Horizon Zero Dawn Explained: What Does The Ending Really Mean?

2. Ted Faro's Choice - One Of The Most Profound Questions In Gaming History

The stage is set, GAIA and HADES have both revealed themselves, we as the audience know what Aloy must do, and we're aware of all the billions of individual sacrifices made to get the Zero Dawn project off the ground.

Through intel-gathering and holograms, we find out all the project leads in charge of all the requisite sub-systems of APOLLO were gathered in a specific facility - one that Ted Faro then arrives to announce that he won't be joining.

Instead, he presents one of the most profound quandaries in morally complex questions a game has ever asked:

If you could encapsulate all the knowledge of the world, good and bad, would you impart it on a new human race, or would you refrain, under the assumption they could repeat all our collective mistakes?

Faro is beset by the notion that by gifting a future populace with everything he and his team have assembled means they could eventually recreate the same machines, enact the same fate on the world and essentially, repeat the very thing all of this was designed to stop.

As such, he wipes the APOLLO knowledge files clean, before killing every project lead, dooming future humankind to start all over again, much like our world's humans once did, way back when.

Think of it this way: Would you leave the plans for a nuclear bomb lying around (alongside footage of Hiroshima), under the assumption someone will learn from your past mistake, or remove them entirely and hope such a thing is never constructed?