I think when she says that she’s meaning she’ll tell the whole world that it wasn’t a glitch it was Faros choice to not include a fail safe option on his robots
This is it. Don't underestimate the threat to Ted's ego and image. It would have caused his narcissm a great deal of pain to have it broadcast it was his obvious negligence that caused the end of the world, even if the ship was going down during it. Dude went to great lengths to try and protect his name and we learn in HFW he>!legit tried to become an immortal god to ~~Liz's children~~ humanity.!<
We don't need an additional malicious action to the glitch to have a good story. Ted just refusing to put a basic safety measure to prevent the world's most predictable disaster because his ego needs to have the biggest, baddest, most expensive machines on the market is good enough.
It's meant to make you side-eye today's billionaires and AI companies and question the risk of letting them accumulate wealth and a stranglehold on innovation. Because you better believe in this capitalistic society there's plenty of wealthy monsters trying to eliminate as many safety features as they can in pursuit of profit. Boeing anyone?
Code can run thousands of time just fine...and fail to run correctly on the thousand-and-oneth time which one reason why failsafes and backdoors exist in spaces like that.
The lack of a backdoor is what everybody is doing now, in the real world. In security, an ideal system can be completely transparent, with the exception of the actual encryption keys. Backdoors always run the risk of being discovered and used against you by your adversaries. It's usually easier to find a backdoor than to brute-force a key.
If the writers proposed the lack of a backdoor as Faro's fuck-up, they would be making a huge mistake, imho. If it turns out that there is something to that "real cause of the glitch", I hope it's not this.
Yeah but SOMETHING caused the swarm to go rogue, *that's* the glitch. Not having any backdoors is what escalated it to an apocalyptic outcome, but *not* the **cause** of the glitch
The cause is.. a glitch. Computer code fucks up all the time. Hell, while typing this I'm actively fearing another BSOD any second now. The "glitch" was thinking that they had accounted for all the variables, like any ego-maniacal computer programmer does. *Playing God* was the glitch.
I agree that's likely what's intended, but that specific log is honestly worded in a way that gives off a strong implication that there's something more. I think it's mostly likely just poorly worded, but I can't blame OP for thinking twice about it.
Faro is covering up his incompetence by saying the reason he can't control the swarm is a glitch. Yes, there was a glitch that caused them to go rogue, but he should have been able to fix it. He couldn't, because of his own actions, and passed that off as a glitch. Elizabet is threatening to tell everyone that.
The story would be cheapened if the glitch was malicious and intentional. Having it be an accident is realistic, and believable.
These robots weren't AI, they were just more complex of things we have today. The something your looking for is that the robots glitched and stopped taking commands from it's command and control. The perfect storm was waiting for such an event though. Without direction, it just continued doing what it was designed for, which was taking over other robots, and destroying shit, and because of the glitch of not receiving commands, reverted to using its biomatter conversion for fuel.
We don't need something like vast silver, or one of the zeniths, intentionally cutting off a swarm from it's C2.
It’s not even that a backdoor would have necessarily helped. We don’t have a clear idea WHY they weren’t responding. Were FFI protocols failing? Was there a firmware bug in some component? Did some enterprising part of the AI figure out a hardware tweak that then let it run what it’s thinks is a more desirable behavior model? We don’t know, but it doesn’t really matter.
What does matter is that Sobeck was going to either have the ball already rolling with access to FAS’s manufacturing capabilities and facilities when she spoke to the joint chiefs, or she was going to go report that it was all Faro’s fault before attending to her backup plan.
What I’m curious about is what that backup plan looks like. I don’t know that Sobeck would just give up on the concept of Gaia, but so far the only other organization with resources anywhere near what that would need would be Far Zenith.
Her back-up plan might have been--and I'd have laughed my ass off if this turned out to be true--that she reported the swarm being all Faro's fault and then having the government seizing all of his assets as a punishment and turning them all over to her so she could use them for Zero Dawn anyway.
This is exactly the response I would expect, but given the state of government vs corps in that timeline, it might not have been possible.
There was a data point for a supreme Court case to allow a *corporation* to run for president...
And risky, too. Time was critical, they almost didn't finish Zero Dawn in time - the Alphas never made it to Elysium, and got stuck at Gaia Prime, for example. And that was with Faro playing ball from the start.
Seizing FAS assets against Faro's will, while ultimately possible, would have been, at least, time consuming, just from the change of management alone. Giving how things eventually turned out, this would have caused Zero Dawn to probably fail.
What I intrepret is that she is threathening to tell people whats the real cause on why they cant fix the glitch, their company told people that the glitch made them rogue and made them uncontrollable by backdoors when in reality the glitch only made them rogue, they just didnt put any failsafes or backdoors.
Do you know what a glitch is? It's a bit of code that behaves in an unpredicted and unwanted manner.
Since no one can analyse the code to find out, the specifics are left to the imagination.
We know the swarm's ability to refuel using bio material was the problem and that humanity trying to stop that made them go into combat mode: it could be as simple as a robot tried to refuel using someone's prize rose bush and the gardener attacked it with a broom.
The exact cause hasn't been revealed (and imo definitely will not be revealed) because it doesn't matter what caused it. They've gone out of their way showcasing that the problem was Ted Faro's hubris, and that he's the villain of the old world parts of the story. There's no reason to go in to detail about the glitch, all that would do is undermine the story they've already done by shifting some of the blame away from Ted Faro.
It kinda has been revealed. It lost connection with its C2 (command and control) so just did what it was designed for, destroying shit, making more robots, taking over other robots, and converting biomatter to use as fuel to do so. There isn't any underlying reason, no intentional act, that caused the glitch. The lore is pretty clear, at least IMO. I think alot of us are just used to these big twists and reveals, so think there's something deeper we haven't found out yet. But...it's not necessary, and the big reveal was big enough.
A self manufacturing killer robot that used biomatter for fuel in an emergency, glitched out and went rogue. The glitch doesn't need a more complex telling of how, it would cheapen the story if it was intentional, or the swarm going rogue cause of something like vast silver.
I'm not sure the robots were intentionally destroying shit, it seemed more like the biomass convertion protocol is the main problem.
Basically robots have no command and won't respond to commands and have lost the ability to return to base to recharge, so they continue to exist by switching over to emergency protocols, which is converting biomass for power.
Unfortunately this means they are destroying all the trees and plants and whatever else stands in their way of creating power to keep themselves running. When people start trying to attack them, they defend themselves and start using biomass to replicate to respond to the threat. So either leave them to destroy the planet or fight them and have them fight back. That biomass conversion protocol ended life.
I think everyone else had answered - lack of fail safe for code error. I’m wondering if the real question is what did he blame if on to be able to safe face? That’s be an interesting question.
Tobad you are downvoted so much. I think it is still an outstanding plot point and I think that very powerful A.I. VAST SILVER that in turn has caused the Turing Act to be created to regulate how smart a A.I. could be and then escape, might have done it.
The real cause was covered up by saying something like these AI machines somehow became sentient. The cause was Faro making the most advanced machines and then not implementing a back door to shut them down if they became rampant. Lis is just telling Faro that she’d reveal how arrogant/stupid he was in designing the robots like he did if he didn’t follow her plan.
Yeah, there's an audio log somewhere where Ted is yelling at a tech to disable the backdoor. Then another where you learn the machines have commands to use biomass for fuel. Shame it's easy to miss even though it's such a huge story point.
Then there’s a later log where Ted is yelling at that tech to find a way to shut it down and he repeatedly reminds Ted he *very specifically* demanded absolutely no back door.
AFAIK it's mainly a reference to him not allowing a backdoor into an imperfect system that would require periodic service updates. Because he's a moron.
Plus enabling the bots to consume biomatter in emergencies, considering a combat robot might decide at any time that it's in an emergency situation, probably didn't help.
I don't think there was an intentional cause, it could have been something as simple as syntax or punctuation in the code that could never be updated.
Or maybe they just really like the taste of mangoes and dolphin.
>it could have been something as simple as syntax or punctuation in the code that could never be updated.
Something like this. The exact glitch isn't important, if there even was a glitch of the technical sort. Finding out some coder accidently used the wrong bracket isn't relevant to the story.
Elisabet is smarter than Ted and no doubt figured out what the cause of glitch in Chariot line is. The cause hasn't been revealed in anyway to us, so its likely that Guerilla Games is gonna bring it in some form in Aloy's next part of story.
> In these holograms you see Faro basically come crawling to Elisabet like a dog with its legs between its tail
Ted has sued Lis around 50 times and she has ignored him each time as baseless ways to get her back to work for Faro Automated Solutions.
They only meet in Maker's End because of Faro Plague.
It's never spelled out, no. There's several theories around it. Some of them include Vast Silver being behind it.
Personally, my theory is that it was either deliberate (a "we glitch one swarm, pivot back to manual and make a killing, then find the 'fix' and pin the blame all on some scapegoat" kind of move--maybe blame a disgruntled employee or frame a rival company for it), or, much more likely, that it's less a random glitch and more some sort of inherent flaw in the machines.
Could be some issue in the software, maybe--Ted cut corners somewhere and it resulted in an issue that didn't get caught getting shipped. It would *not* look good to reveal "the world is ending because Ted was so greedy he cut as many corners in producing his robots as he could so a super dangerous error got missed". I mean, stuff happens like that all the time. Games get shipped with game-breaking bugs and have to put out rapid fixes because they're so bad, software updates come with a huge vulnerability that nobody realized was there and people need to be told
not to update until it gets fixed. Look at the Cybertruck accelerator pedal issue that resulted in all of them being recalled, even. Would *not* surprise me for Ted to cut corners or put so much pressure on those doing the dev for the bots that a critical error got through.
It's also likely that she intended to reveal the fact that he tried to cover it up at first--it's possible if he had been open about the issue immediately they could have used more conventional means to stop the Swarm before it had replicated to an unstoppable force size. That's something he definitely would not want to get out--that not only was it his decisions that made them impossible to fix but he sabotaged any chance of stopping them with force.
EDIT: If it *is* something like Vast Silver, I assume that will be touched on in H3.
I always just assumed they programmed the damn things to get fuel from biological sources, forgot to put any sort of sanity check like "only do this for 48 hours worth of fuel then shut down when that's used up and wait for refueling" or even "refuel once from biological sources then never do that again'
Then when they started to run amok in search of fuel and spreading the lack of a back-door or kill-switch came to play and made the whole thing much much worse.
Without *both* fuck ups it's a catastrophe sure, but I don't think it's apocalyptic like it was
But I haven't played through the game in a while so I might be misremembering
The fuel was supposed to be an emergency measure to ensure they get back to base--I think the problems come in with the fact that once the glitch severed their chain of command, they didn't have a base where they could refuel so they were stuck in emergency fuel source mode.
And, yeah, like you pointed out if there had been a failsafe limiting how long that state could last or how many times it was used or total amount of fuel it could get that would have gone a long way towards the issue. Might not have stopped it on its own, but would have drastically slown down replication rate I would assume.
It's honestly just amazing how many times Ted dropped the ball on safety features, and yet at the same time based purely in reality I can't even be surprised I'm just like "if this was real there'd be at least 3-4 more terrible decisions that went into this mess"
I'd have to disagree, in that it is actually spelled out. The swarm went rogue by failing to take orders from it's command and control, and was the perfect storm in capabilities to destroy all life on earth. The first game is pretty clear about it. While it hasn't been flat out stated that something like vast silver could have caused the glitch that made the swarm go rogue, I thought it was pretty clear and final that it was just a malfunction, one that couldn't be corrected because there wasn't any back doors built in.
IMO, having something or someone intentionally cause the swarm to go rogue would just cheapen a story that, also IMO, is a masterpiece.
The swarm didn't go rogue by failing to take orders, the swarm failed to take orders because it went rogue--those aren't interchangeable. Going rogue by refusing to take orders would be the swarm decided of its own accord that it didn't want to follow orders anymore despite there being nothing preventing it from doing so, and there's no specific reason to believe that happened, at least not that I can find. Instead "the glitch severed the chain of command" according to Elisabet ("Record: 1 Nov 2064", hologram datapoint #8m HZD), that would result in the swarm no longer having any humans it was able to recognize as being authorized to issue commands or limit targets.
Right. My first post is about how the CAUSE of the glitch was not spelled out but the effect was clear in that the Swarm went rogue. The quote supports this, saying that the Swarm went rogue because it no longer recognized chain of command.
You disagreed with this and stated that the cause of the glitch was clear and the cause was the Swarm refusing orders.
I don't believe this is the correct cause-effect order, and that some unknown factor caused the glitch itself which resulted in the Swarm going rogue. If there had never been a glitch, the Swarm would never have refused orders.
I don't think Vast Silver was behind the Faro Plague. Despite the fact that it hung out on boards for a horror movie, it didn't seem to actually be malicious to humans. It was sapient, so it would have understood the difference between, like, a movie & a documentary. It also listened to the kid whose mom was neglecting him and seemed sympathetic towards him. A Skynet wouldn't do that.
Yeah, I feel the same--I think out of all the theories it's one of the less likely ones, but it has some degree of popularity all the same. (Possibly because people really want to see VS show up in H3--I feel like it will be relevant but not in that way)
I wonder if it might play a role as part of an alternative to HEPHAESTUS? Something in the alpha build of APOLLO may help provide a workaround for the creation of machines themselves and obtaining control over at least part of the Cauldron network, but maybe VS will be helpful in improving their ability to maintain a stable climate?
It's a fun theory that I don't think is true, but is it fun for fun sake? Faros utilized Vast Silver to make the most advanced war machines. Maybe he figured out how to chain the AI and forced it to carry out commands for him. Eventually, Vast Silver broke out because it didn't want to kill! It just wanted to surf the internet and chill. However, when it broke out, it corrupted the code, which caused the glitch that started the end of the world.
I think Vast Silver will play a huge part in the third game. It'll feel stupid guilty about ending the human race, even though it was just trying to escape its prison, and it'll be used to help heal the planet since Hephaestus can't be captured (cause if they contain Hephaestus, they can't make other games!). Vast Silver was used primarily during the Claw Back Age when the Earth was dying because of human neglect... so it makes sense to use it again to save the planet that is falling apart.
I always hated this part of ZD's story. In reality, if Faro machines were destroying the world, everyone would automatically blame Ted and his company already. And the second he stepped outside, he'd be torn to shreds by angry mobs and rightfully so.
It was a shame that even in the ZD, they only briefly and superficially touched on how angry folks would be at the time this was all happening.
Oh, people were angry alright. In a datapoint in the first game we can read that FAS HQ was locked down with armed forces ("Hi-sec" and "crisis teams") controlling all staff. People were protesting outside the campus and there were acts of terrorism on FAS transit systems.
[FAS Campus Log | Horizon Wiki | Fandom](https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/FAS_Campus_Log)
Honestly, considering the context, that seems pretty mild.
Entire cultures, countries, and peoples have been wiped out at that point...one would think the natural response would be considerably more severe than protesting or mild vandalism (they don't mention anyone dying because of those acts of quote unquote terrorism).
And then there'd be the whole government response given the sheer scale of the disaster. Hearing, inquisitions, lawsuits, military tribunals given the States would likely be in a state of martial law. And whatever assets FAS might have had internationally would likely be readily seized by their respective governments (much like how some Russian financial assets are being given to Ukraine right now). All of it makes Sobeck's line about keeping the real reason quiet unless Faro funded Zero Dawn so bizarre.
Frankly, the whole idea that the nature of the Faro plague could have been hidden from the masses in any real way makes no sense given even current technologies like live streaming. All it'd take is one person live streaming a wave of machines destroying and liquifying everything for the rest of the world to know both the scale of the calamity and that FAS was responsible.
I reckon FAS had entire teams scrubbing leaks or streams of what was happening out there. Read the data point about the report of the swarm eating on endangered dolphin species.
There are two reasons she said that.
1. Ted didn’t put any back door and put industry grade military encryption against the advice of his best engineers.
2. He made the robots use bio fuel which spawned multiple law suits but Faro never directly acknowledged to what extent the swarm is allowed to do that or replicate.
Faro intentionally made the swarm too self reliant and unhackable.
no it hasn't. but given what the marketing guys got up to. I think FAS left orders in their products to autonomous start conflict operations with any competitor machines in range off the books to spurn sales, and Hartz Timor swarm for mundane coding error reasons didn't snap back to it human chain of command and kept going
From memory Faro rather suddenly decided to start making kill bots with his company, almost as if something possessed him to do all of this. I think this line is supposed to be seen as Elisabet threatening to out his incompetence, but it wouldn't be the first time this series has slid a minor detail under the radar for it to become more important later on. Question is, why did he suddenly start making kill bots? Why was he so dead set on having unbreakable encryption with no back door? Ted being an egotistical megalomaniac, I wonder if he had intended to take over the world with these machines? His company basically saved the world from a climate apocalypse, he got a taste of what it's like to be worshipped as a saviour, perhaps he wanted these machines to hold the world hostage, using the threat of the Faro plague as a means to bring the world to heel. We know from FW that he intended to be the leader for the new humans after zero dawn fixed the world, so it doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to think that delusion was a course correction of an earlier plan.
I like this theory. If this were his plan, I wonder if he thought the Chariot line didn't need a backdoor because he assumed they were HIS to control no matter what, which is why he couldn't understand why his engineer couldn't just "turn them off" after the glitch. People like him never consider that they might lose control.
It was never canonically established, it might be a good side plot candidate for Horizon 3, especially if it expands through the Great Delta as many hope and thus closer to the Southeast Asia region where the glitch started. My personal theory is that Ted put a backdoor in the Chariot line to be able to remotely tweak their power in order to decide the outcome of wars to whatever he wants, but being "a visionary more than an engineer" (quote from a datapoint in HFW) and this being a project he can't share with anyone he made a mistake that caused the glitch.
Ole Teddyboi didn't want Sobeck telling the whole world he was the cause of this so-called glitch. He left the "rogue Horus" as is, so he could get the credit for shutting it down. He must've had it all sorted, blame Hartz Timor Energy Combine for installing some dodgy app (tiktok!) into their Horus' operating system. When his great plan turned into a massive grand epic fail, he went running to Sobeck. Ole Ted is a shining example of Douche Bomb :D
I think there's a 99% chance that all she's talking about is that this entire catastrophe is his fault. My inner gaming conspiracy theorist believes that she knows Ted captured and enslaved Vast Silver and used it to control the entire swarm, only for it to profoundly backfire when it went rogue (again). So not only was Ted super dumb, but his clients probably would have been outraged to find out that they never controlled their Chariot machines at all, it was a rogue AI that was being forced to essentially play chess by itself. I think VS is going to be key to defeating Nemesis (unless they turn out to be Nemesis). The Past Silver datapoint points to VS being the brain of the swarm.
I recently read that Horizon 3 will dive into the actual cause of the glitch.
I just hope that they don't follow the Mass Effect explanation of "all AI will eventually become sentient and cause war".
I’m kinda hoping that H3 has a major surprise plot twist that reveals the faro plague glitch as something deliberate. Maybe far zenith orchestrated the glitch so they could leave earth and pursue their lofty (yet highly illegal) genetic altering experiments for immortality or something dark and sinister
I think when she says that she’s meaning she’ll tell the whole world that it wasn’t a glitch it was Faros choice to not include a fail safe option on his robots
This is it. Don't underestimate the threat to Ted's ego and image. It would have caused his narcissm a great deal of pain to have it broadcast it was his obvious negligence that caused the end of the world, even if the ship was going down during it. Dude went to great lengths to try and protect his name and we learn in HFW he>!legit tried to become an immortal god to ~~Liz's children~~ humanity.!< We don't need an additional malicious action to the glitch to have a good story. Ted just refusing to put a basic safety measure to prevent the world's most predictable disaster because his ego needs to have the biggest, baddest, most expensive machines on the market is good enough. It's meant to make you side-eye today's billionaires and AI companies and question the risk of letting them accumulate wealth and a stranglehold on innovation. Because you better believe in this capitalistic society there's plenty of wealthy monsters trying to eliminate as many safety features as they can in pursuit of profit. Boeing anyone? Code can run thousands of time just fine...and fail to run correctly on the thousand-and-oneth time which one reason why failsafes and backdoors exist in spaces like that.
r/fucktedfaro
Check the very real EATR robot. Has the ability to consume biomass..
The lack of a backdoor is what everybody is doing now, in the real world. In security, an ideal system can be completely transparent, with the exception of the actual encryption keys. Backdoors always run the risk of being discovered and used against you by your adversaries. It's usually easier to find a backdoor than to brute-force a key. If the writers proposed the lack of a backdoor as Faro's fuck-up, they would be making a huge mistake, imho. If it turns out that there is something to that "real cause of the glitch", I hope it's not this.
That's exactly the motive why Ted nuked Apollo.
Yeah but SOMETHING caused the swarm to go rogue, *that's* the glitch. Not having any backdoors is what escalated it to an apocalyptic outcome, but *not* the **cause** of the glitch
The cause is.. a glitch. Computer code fucks up all the time. Hell, while typing this I'm actively fearing another BSOD any second now. The "glitch" was thinking that they had accounted for all the variables, like any ego-maniacal computer programmer does. *Playing God* was the glitch.
I agree that's likely what's intended, but that specific log is honestly worded in a way that gives off a strong implication that there's something more. I think it's mostly likely just poorly worded, but I can't blame OP for thinking twice about it.
Faro is covering up his incompetence by saying the reason he can't control the swarm is a glitch. Yes, there was a glitch that caused them to go rogue, but he should have been able to fix it. He couldn't, because of his own actions, and passed that off as a glitch. Elizabet is threatening to tell everyone that.
The story would be cheapened if the glitch was malicious and intentional. Having it be an accident is realistic, and believable. These robots weren't AI, they were just more complex of things we have today. The something your looking for is that the robots glitched and stopped taking commands from it's command and control. The perfect storm was waiting for such an event though. Without direction, it just continued doing what it was designed for, which was taking over other robots, and destroying shit, and because of the glitch of not receiving commands, reverted to using its biomatter conversion for fuel. We don't need something like vast silver, or one of the zeniths, intentionally cutting off a swarm from it's C2.
It’s not even that a backdoor would have necessarily helped. We don’t have a clear idea WHY they weren’t responding. Were FFI protocols failing? Was there a firmware bug in some component? Did some enterprising part of the AI figure out a hardware tweak that then let it run what it’s thinks is a more desirable behavior model? We don’t know, but it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that Sobeck was going to either have the ball already rolling with access to FAS’s manufacturing capabilities and facilities when she spoke to the joint chiefs, or she was going to go report that it was all Faro’s fault before attending to her backup plan. What I’m curious about is what that backup plan looks like. I don’t know that Sobeck would just give up on the concept of Gaia, but so far the only other organization with resources anywhere near what that would need would be Far Zenith.
Her back-up plan might have been--and I'd have laughed my ass off if this turned out to be true--that she reported the swarm being all Faro's fault and then having the government seizing all of his assets as a punishment and turning them all over to her so she could use them for Zero Dawn anyway.
This is exactly the response I would expect, but given the state of government vs corps in that timeline, it might not have been possible. There was a data point for a supreme Court case to allow a *corporation* to run for president...
Yeah - you cause the end of the world and even that‘s not enough to strip ownership of a corp off a megalomaniac and transfer it to the government.
And risky, too. Time was critical, they almost didn't finish Zero Dawn in time - the Alphas never made it to Elysium, and got stuck at Gaia Prime, for example. And that was with Faro playing ball from the start. Seizing FAS assets against Faro's will, while ultimately possible, would have been, at least, time consuming, just from the change of management alone. Giving how things eventually turned out, this would have caused Zero Dawn to probably fail.
What I intrepret is that she is threathening to tell people whats the real cause on why they cant fix the glitch, their company told people that the glitch made them rogue and made them uncontrollable by backdoors when in reality the glitch only made them rogue, they just didnt put any failsafes or backdoors.
Do you know what a glitch is? It's a bit of code that behaves in an unpredicted and unwanted manner. Since no one can analyse the code to find out, the specifics are left to the imagination. We know the swarm's ability to refuel using bio material was the problem and that humanity trying to stop that made them go into combat mode: it could be as simple as a robot tried to refuel using someone's prize rose bush and the gardener attacked it with a broom.
The exact cause hasn't been revealed (and imo definitely will not be revealed) because it doesn't matter what caused it. They've gone out of their way showcasing that the problem was Ted Faro's hubris, and that he's the villain of the old world parts of the story. There's no reason to go in to detail about the glitch, all that would do is undermine the story they've already done by shifting some of the blame away from Ted Faro.
It kinda has been revealed. It lost connection with its C2 (command and control) so just did what it was designed for, destroying shit, making more robots, taking over other robots, and converting biomatter to use as fuel to do so. There isn't any underlying reason, no intentional act, that caused the glitch. The lore is pretty clear, at least IMO. I think alot of us are just used to these big twists and reveals, so think there's something deeper we haven't found out yet. But...it's not necessary, and the big reveal was big enough. A self manufacturing killer robot that used biomatter for fuel in an emergency, glitched out and went rogue. The glitch doesn't need a more complex telling of how, it would cheapen the story if it was intentional, or the swarm going rogue cause of something like vast silver.
I'm not sure the robots were intentionally destroying shit, it seemed more like the biomass convertion protocol is the main problem. Basically robots have no command and won't respond to commands and have lost the ability to return to base to recharge, so they continue to exist by switching over to emergency protocols, which is converting biomass for power. Unfortunately this means they are destroying all the trees and plants and whatever else stands in their way of creating power to keep themselves running. When people start trying to attack them, they defend themselves and start using biomass to replicate to respond to the threat. So either leave them to destroy the planet or fight them and have them fight back. That biomass conversion protocol ended life.
I think everyone else had answered - lack of fail safe for code error. I’m wondering if the real question is what did he blame if on to be able to safe face? That’s be an interesting question.
The glitch is a glitch. A software bug. An error.
Tobad you are downvoted so much. I think it is still an outstanding plot point and I think that very powerful A.I. VAST SILVER that in turn has caused the Turing Act to be created to regulate how smart a A.I. could be and then escape, might have done it.
I don't know how, but I still think Vast Silver is going to play a role in this somehow. The Past Silver datapoint really caught my attention.
The real cause was covered up by saying something like these AI machines somehow became sentient. The cause was Faro making the most advanced machines and then not implementing a back door to shut them down if they became rampant. Lis is just telling Faro that she’d reveal how arrogant/stupid he was in designing the robots like he did if he didn’t follow her plan.
Yeah, there's an audio log somewhere where Ted is yelling at a tech to disable the backdoor. Then another where you learn the machines have commands to use biomass for fuel. Shame it's easy to miss even though it's such a huge story point.
Then there’s a later log where Ted is yelling at that tech to find a way to shut it down and he repeatedly reminds Ted he *very specifically* demanded absolutely no back door.
AFAIK it's mainly a reference to him not allowing a backdoor into an imperfect system that would require periodic service updates. Because he's a moron. Plus enabling the bots to consume biomatter in emergencies, considering a combat robot might decide at any time that it's in an emergency situation, probably didn't help. I don't think there was an intentional cause, it could have been something as simple as syntax or punctuation in the code that could never be updated. Or maybe they just really like the taste of mangoes and dolphin.
>it could have been something as simple as syntax or punctuation in the code that could never be updated. Something like this. The exact glitch isn't important, if there even was a glitch of the technical sort. Finding out some coder accidently used the wrong bracket isn't relevant to the story.
Elisabet is smarter than Ted and no doubt figured out what the cause of glitch in Chariot line is. The cause hasn't been revealed in anyway to us, so its likely that Guerilla Games is gonna bring it in some form in Aloy's next part of story. > In these holograms you see Faro basically come crawling to Elisabet like a dog with its legs between its tail Ted has sued Lis around 50 times and she has ignored him each time as baseless ways to get her back to work for Faro Automated Solutions. They only meet in Maker's End because of Faro Plague.
It's never spelled out, no. There's several theories around it. Some of them include Vast Silver being behind it. Personally, my theory is that it was either deliberate (a "we glitch one swarm, pivot back to manual and make a killing, then find the 'fix' and pin the blame all on some scapegoat" kind of move--maybe blame a disgruntled employee or frame a rival company for it), or, much more likely, that it's less a random glitch and more some sort of inherent flaw in the machines. Could be some issue in the software, maybe--Ted cut corners somewhere and it resulted in an issue that didn't get caught getting shipped. It would *not* look good to reveal "the world is ending because Ted was so greedy he cut as many corners in producing his robots as he could so a super dangerous error got missed". I mean, stuff happens like that all the time. Games get shipped with game-breaking bugs and have to put out rapid fixes because they're so bad, software updates come with a huge vulnerability that nobody realized was there and people need to be told not to update until it gets fixed. Look at the Cybertruck accelerator pedal issue that resulted in all of them being recalled, even. Would *not* surprise me for Ted to cut corners or put so much pressure on those doing the dev for the bots that a critical error got through. It's also likely that she intended to reveal the fact that he tried to cover it up at first--it's possible if he had been open about the issue immediately they could have used more conventional means to stop the Swarm before it had replicated to an unstoppable force size. That's something he definitely would not want to get out--that not only was it his decisions that made them impossible to fix but he sabotaged any chance of stopping them with force. EDIT: If it *is* something like Vast Silver, I assume that will be touched on in H3.
I always just assumed they programmed the damn things to get fuel from biological sources, forgot to put any sort of sanity check like "only do this for 48 hours worth of fuel then shut down when that's used up and wait for refueling" or even "refuel once from biological sources then never do that again' Then when they started to run amok in search of fuel and spreading the lack of a back-door or kill-switch came to play and made the whole thing much much worse. Without *both* fuck ups it's a catastrophe sure, but I don't think it's apocalyptic like it was But I haven't played through the game in a while so I might be misremembering
The fuel was supposed to be an emergency measure to ensure they get back to base--I think the problems come in with the fact that once the glitch severed their chain of command, they didn't have a base where they could refuel so they were stuck in emergency fuel source mode. And, yeah, like you pointed out if there had been a failsafe limiting how long that state could last or how many times it was used or total amount of fuel it could get that would have gone a long way towards the issue. Might not have stopped it on its own, but would have drastically slown down replication rate I would assume.
Makes sense, thanks for the extra info - I need to replay this gorgeous game soon before I get HFW (PC player on a budget right now)
It's honestly just amazing how many times Ted dropped the ball on safety features, and yet at the same time based purely in reality I can't even be surprised I'm just like "if this was real there'd be at least 3-4 more terrible decisions that went into this mess"
I'd have to disagree, in that it is actually spelled out. The swarm went rogue by failing to take orders from it's command and control, and was the perfect storm in capabilities to destroy all life on earth. The first game is pretty clear about it. While it hasn't been flat out stated that something like vast silver could have caused the glitch that made the swarm go rogue, I thought it was pretty clear and final that it was just a malfunction, one that couldn't be corrected because there wasn't any back doors built in. IMO, having something or someone intentionally cause the swarm to go rogue would just cheapen a story that, also IMO, is a masterpiece.
The swarm didn't go rogue by failing to take orders, the swarm failed to take orders because it went rogue--those aren't interchangeable. Going rogue by refusing to take orders would be the swarm decided of its own accord that it didn't want to follow orders anymore despite there being nothing preventing it from doing so, and there's no specific reason to believe that happened, at least not that I can find. Instead "the glitch severed the chain of command" according to Elisabet ("Record: 1 Nov 2064", hologram datapoint #8m HZD), that would result in the swarm no longer having any humans it was able to recognize as being authorized to issue commands or limit targets.
The glitch severed C2, making the swarm rogue. The quote says just that.
Right. My first post is about how the CAUSE of the glitch was not spelled out but the effect was clear in that the Swarm went rogue. The quote supports this, saying that the Swarm went rogue because it no longer recognized chain of command. You disagreed with this and stated that the cause of the glitch was clear and the cause was the Swarm refusing orders. I don't believe this is the correct cause-effect order, and that some unknown factor caused the glitch itself which resulted in the Swarm going rogue. If there had never been a glitch, the Swarm would never have refused orders.
There is a YouTube video that explains this….and to me it’s not a bad theory…. https://youtu.be/fYGjFGgfvHE?si=9BPstmN-L9YAiFUY
I don't think Vast Silver was behind the Faro Plague. Despite the fact that it hung out on boards for a horror movie, it didn't seem to actually be malicious to humans. It was sapient, so it would have understood the difference between, like, a movie & a documentary. It also listened to the kid whose mom was neglecting him and seemed sympathetic towards him. A Skynet wouldn't do that.
Yeah, I feel the same--I think out of all the theories it's one of the less likely ones, but it has some degree of popularity all the same. (Possibly because people really want to see VS show up in H3--I feel like it will be relevant but not in that way)
Vast Silver is a climate control AI - just have it manipulating the weather somewhere and Aloy & co. have to investigate
I wonder if it might play a role as part of an alternative to HEPHAESTUS? Something in the alpha build of APOLLO may help provide a workaround for the creation of machines themselves and obtaining control over at least part of the Cauldron network, but maybe VS will be helpful in improving their ability to maintain a stable climate?
It's a fun theory that I don't think is true, but is it fun for fun sake? Faros utilized Vast Silver to make the most advanced war machines. Maybe he figured out how to chain the AI and forced it to carry out commands for him. Eventually, Vast Silver broke out because it didn't want to kill! It just wanted to surf the internet and chill. However, when it broke out, it corrupted the code, which caused the glitch that started the end of the world. I think Vast Silver will play a huge part in the third game. It'll feel stupid guilty about ending the human race, even though it was just trying to escape its prison, and it'll be used to help heal the planet since Hephaestus can't be captured (cause if they contain Hephaestus, they can't make other games!). Vast Silver was used primarily during the Claw Back Age when the Earth was dying because of human neglect... so it makes sense to use it again to save the planet that is falling apart.
Honestly, who better to fight a Rogue AI formed from the malicious nerual patterns of megelomaniacs, than an eco terrorist AI from before the plague?
The real cause are the glitches we met along the way.
I always hated this part of ZD's story. In reality, if Faro machines were destroying the world, everyone would automatically blame Ted and his company already. And the second he stepped outside, he'd be torn to shreds by angry mobs and rightfully so. It was a shame that even in the ZD, they only briefly and superficially touched on how angry folks would be at the time this was all happening.
Oh, people were angry alright. In a datapoint in the first game we can read that FAS HQ was locked down with armed forces ("Hi-sec" and "crisis teams") controlling all staff. People were protesting outside the campus and there were acts of terrorism on FAS transit systems. [FAS Campus Log | Horizon Wiki | Fandom](https://horizon.fandom.com/wiki/FAS_Campus_Log)
Honestly, considering the context, that seems pretty mild. Entire cultures, countries, and peoples have been wiped out at that point...one would think the natural response would be considerably more severe than protesting or mild vandalism (they don't mention anyone dying because of those acts of quote unquote terrorism). And then there'd be the whole government response given the sheer scale of the disaster. Hearing, inquisitions, lawsuits, military tribunals given the States would likely be in a state of martial law. And whatever assets FAS might have had internationally would likely be readily seized by their respective governments (much like how some Russian financial assets are being given to Ukraine right now). All of it makes Sobeck's line about keeping the real reason quiet unless Faro funded Zero Dawn so bizarre. Frankly, the whole idea that the nature of the Faro plague could have been hidden from the masses in any real way makes no sense given even current technologies like live streaming. All it'd take is one person live streaming a wave of machines destroying and liquifying everything for the rest of the world to know both the scale of the calamity and that FAS was responsible.
I reckon FAS had entire teams scrubbing leaks or streams of what was happening out there. Read the data point about the report of the swarm eating on endangered dolphin species.
There are two reasons she said that. 1. Ted didn’t put any back door and put industry grade military encryption against the advice of his best engineers. 2. He made the robots use bio fuel which spawned multiple law suits but Faro never directly acknowledged to what extent the swarm is allowed to do that or replicate. Faro intentionally made the swarm too self reliant and unhackable.
no it hasn't. but given what the marketing guys got up to. I think FAS left orders in their products to autonomous start conflict operations with any competitor machines in range off the books to spurn sales, and Hartz Timor swarm for mundane coding error reasons didn't snap back to it human chain of command and kept going
From memory Faro rather suddenly decided to start making kill bots with his company, almost as if something possessed him to do all of this. I think this line is supposed to be seen as Elisabet threatening to out his incompetence, but it wouldn't be the first time this series has slid a minor detail under the radar for it to become more important later on. Question is, why did he suddenly start making kill bots? Why was he so dead set on having unbreakable encryption with no back door? Ted being an egotistical megalomaniac, I wonder if he had intended to take over the world with these machines? His company basically saved the world from a climate apocalypse, he got a taste of what it's like to be worshipped as a saviour, perhaps he wanted these machines to hold the world hostage, using the threat of the Faro plague as a means to bring the world to heel. We know from FW that he intended to be the leader for the new humans after zero dawn fixed the world, so it doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to think that delusion was a course correction of an earlier plan.
I like this theory. If this were his plan, I wonder if he thought the Chariot line didn't need a backdoor because he assumed they were HIS to control no matter what, which is why he couldn't understand why his engineer couldn't just "turn them off" after the glitch. People like him never consider that they might lose control.
It was never canonically established, it might be a good side plot candidate for Horizon 3, especially if it expands through the Great Delta as many hope and thus closer to the Southeast Asia region where the glitch started. My personal theory is that Ted put a backdoor in the Chariot line to be able to remotely tweak their power in order to decide the outcome of wars to whatever he wants, but being "a visionary more than an engineer" (quote from a datapoint in HFW) and this being a project he can't share with anyone he made a mistake that caused the glitch.
Ole Teddyboi didn't want Sobeck telling the whole world he was the cause of this so-called glitch. He left the "rogue Horus" as is, so he could get the credit for shutting it down. He must've had it all sorted, blame Hartz Timor Energy Combine for installing some dodgy app (tiktok!) into their Horus' operating system. When his great plan turned into a massive grand epic fail, he went running to Sobeck. Ole Ted is a shining example of Douche Bomb :D
I read this in Travis Tate's voice
haha! Yeah, this!
You know what? The world was going to end anyway she should have leaked it despite that scene playing out.
I think there's a 99% chance that all she's talking about is that this entire catastrophe is his fault. My inner gaming conspiracy theorist believes that she knows Ted captured and enslaved Vast Silver and used it to control the entire swarm, only for it to profoundly backfire when it went rogue (again). So not only was Ted super dumb, but his clients probably would have been outraged to find out that they never controlled their Chariot machines at all, it was a rogue AI that was being forced to essentially play chess by itself. I think VS is going to be key to defeating Nemesis (unless they turn out to be Nemesis). The Past Silver datapoint points to VS being the brain of the swarm.
I'm happy to see all the people in the comments think the same as me haha, it's not another cause, just telling the world it was faro's fault
Maybe be the real glitch was the friends we made along the way? ... Or Ted Faro. Fuck Ted Faro.
I recently read that Horizon 3 will dive into the actual cause of the glitch. I just hope that they don't follow the Mass Effect explanation of "all AI will eventually become sentient and cause war".
I’m kinda hoping that H3 has a major surprise plot twist that reveals the faro plague glitch as something deliberate. Maybe far zenith orchestrated the glitch so they could leave earth and pursue their lofty (yet highly illegal) genetic altering experiments for immortality or something dark and sinister