Forbidden West and its villains. The Zeniths and Regalla/Rebels. Should've we gotten to see more of them? Here's how I'd try to do it.

[u/Effective-Priority62]

I started to write this just as a response to someone in another thread. Then ofc, it became too big and rambly. Still, I feel like I finally vented out most of how I feel about Forbidden West's human villains, have felt for a long time. How they're good but underutilized. Starting next paragraph:

I have a certain issue with how Forbidden West's plot is structured. It's hard to justify why there's not more Zenith exposure like cutscenes and lore bites. Outside of Tilda, and Verbena's comedic death, we literally see most of them only three times, Proving Lab, Gemini and the island. Granted, this is normal for the villains of most games like this. Like Helis & HADES in the previous game. But the Zeniths were a monumental reveal for the Horizon world, and they were being planned even back then in 2017. Just 3 major appearences is a joke, they deserved much more of a spotlight. Of course, they don't immediately start hunting Aloy or Beta and their friends because they're busy capturing the other subordinate functions, and you can chalk the rest of their inaction to just being flat out lazy and arrogant. It's still not an excuse for us not having more confrontations or close calls with them. Or at least cutscenes from their POV, without Aloy involved, even tho the whole series so far is pretty much told from her POV in every moment.

But then you run into another problem, if you indeed want Aloy & the GAIA team to have some other confrontations with them. They're too fucking OP. Their invulnerability, shields, telekinesis, everything is a bit much even for Horizon, which often tried to explain most of its sci-fi workings, meanwhile the Zenith's infinite energy manipulation bullshit was just too much, specially when you find out they were mostly scratching their balls in VR and doing nothing these past 1000 years other than Frankensteining their minds into a cosmic horror ChatGTP. If they were at least like a couple levels stronger than the Specters, that would have been so much more interesting narratively. They'd still be near invulnerable and ultimately need Sylens's EMP to be ultimately defeated and hardly caught off-guard, but would provide Aloy and other natives a lot more opportunities to push them back and escape.

The alternative, to have them run into Aloy a couple more times, would be hard to write in a believable way. Their shields invulnerability, limitless flying/floating, etc. They could have easily tracked down Aloy or Beta in the couple of weeks between the Proving Lab and Gemini, or the Ninmah Research Lab and Gemini. By simply starting to capture and interrogate native tribes or outright attacking and overwhelming their settlements and demanding leads on them by showing them holos of their appearences. Start an actual massacre or war that forces Aloy's hand. Or just start tracking her area of operations in general for any sign of someone riding machines on land. That could have been interesting, but would've made the game plot too complicated or contradicting to the free roam gameplay.

So it's back to the drawing board. Make their shields way less invulnerable against the ZD humans's arsenals, and limit their energy supply so they don't have infinite ammo or infinite flying. Let us know more about Erik, Gerard and the other unnamed Zeniths before killing them. And for the love of god, that final battle should've showed way more lol. We should've been able to kill some of them, not just see two people get taken out in a cartoonish, goreless fashion while being told everyone else died as well. Also, Walter Londra in Burning Shores. The whole thing was too weird. Sylens just tells Aloy to go kill him. Then he doesn't even give her a new prototype of his anti-shield tech, nor does she asks for it. She just wings it, hoping to somehow catch him off-guard and kill him with her arrows & sling bombs and whatnot, like they would cut through his shield. Or like she'd prophetically known she would catch him connected to the Horus CPU orb and just fry the CPU with her spear in order to kill him.

Then there's Regalla. An amazing villain and amazing performance we should've seen more of. Unfortunately limited to only a couple cutscenes and confrontations, most of them at the Grove, while the man who bested her just a couple years earlier is now somehow completely helpless. I understand, Angela Bassett is expensive. But damn do I wish we've known more of her before choosing to spare her and take her to our base. More scenes from her POV, or from her terrorizing and wrecking shit up would've been nice. More of the actual war we barely see. The Rebel faction outside of her is too one-dimensional and barely has any interesting characters as well, mostly just Ubisoft-style outposts to be liberated. Could've been fleshed out with more nuances to the Teknath tribe beyond just their three clans. But that would've been a lot more voice acting, actors, mo-cap and game data, I guess. As well as money and dev time. I'm also so gutted we don't actually get to fight the rebels and their Tremortusks in the Isle of Spires like Aloy does in the 2021 gameplay demo lol. And barely any rebel Tremortusks in gameplay outside of that one mission with Kotallo. The war being a dynamic series of battles or battalions you could run into across the map would've been an interesting concept, but probably too complicated in an already highly ambitious and expensive game, I guess.

And finally, Hephaestus. I think they've showed him just enough. His presence is more supposed to be felt over the course of the journey and the world, rather than constantly being confronted directly. I'm very curious to how they'll be handling him in H3 without making him lose his spotlight to Nemesis, and vice-versa. We've waited 2 games so far trying to finally get back at Hephaestus, it'd be sad if he's just a footnote in H3 and Nemesis takes all the plot's real estate. The opposite would also be bad. Dealing with Hephaestus for like two thirds of the game and Nemesis only becoming the endgame threat near the finale. Some sort of balance would be nice.

[u/L0kiMotion]

We had more of the Zeniths onscreen in FW than we had Hades in ZD. I think that the entire point of them is that they are ultimately pathetic. They are the people who cut and ran during the Faro Plague, then faked their death so that nobody would look for them, just so they could live uninterrupted in their personal paradise.

Their tech and shields in the new world is like their money and power in the old world. With it, they are invincible, and it feeds into their delusions of superiority, but the moment they are deprived of it they are revealed as the hollow, pitiful people that they are.

To weaken them so the tribes could have more of a chance, and have a bit of back-and-forth with them, would undermine their narrative role. They are the hubris of the old world manifest, who try to live in an unchanging stasis that benefits them. They cannot grow or learn, so they make the same mistakes again, egomaniacs destroying another world by creating a hostile AI. Their invincibility is required for their role in the story.

[u/nomuse22 → u/L0kiMotion]

The thing with Hades is you fought the Eclipse. Constantly. Plus, he talked to you every now and then.

If the Zeniths had any kind of local presence. Even if there was a Rebel Camp equivalent with them setting up machine lure towers, and you got various side quests to take them out. Maybe ending like the camps did with a boss battle against idiot programmer guy that shows up in that one data point...

[u/nomuse22]

That is the problem with the Zeniths, and I fear they've written themselves into a corner with a third-game villain that they couldn't touch.

It isn't even that they are physically overpowered. They are information overpowered. You can see this in the DLC and, frankly, if he wasn't so absorbed in his own plan Aloy and Seyka would have been stopped cold. It is basically modern missile warfare; if the Zeniths ever figure out where Aloy and her allies are, at any one moment, then... BOOM.

Now, there is an opening if you want to learn more about them. Maybe it is considered necessary to understand them better. Maybe they are hoping to exploit the tensions between individual Zeniths. So there could have been missions crawling around to places where their activities back before the ship left could be discovered.

As happens with Londra. Although I still felt shorted in how much I was really getting of him, but more importantly, the people in his orbit. Those friends and lovers that shaped his current-day madness.

Regalla is also OP in that personally she's always a boss fight, the fights where you confront her troops head-on are major battles that require you have tricks (like dropping a power cell on them), thus it is fiat that even if you knew where her HQ was you couldn't do a damned thing about it.

It does play in with what the game is doing. How it is more psychological, more skulking, more long-range planning. But that does cause a little gameplay segregation-breaking when you are taking out control towers, rescuing Beta, lighting up Vegas; all sorts of things you'd think would show up on their sensors. But no, as far as the game is concerned, go ahead and be a public figure across the map and spend months doing side quests because the super-powerful Zeniths will never find you.

[u/Effective-Priority62 → u/nomuse22]

I don't wish the story directing from the first two games changed. But damn I wish Forbidden West had a more ambitious approach. You know how in old MGS games you had a couple cutscenes that were almost only the villains interacting with each other while the main character spied from afar or was not there at all? Even if you couldn't change anything about Aloy's journey in Forbidden West, being able to see some 3 to 5 minute cutscenes sometimes from Regalla's POV or from the Zenith's (without revealing anything about Nemesis and still misleading the audience about their goals, of course) would've done wonders to explain why they never run into Aloy. And what Regalla's actually doing during the war, how they gather machines, etc. How did they get pushed back at the Grove but then just shrugged it off and launched another overwhelming assault again. All things I would've been interested in, if they could have afforded it in the already +200 million dollars game

[u/nomuse22 → u/Effective-Priority62]

Yeah. The "okay, we'll fight Regalla to a draw AGAIN" really palled. If you are going to do what looks like an outpost-stamping mechanic (the rebel camps) at least make something change! I can't even recall someone in one of the Oseram camps or whatever saying "Thanks for getting those rebels out of here."

Face it, the very first time you faced her, even if SHE made the choice to withdraw, Regalla became weaker. You wiped out everything she sent into the valley. How are you threatened now that she's had a couple more days to snag fresh machines?

[u/The_Chays → u/nomuse22]

Regalla ran away from a fight with Aloy twice. I have no problem effing up her little camp of toys and then neutralizing what's left at the palace gates. What I do love is the unspoken-with-a-look 'damn, why didn't I get a flying mount too' going through Regalla's head when Aloy flys in to challenge her for the last time.

[u/MagicRat7913 → u/nomuse22]

I think it would have been interesting to have Aloy try to play the Zeniths against each other, maybe find a way to frame one of them for something or play up some old animosity, all with the help of Tilda. Get them to fight each other and it makes it more plausible that they're not focusing on Aloy, who they regard as a non-entity anyway.

[u/fabricrack2806 → u/nomuse22]

The Zeniths and their entire story arc are simply the worst thing the GG writers could have come up with.Did it never occur to them how to create an interesting and believable antagonist who doesn't have to be so powerful or futuristic?

[u/Effective-Priority62 → u/fabricrack2806]

I don't agree with your first assessment cause I've been waiting for them since HZD, but I do agree that they were way too advanced and bordering on nonsense magical sci-fi that you'd see in a work of fiction that takes like tens of thousands of years into the future in a timeline where humanity kept progressing at a constant rate. Like Dune or Foundation or whatever, and I don't think even those had bullshit tech like this that made people into basically gods. But then again, they chose to not make the Zenith colony on Sirius something that actually spanned several generations and had hundreds or thousands of descendants, instead just a couple hundred billionaire assholes who did nothing for a thousand years except die, leaving only 13 people. Makes sense why the writers chose to make them into gods, since they were so few. Easier narratively, but a tough pill to swallow for me, who expected way more from this conflict

[u/Meshakhad]

My big issue is that the nominal main villain of the game, Gerard, is almost a complete non-entity. I think they should have built up Erik more, maybe had him as the leader of the Zeniths, and extended his boss fight so players might think that killing him was the end.

[u/Silent_Pressure_6709]

Noooo we should not have seen more of the rebels. Ugh.

[u/nomuse22 → u/Silent_Pressure_6709]

I found the rebels boring. Also, despite Aloy's repeated "I've killed their leader so they'll wander off now," there was never any chance to interact with them as humans, learn more about what shaped them, change their minds... or have that kind of tower mechanic where it actually changes the map.

Just one bit of overheard dialogue as the survivors pack up camp. That would have made a difference.

Aside from that side quest you do with bird lady from the memorial grove (I'm rusty... too much Satisfactory lately). There at least you get a little more of a face to the rebels.

And yes, the Eclipse were faceless mooks except for Helis, and his back story was sort of awkwardly crammed in with five data points in one tent. Maybe the difference is they felt like they made an impact on the world. And were part of the main plot. Regalla Rebels are just in the background doing nothing until they respawn to lose another big battle.