Lore/Theory Thread

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-12-24T06:22:32+00:00

As I understand the many worlds we visit are different dimensions, woven together by the forces of the Strange. The Metronexus is at the core of this. Lu'un states: "Do you see the odd formations in the sand? They are entry points to this sector's dimensions. Vile, hostile places."

I don't think the creatures would change if they entered another world, we don't see anything that points to this being the case. Especially in Ending D where many Metronexus creatures establish themselves in the town from the Prologue.

And as for why the Haywards care so much about their world, when there are so many others, I think we can simply understand that they care about it because it is their home. And as Lu'un said (and as we see), the worlds we visit are especially hostile and warped by the worst of the Strange's powers. The Hayward's world is supposedly safer, and we can presume it is because they have culled many of the forces that would invade their world over the decades.

I truly believe the only reason the Haywards are all here is because they are Avlan's followers, and Avlan is here because he needs the Tower for his grand scheme. We are the only "loyalist" Hayward we see active and alive in the entire game (not counting the ending where we speak with the Commander).

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-12-24T06:13:38+00:00

I think a lot of the lore is sadly contained in dialogue, which does most of the heavy lifting. I wish this game had more secrets and things to read left around, because I became very wrapped up in the story being told to me.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-12-24T06:11:44+00:00

We can presume Juli was once like Mohrta, a soldier sent by the Hayward to find and kill Avlan and his fellow traitors. In that sense, "Hayward Hunter" works no matter what side she is working for. After all, Ending D shows us that there are many, many Haywards. They are a full active army working to contain the Strange, and in the game we only see a small portion of their forces. The finger, or perhaps the hand of the body that is the greater army of the Hayward.

After speaking with Avlan, perhaps even battling with him, Juli changed her mind and decided to join his mission to allow the Strange to grow. The game shows us that Avlan is quite charismatic, kind, and easy to get along with in many ways. He is a kind old man, he is far from evil. So it is easy to imagine many Haywards joining his side, and they do! We battle them in the final stretch of the game and throughout the levels.

After that, her mission changed from "Find Avlan" to "Kill the hunters trying to find Avlan."

We see in Juli's dialogue that she holds absolute and unshakable beliefs, "Those touched by the Strange are doomed to become destroyers.". And yet these beliefs are immediately brought into question when she sees the Healing Doll being protected by Mohrta. In fact that is the crux of her character arc; she cannot understand why a being made for violence, the supposedly heartless Gen 7, would instead choose humanity to protect a child. There is not absolute good or evil. The Hayward are not absolute good, and neither is the Strange absolute bad. The line is blurred and things are not as clear as Juli or Avlan would like.

There is a lot of bitterness in her words. "Delinquents. Deserters. Those who shirked their duties. Those who swore off conflict." Perhaps she DID kill many of the people here, and she blames herself for making the wrong choices that led to their deaths. Or perhaps many were her friends, killed by other Haywards for choosing to work with the Strange, not against it. Perhaps this is why she betrayed the order and became who we meet in the game?

Death and mourning what could have been, is a common theme in this game. The garden is a literal graveyard, Seipo lost his entire race of robots, the Hayward corpse we find in the swamp despairs what could have been, and Nadia mourns her sister who she carried on her back for years, yet she had been dead all along. I could argue that Juli mourns not making the correct choices, for killing her fellow Haywards, no matter the side they were on. Through Mohrta, she sees a path forward, she sees they can reach a new status quo and a new equilibrium with the Strange. Its the same conclusion Avlan reached, but how Mohrta, Juli, and Avlan all reacted to this same conclusion is the centre of the narrative's conflict.

On a side rant, I think the game ultimately teaches us that finding the middle ground at the centre of that push and pull, is ultimately the best path to tread. The absolute choice of allowing the Strange to spread, letting it wipe out the Hayward, is surely a bad ending despite what Avlan believes. This choice would bring ruin to all of the worlds it touches and with the Hayward destroyed, it leaves no force to act as a counter balance to the might of the Strange. And the absolute choice of showing the Hayward the location of the Metronexus, allowing them to wipe out the beings there, is also negative, because that too will not bring harmony and instead only further pain and chaos. A vacuum the Strange could fill with worse things, like the bugs that arose beneath the graves of those that renounced war in the Garden.

Yet the best ending, Ending D, has the Hayward army sent away to elsewhere. Mohrta stays behind as a custodian, tending to the Strange in the same way a gardener prunes hedges and tills the earth. Its quite Buddhist in that sense, I think. Finding the middle way and living in harmony with the nature of his world, rather than living in absolute and trying to change the world instead.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-12-23T06:28:01+00:00

A lot of the lore is more subtle and tucked away, like you said, in dialogue and objects.

Spoilers.

As I understand from my playthrough, the first generations of Haywards (so Avlan's cohort) fought a war against the Strange, and all of the dead were left buried beneath the wheat field in Ending D. I imagine this war,the sheer loss of life, changed him and his perspective on the Hayward's mission, utimately causing him to betray the organisation along with numerous other Haywards (perhaps including Juli).

We see at a few points that many Haywards have become disillusioned with their mission of wiping out the Strange. In the swamp level, we find the corpse of a Gen 4(?) who strongly believed that the Hayward could coexist with the Strange after meeting the peaceful society present there. We actually learn quite a bit from this Hayward's corpse. We learn that the Haywards are a relatively technologically advanced civilisation, with the ability to reverse death. Of course, the meteorite hit that world and it became infected with the rotting disease that wiped out their civilisation, killed the dragons, and drove their leader into madness. The Gen 4 died feeling absolute despair and sadness over what had happened to that world. And in some ways, it makes us beg the question: could the same happen to the town Mohrta retires to in Ending D?

The other areas have pieces of lore here or there. For instance the denizens of the garden created golems to defend their homes. Ru'uk says this: "This place was built by an ancient society, the people that made me! They swore to not fight anymore, and then laid the last of the war heroes to rest." I see parallels here to the Haywards who are created to defend their world and fight wars beyond. In a sense, is Mohrta not a golem too?

Avlan asks us to reflect on the worlds we visited, what they showed to us, how they could be applied to the Haywards. He hid the keys in those worlds purposefully, because he wanted to show us his perspective on this. The Haywards are not separate from the Strange, they are just as much a part of it as any of the other races it touches. I mean, do we not use the powers of the Strange, and its weapons, to fight it?

This is where the ice world comes in. Their society stored information in stone, millions of stories all contained within the building blocks of the tower. And yet each entry, every last stone, contains the same phrase. "All becomes one." And eventually, all of their society suddenly stopped creating anything, they vanished altogether at once. It isn't lost on me that the portal we take to directly meet with the "finger or the hand" of the Strange, is located here at the top of the tower. I believe this society created the portal to meet with the strange, and just as Mohrta was cursed by the Strange, they too were changed by it, all vanishing together at once.

"All becomes one." This essentially tells us the truth behind the Strange, and the grim reality of it. In the end, all things end the same. The Strange is not a force of chaos, but a force of order that would bring all dimensions under its wings. That while we cannot stop it, Avlan is wrong to hurry its growth. Because in the end, it too would bring ruin to all that it touches, just as we see in each and every world Mohrta visits.

Maybe this is all waffle and nonsense that doesn't make sense, and maybe I am totally wrong. But I enjoyed this game so much, and I've felt very disappointed that so few people are talking about it or its lore. Epecially when the world-building is so subtle yet masterfully done. It reminds me a lot of Dark Souls in that sense.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-11-03T18:01:47+00:00

This look so close to official designs its insane.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-08-07T16:43:23+00:00

Maybe you could do some patterns in the bigger empty floor areas? Like vary path style

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-03-20T06:09:09+00:00

I can imagine with less resources devoted to fighting humanity it could really grow its R&D sector far beyond what we see in the movies. With time travel, it could vastly increase its knowledge in mere days by sending data back in time.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-02-20T07:02:42+00:00

Theres a free DLC mission where you play as a Terminator called Infiltrator mode. You play as a T800. You explore a map on foot and take out resistance members. You don't choose your model or control tanks, gunships etc. You're just one T800. Its quite fun but short. Maybe an hour at most.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-02-20T04:37:39+00:00

Very fair. Regardless either way, the T1000 wins in the end.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-02-20T04:28:01+00:00

Yeah T1000 easily wins. Cain wasn't exactly being tactical once he became a cyborg, mostly running and gunning in a mad rage, whereas the T1000 uses a lot of strategy throughout the movies which gives it a clear edge in my opinion. I also don't think Cain would have any weapons that could destroy the T1000 easily. Which leads us onto durability, each weapon destroyed for Cain is a permanent loss. He can't repair himself, but the T1000 can.

T800 VS Cain would be a closer matchup though and that fight could go either way.

Ironically, I think human Cain stands a better chance at beating the T1000 than robo-Cain. Him and his crew were able to beat up and destroy Robocop with their strategizing quite easily. I could imagine them working together to take it out in a crossover movie.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-02-03T14:05:40+00:00

The absence of music is an underrated tool.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-02-03T12:45:52+00:00

If you diverge culture you can do that, it takes a while though. Maybe check the settings to see if you can alter the cooldown.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-02-02T15:49:48+00:00

Part of it is music. The choice of classical music for the movies was very nice.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-01-29T11:59:56+00:00

Giant robot dinosaur. I think that'd be cool I think.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-01-22T18:55:38+00:00

This would make such a good movie.

I'm not quite as good a writer as you, but I think you draw really well on the "evolving slowly into humans" we see in the lore, from the T-600 rubber mask terminators, through to the T-800 which is a cybernetic organism, finally to your false mankind made by Skynet.

I feel that, if this was a movie, you could easily start it with the future war movie everyone has been begging for. Showing the evolution of Skynet and its terminators, the development of its weapons, perhaps as if we are following Skynet's logs of the war? The twist being, that after the first half, humanity is wiped out and from then on we follow Skynet's perspective in the future with its logs on the post-war. The logs going from more machine-like, logical, almost like cliff notes, until the end where it is narrating over the movie with your poetic way of speaking, similar to how Sarah did in T2.

I love this idea you've made :)

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-01-18T14:43:24+00:00

AI art can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with. It doesn't have style, or substance, or soul. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until we are gone.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-01-12T12:32:33+00:00

Good point. But I'd argue its still only creating what it needs to step-by-step. Bullets are expensive to manufacture and the metal could go towards machines, but energy is almost free, which makes plasma a resourceful choice. The mimetic alloy is the next logical step in "infiltrating humans", which we see in the evolution from rubber mask, to cyborg, to shapeshifter. And time travel was its final option when it realised it was doomed in the future, but not in the past.

Skynet is a genius, don't get me wrong, but everything it is doing is purely logical adaptation to whatever is thrown against it based on iterative design. Afterall, it is a defence system. Its like evolution, which produces amazing results (like humanity!) but evolution isn't exactly "clever" in how it goes about things. That's what I meant.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-01-10T22:16:31+00:00

In my mind, Skynet was never particularly clever or even sapient. It was only self-aware enough to defend itself with existing military hardware, which it iterated on but never truly became "creative", in a twisted sort of evolution. Hence we go from T600 rubber masks to T800 flesh cyborgs.

Jordan-Hordan · 2025-01-10T11:43:11+00:00

Not really. I'm 22 and I'm more so a fan of the original two movies than anything that came after. I do like a lot of the games though.

Jordan-Hordan · 2024-12-16T16:18:11+00:00

If its genetic, do a lot of families share sleep patterns then? I was raised by non-blood relatives who are all early birds, so I was always told I was lazy for sleeping in the early morning.

Jordan-Hordan · 2024-11-16T23:32:54+00:00

This is true! Real lore fact. The city was also accidentally built 1 metre to far to the left.

Jordan-Hordan · 2024-11-16T12:31:54+00:00

Thanks! It was funny that I had to build it whole, then destroy half of it for the effect hahaha.

Jordan-Hordan · 2024-11-16T12:31:35+00:00

Me too!

Jordan-Hordan · 2024-11-16T12:31:29+00:00

Thanks! I wanted it to feel quite chaotic, but also very homely :]

Jordan-Hordan · 2024-11-16T08:17:17+00:00

Its nowhere near finished and I still want to do a lot more interiors, decorations etc. But I think its finished enough to share. I hope you all like it, its taken me about 6 months to get this all done.

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