman in Arkham Knight, for example, who prattled on about not crossing his line while we ran over people with our two ton Bat-Tank). The unfortunate, jarring part of that syncing up though is that the player has no intention of staying in Nora lands, marrying that military commander's charming son, and pumping out as many babies as possible to climb the ranks of a socio-political hierarchy based on such (Which was great. Why is Susan the President? Twenty kids and 60 grand-kids. Clearly she is most qualified).

Nope, we want to go hunt monsters and slay bandits... so we have to have a reason to leave the training zone. *queue the death of everyone that might have tempted Aloy to linger there*

I think looking at the characterization and logic behind Aloy rather than the narrative device she represents is going to lead to finding some very droll holes (which you've been finding). She serves her purpose but suffers for it. *shrug*

@efesell: I think that was a way of the game showing you that it's not afraid to kill people off that seem important. Makes the story feel open to anything happening... of course nobody important dies from that point on, though. I was excited for the possibility that it was going to be one of those stories that allows important characters to be taken away from you.

I think it's worth noting that at any time during the game you can go back and visit Rost's grave, interact with it and Aloy will catch Rost up on her current events. It was a super clever way of underlining those two characters connections and giving the player agency on whether or not to engage with it.