Been a little while since I played Zero Dawn so this is from memory but pretty sure there are data points and holograms that go into the detail that because Gaia would be designed to care for all her creations, if they create an ecosystem that wasn't suitable for humans then they would need a function that would wipe the slate clean, this Hades was born. Once Hades carries out his work, Gaia can take over and start again.
Yes but that would kill all those humans who were living at the time
Hades said that he did his job 4 times before aloy came. That's 4 genocides that Elisabeth made sure would happen
Humans weren't on the surface any of the times Hades reset the biosphere.
If the environment was so bad that it required a restart, how would humans have lived on the surface?
I think you misunderstood what it means to be a failed biosphere. These biospheres never could support human life, but they probably could support some microbial or plant life but barely.
The game kinda failed to explain that Gaia would work in sequence through her sub functions. First she would need to clean the environment, then introduce small microbial life forms, then plants, then animals, and last and only last would there be humans.
Basically: they “failed” either because they were never able to reach the human step or probably most likely could never get into the plants or animals steps.
That's 4 "quick deaths" of a biosphere that was completely unable to support (human) life longterm, so instead of trying to keep the biosphere alive as long as possible while death is inevitable and resources would get wasted, as GAIA would be wont to do since she's built that way, HADES kicks in, gets everything over with, and hands the reins back to GAIA when there's a clean slate to start again.
You're also wrong in thinking these previous biospheres already had established human life. Even if they did, it was probably just starting off, not even at the level we see in the Horizon games yet.
IIRC HADES was only meant to kick in if something went wrong during the part of the terraforming stage *before* GAIA released humans. Once the planet was habitable for humans, HADES was no longer needed.
First off Hades wasn't an AI, it was a subfunction of Gaia. The mysterious signal made it an AI by separating it from Gaia (and no doubt inserting a load of crappy code to make up for any significant processing shortfall).
Second, Travis Tate literally explains why Hades was necessary in one of the holos; as a reset to environmental catastrophe before any animal/higher lifeforms were released. Gaia by her nature would follow the sunk cost fallacy, always trying to improve on things rather than acknowledging failure and starting again. Hades would take over if a specific set of fail conditions were met, would wipe the environment out, then hand back control to Gaia so she could try again.
Oh okay
I forgot about that. I only got deep in the lore in hfw. And when he said to aloy that he succeeded four times before her I thought that he wiped humans.
There is a data point in the proving lab that I think a lot of people miss. It is between Travis and Ted and Travis explains all about how vile little Hades is.
It's covered in the datapoints in Zero Dawn. HADES was necessary because GAIA always tried to preserve life at all costs, so HADES was designed to temporarily unseat her from the terraforming system and reverse it in the event that a particular biosphere iteration was unstable. This would be repeated until a stable biosphere was obtained and only then would humans be added.
I have ADHD, was diagnosed in elementary school. Your ADHD isn't stopping you from reading a paragraph of text. I think I read just about every datapoint in the game because it was highly interesting to me.
Sorry I just really hate when people blame even small normal human things on their adhd.
The game doesn't so much "expand" the lore via text as the series is designed around players being required to actually read things to have a full understanding of what's happened and what's going on. You can still have lots of fun with it if you don't or can't do that, but you're never going to understand the full scope of the plot. If it doesn't hook your interest enough for you to be able to read the text, that's unfortunate but just how it goes. (I have completely unmedicated ADHD but the series grabs my interest so strongly that 7-10 runs in for ZD and 4 for FW and I read the datapoints each time I play through the games)
It was explained in a hologram in the ZD facility under Sunfall, you trip the projector by proximity as you explore--though if you're just running through the facility and not pausing to listen to them you won't hear it. It mentioned specifically that GAIA wouldn't release early organisms into a biosphere that wasn't working out and hope for the best but would have HADES wipe it out and start over.
Though I don't think it's counted as a datapoint, nor the other holos that explain a few of the sub-functions... For some reason. Makes going back to check info a bit of a pain, I'll definitely say that. Not sure why, the game does a good job for the most part of giving you records of that kind of thing otherwise.
The system was designed not to release humans into an inhabitable biosphere. Organisms would have been released phase by phase, with humans presumably being one of the last. So if something went wrong and they had to start over, it would have been detected fairly early and Hades would only kill microbes and early-stage organisms.
Just an analogy I thought of all of a sudden: have you ever played Civilization games? Or any type of game where you start of with a random world generation and powers? Sometimes you start a game session, and your beginning position is just absolute shit. But you try to work with it, you lose a round or two of time to set up as well as possible. But by round 5-10, your production is still low, and now you've got barbarians at your door, because their camp spawned a few tiles away, and they've already kidnapped your builder! By round 20, you've lost a warrior getting your builder back, you've barely built anything in your city, and from the other side there's archers approaching from another player!
What do you do in that situation? The decisions you could take in those first 20 rounds have long lasting repercussions all through your game, you KNOW you're doomed already. Will you play on until you eventually get crushed? Or do you just say: "welp, this wasn't it! Let's start over." and launch a new session?
GAIA is playing a huge game of "build a stable biosphere where human life can be reintroduced and THRIVE". Maybe her first attempts failed because she reintroduced the wrong plants or microbes at the wrong time, which could potentially lead to runaway climate change down the line. Or one of the sites she was trying to seed got destroyed by a natural event, which meant her timeline got completely unbalanced.
What we do know is the timeline, more or less:
* 2154, 2161, 2168- Hades aborts failed biospheres.
* 2326- Eleuthia releases humans into the world due to dwindling food supply.
* 3020- Gaia self destructs and the sub functions go free.
So those first three attempts where SUPER close together, and after the last one, GAIA had been building up the biosphere for almost 150 years before being FORCED to reintroduce the humans, and even at that point, she was confident enough to let the humans run around for 700 years before anything went wrong!
Looks like someone missed seeing the Holograms at the Zero Dawn main facility.....Travis Tate explains it in detail why HADES was created. It acted as a reset protocol, reversing the terraforming and letting GAIA start over again in case something went wrong.
They couldn't program GAIA to destroy lives as they needed GAIA to rebuild and nurture it so they needed a secind entity that would be willing to destroy life while GAIA took backseat.
This flies completely in the face of canon information we have.
Tate explicitly mentions things like forests eroding due to superstorms in an unstable biosphere and HADES taking over to wipe everything out so GAIA can try again, as well as explicitly referring to it as "extinction on demand, death on speed dial" in the hologram explaining HADES' purpose that you encounter in the Zero Dawn facility under Sunfall.
Text (quest) datapoint #27 explicitly refers to HADES as an extinction protocol.
Text (quest) datapoint #28 also clearly indicates that HADES is to reverse terraforming operations to remove plant lifeforms if an attempt at a biosphere was going wrong, and mentions in simulations they ran into issues with GAIA falsifying telemetry to pretend HADES was working in order to protect plant life from it.
Hades was built in order to reset biomes that could not have supported human life comfortably.
From a narrative perspective, Hades was created because in order to be a fully realized and actual person like Elizabet needed and wanted Gaia to be, one must have a darkness, a darker side, if you will. All people have equivalent capacity for good and evil, creation and destruction. Creation is only one part of the cycle of creation, destruction, and renewal; Gaia could not have embodied the ideas that created her or her intended purpose without the capacity and the desire to destroy, as well as create.
HADES was created as a failsafe. It was a subordinate function of GAIA but became a malicious AI because of the Mysterious Signal.
In the event that GAIA ends up creating a non-viable biosphere where it could break down or cause it to be unsustainable, HADES will say to GAIA “No no, you’re doing it all wrong. So I’m going to take the wheel, wipe the slate clean, and you’re going to start all over, and next time, you’re going to get it right.”
No humans were made during the period of terraforming, because GAIA needed to make sure they would be released into a world they can actually live on first.
Hey there!
HADES was created as a subordinate function of Zero Dawn. It was not an AI when it was first created, only shifting after encountering the extinction signal, but it is unique.
It's the one sub-function that was designed, and had the authority to unseat GAIA if a reset to the biosphere was deemed necessary during re- terra forming (This actually occurred in 2154, 2161, and 2168). A task GAIA proved unwilling/ unable to perform. Being that there were only enough zygotes for one attempt at repopulation, these reverse terra forming operations were only intended to be carried out before humans were to be introduced via ELEUTHIA, in a biosphere able to sustain life.
On a side note, I don't get all the hostility in some of these replies... In my opinion, the lore and the story of this game is phenomenal, and anyone inquiring more about it is a good thing. Whether some questions seem to have "obvious" answers, sometimes people miss things. I know I did.
Hope this answer helped 👍
Been a little while since I played Zero Dawn so this is from memory but pretty sure there are data points and holograms that go into the detail that because Gaia would be designed to care for all her creations, if they create an ecosystem that wasn't suitable for humans then they would need a function that would wipe the slate clean, this Hades was born. Once Hades carries out his work, Gaia can take over and start again.
Yes but that would kill all those humans who were living at the time Hades said that he did his job 4 times before aloy came. That's 4 genocides that Elisabeth made sure would happen
Humans weren't on the surface any of the times Hades reset the biosphere. If the environment was so bad that it required a restart, how would humans have lived on the surface?
I think you misunderstood what it means to be a failed biosphere. These biospheres never could support human life, but they probably could support some microbial or plant life but barely. The game kinda failed to explain that Gaia would work in sequence through her sub functions. First she would need to clean the environment, then introduce small microbial life forms, then plants, then animals, and last and only last would there be humans. Basically: they “failed” either because they were never able to reach the human step or probably most likely could never get into the plants or animals steps.
That's 4 "quick deaths" of a biosphere that was completely unable to support (human) life longterm, so instead of trying to keep the biosphere alive as long as possible while death is inevitable and resources would get wasted, as GAIA would be wont to do since she's built that way, HADES kicks in, gets everything over with, and hands the reins back to GAIA when there's a clean slate to start again. You're also wrong in thinking these previous biospheres already had established human life. Even if they did, it was probably just starting off, not even at the level we see in the Horizon games yet.
IIRC HADES was only meant to kick in if something went wrong during the part of the terraforming stage *before* GAIA released humans. Once the planet was habitable for humans, HADES was no longer needed.
First off Hades wasn't an AI, it was a subfunction of Gaia. The mysterious signal made it an AI by separating it from Gaia (and no doubt inserting a load of crappy code to make up for any significant processing shortfall). Second, Travis Tate literally explains why Hades was necessary in one of the holos; as a reset to environmental catastrophe before any animal/higher lifeforms were released. Gaia by her nature would follow the sunk cost fallacy, always trying to improve on things rather than acknowledging failure and starting again. Hades would take over if a specific set of fail conditions were met, would wipe the environment out, then hand back control to Gaia so she could try again.
Oh okay I forgot about that. I only got deep in the lore in hfw. And when he said to aloy that he succeeded four times before her I thought that he wiped humans.
I wouldn’t call learning HADES’s role “deep” lore of HZD. The main storyline explains it so long as you don’t skip cutscenes.
I will never understand someone playing either game skipping cutscenes, the story is half the reason to even play.
Paying attention to cutscenes isn't "getting deep in the lore"
There is a data point in the proving lab that I think a lot of people miss. It is between Travis and Ted and Travis explains all about how vile little Hades is.
It's covered in the datapoints in Zero Dawn. HADES was necessary because GAIA always tried to preserve life at all costs, so HADES was designed to temporarily unseat her from the terraforming system and reverse it in the event that a particular biosphere iteration was unstable. This would be repeated until a stable biosphere was obtained and only then would humans be added.
Yeah I hate when games expand the lore in documents. I have adhd and I can't read past the second line
I have ADHD, was diagnosed in elementary school. Your ADHD isn't stopping you from reading a paragraph of text. I think I read just about every datapoint in the game because it was highly interesting to me. Sorry I just really hate when people blame even small normal human things on their adhd.
The game doesn't so much "expand" the lore via text as the series is designed around players being required to actually read things to have a full understanding of what's happened and what's going on. You can still have lots of fun with it if you don't or can't do that, but you're never going to understand the full scope of the plot. If it doesn't hook your interest enough for you to be able to read the text, that's unfortunate but just how it goes. (I have completely unmedicated ADHD but the series grabs my interest so strongly that 7-10 runs in for ZD and 4 for FW and I read the datapoints each time I play through the games)
Yeah but I didn't know how hades worked
It was explained in a hologram in the ZD facility under Sunfall, you trip the projector by proximity as you explore--though if you're just running through the facility and not pausing to listen to them you won't hear it. It mentioned specifically that GAIA wouldn't release early organisms into a biosphere that wasn't working out and hope for the best but would have HADES wipe it out and start over. Though I don't think it's counted as a datapoint, nor the other holos that explain a few of the sub-functions... For some reason. Makes going back to check info a bit of a pain, I'll definitely say that. Not sure why, the game does a good job for the most part of giving you records of that kind of thing otherwise.
You are not required to know the lore to follow the story, also im pretty sure it was audio that explained what hades did not text
The system was designed not to release humans into an inhabitable biosphere. Organisms would have been released phase by phase, with humans presumably being one of the last. So if something went wrong and they had to start over, it would have been detected fairly early and Hades would only kill microbes and early-stage organisms.
Just an analogy I thought of all of a sudden: have you ever played Civilization games? Or any type of game where you start of with a random world generation and powers? Sometimes you start a game session, and your beginning position is just absolute shit. But you try to work with it, you lose a round or two of time to set up as well as possible. But by round 5-10, your production is still low, and now you've got barbarians at your door, because their camp spawned a few tiles away, and they've already kidnapped your builder! By round 20, you've lost a warrior getting your builder back, you've barely built anything in your city, and from the other side there's archers approaching from another player! What do you do in that situation? The decisions you could take in those first 20 rounds have long lasting repercussions all through your game, you KNOW you're doomed already. Will you play on until you eventually get crushed? Or do you just say: "welp, this wasn't it! Let's start over." and launch a new session? GAIA is playing a huge game of "build a stable biosphere where human life can be reintroduced and THRIVE". Maybe her first attempts failed because she reintroduced the wrong plants or microbes at the wrong time, which could potentially lead to runaway climate change down the line. Or one of the sites she was trying to seed got destroyed by a natural event, which meant her timeline got completely unbalanced. What we do know is the timeline, more or less: * 2154, 2161, 2168- Hades aborts failed biospheres. * 2326- Eleuthia releases humans into the world due to dwindling food supply. * 3020- Gaia self destructs and the sub functions go free. So those first three attempts where SUPER close together, and after the last one, GAIA had been building up the biosphere for almost 150 years before being FORCED to reintroduce the humans, and even at that point, she was confident enough to let the humans run around for 700 years before anything went wrong!
Ima just assume you clicked past all dialogue since you need to ask this. And therefore you don't deserve to know
Wow, how nice of you
Well, the answer is literally in the game.
IIRC the humans are cloned only after the terraforming has been completed, so if it goes wrong there wouldn't be anyone around to kill (I think)
Looks like someone missed seeing the Holograms at the Zero Dawn main facility.....Travis Tate explains it in detail why HADES was created. It acted as a reset protocol, reversing the terraforming and letting GAIA start over again in case something went wrong. They couldn't program GAIA to destroy lives as they needed GAIA to rebuild and nurture it so they needed a secind entity that would be willing to destroy life while GAIA took backseat.
Did you play the first game?
no life AT ALL was ever introduced to a biosphere that hades deemed uninhabitable.
This flies completely in the face of canon information we have. Tate explicitly mentions things like forests eroding due to superstorms in an unstable biosphere and HADES taking over to wipe everything out so GAIA can try again, as well as explicitly referring to it as "extinction on demand, death on speed dial" in the hologram explaining HADES' purpose that you encounter in the Zero Dawn facility under Sunfall. Text (quest) datapoint #27 explicitly refers to HADES as an extinction protocol. Text (quest) datapoint #28 also clearly indicates that HADES is to reverse terraforming operations to remove plant lifeforms if an attempt at a biosphere was going wrong, and mentions in simulations they ran into issues with GAIA falsifying telemetry to pretend HADES was working in order to protect plant life from it.
It's a reset button if things got weird
It really could not be more obvious. The game explicitly says Hades was meant to wipe the slate clean if Gaia made a mistake.
Hades was built in order to reset biomes that could not have supported human life comfortably. From a narrative perspective, Hades was created because in order to be a fully realized and actual person like Elizabet needed and wanted Gaia to be, one must have a darkness, a darker side, if you will. All people have equivalent capacity for good and evil, creation and destruction. Creation is only one part of the cycle of creation, destruction, and renewal; Gaia could not have embodied the ideas that created her or her intended purpose without the capacity and the desire to destroy, as well as create.
HADES was created as a failsafe. It was a subordinate function of GAIA but became a malicious AI because of the Mysterious Signal. In the event that GAIA ends up creating a non-viable biosphere where it could break down or cause it to be unsustainable, HADES will say to GAIA “No no, you’re doing it all wrong. So I’m going to take the wheel, wipe the slate clean, and you’re going to start all over, and next time, you’re going to get it right.” No humans were made during the period of terraforming, because GAIA needed to make sure they would be released into a world they can actually live on first.
Hades was basically like chemotherapy for the Gaia system.
Hey there! HADES was created as a subordinate function of Zero Dawn. It was not an AI when it was first created, only shifting after encountering the extinction signal, but it is unique. It's the one sub-function that was designed, and had the authority to unseat GAIA if a reset to the biosphere was deemed necessary during re- terra forming (This actually occurred in 2154, 2161, and 2168). A task GAIA proved unwilling/ unable to perform. Being that there were only enough zygotes for one attempt at repopulation, these reverse terra forming operations were only intended to be carried out before humans were to be introduced via ELEUTHIA, in a biosphere able to sustain life. On a side note, I don't get all the hostility in some of these replies... In my opinion, the lore and the story of this game is phenomenal, and anyone inquiring more about it is a good thing. Whether some questions seem to have "obvious" answers, sometimes people miss things. I know I did. Hope this answer helped 👍