In protest of Faro’s move toward defense contracting, she quits her job and starts her own company, which ends up winning all kinds of awards for its “green robots.” And when Faro’s military robots turn deadly, it’s Sobeck to whom he turns, desperate for a solution to a problem of his own making. Sobeck represents the best of humanity: a genius who puts her brilliant mind to work in cleaning up the consequences of climate change. Image: Guerrilla Games/PlayStation Mobile “We felt that any version of a timeline for 2020-2065 would have to include or it wouldn’t feel credible,” says McCaw. If you look at the potential consequences of ignoring this seemingly intractable problem, and the difficulty of tackling it, it starts to feel obvious that climate change presents an existential threat to the planet. I’ve read a lot of reporting on the capacity for climate change to completely reshape life on Earth, especially if people around the world don’t immediately undertake all possible efforts to slow it. and try to extrapolate plausible science-fictional outcomes that enhance the themes of the franchise.” “We look especially closely at technological trends - AI, automation, robotics, transportation, etc. “Every time we add something to our alternate timeline, we take great pains ensure it feels real,” says Ben McCaw, narrative director at developer Guerrilla Games and lead writer on Horizon Zero Dawn, in an email interview with Polygon. When some robots start to go rogue in late 2064, Sobeck quickly realizes that there’s no stopping them from consuming every living cell on the planet. These self-repairing, AI-driven war machines are already built by AI-run factories, but in a final, fatal step toward disaster, Faro engineers develop a battle robot that is capable of consuming biomass and turning it into fuel - i.e., eating - instead of needing to be recharged. The company’s founder, Ted Faro, unknowingly creates the conditions for Earth’s sixth mass extinction when he pivots the firm to military contracts, producing automated defense systems for governments, corporations, and other entities. See 4 exclusive pages from Titan Comics’ Horizon Zero Dawn But in the game’s fiction, that extinction event comes in the near future, with a plague of killer robots that consume all organic matter on Earth sometime in the late 2060s - which would be during the lifetime of many people reading this article. Guerrilla Games’ 2017 adventure takes place a thousand years in the future, on a barely recognizable Earth that has suffered the catastrophe that we perhaps fear the most: the extinction of all life on the planet. The specifics of Horizon Zero Dawn go beyond that familiar framework to deliver a unique sense of thrill and hope that’s far less common - a vision of the future that’s optimistic because of how strongly it centers women. But that alone isn’t why I love it so much. Horizon Zero Dawn tells a classic science fiction story, one of my favorite examples of the genre: a tale of how humanity’s indomitable spirit and survival instinct can conquer the most hostile circumstances one could imagine. Follow along as we deep dive into the great unknown.
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What does the future hold? In our new series “Imagining the Next Future,” Polygon explores the new era of science fiction - in movies, books, TV, games, and beyond - to see how storytellers and innovators are imagining the next 10, 20, 50, or 100 years during a moment of extreme uncertainty.
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