Horizon 3: Where will it take place?
Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores is the follow-up story DLC to the main game. Picking up right after the end of that story, Aloy helps Silens on a search for a missing Zenith. However, this DLC does not address Nemesis or the impending threat to Earth. Instead, that story is left alone with Burning Shores set up as a prologue for the third and final installment. But, there is one important question – where will Aloy be headed to on her journey? Well, the game does a good job of setting it up for us. Let’s take a look. Spoilers obviously.
At the end of Horizon: Zero Dawn, we saw Silens take off and attempt to control one of the GAIA aspects. An in-game map during one of the story cut-scenes showed us heading west toward San Francisco. The end of Forbidden West mentioned heading south and heavily implied we were going to be in Los Angeles. Low and behold, that’s where we were. Now, here we are awaiting the third game. A brief recap, if you will. At the end of Forbidden West, Aloy had defeated the Zeniths and realized that the rogue AI Nemesis was on its way back to Earth to destroy it. Fully self-aware, Nemesis is destroying any planet that the Zeniths were on. Aloy, along with Silens, are attempting to implement a plan to stop this from happening.
During the story, we encounter a new friend called Seyka. She indicates that her people were coming from far away and crash landed on the Burning Shores (Los Angeles) after being taken out by an AI machine tower. They were now unable to reach their original destination of San Francisco as they have no boats and are low on supplies. Now, Seyka and her people appear to be of Hawaiian / Samoan descent based on their appearance. Add that to Seyka’s remark about their journey and it starts to make sense. The end of the story, however, is where it all starts to come together.
After defeating the missing Zenith Londra and foiling his plans, Aloy must meet Silens back in the mainland base to complete the final quest. Silen’s mentions how has leads on how to defeat Nemesis. He is concerned that Nemesis is so advanced, but that he found five potential leads in Londra’s personal logs. According to Silens, there were five companies that existed in Londra’s time that were at the forefront of technology. It’s possible, Silens theorizes, that these companies may have some research that could help them defeat the AI Nemesis in a way it does not yet realize possible.
While talking to Aloy, Silens shows a map on the holo lens indicating the locations of the five companies. You can clearly see that all five are located on water (islands) and are all next to each other. They are all situated resembling the islands of Hawaii. Of course, we can not tell which five of the Hawaiian islands the game will lead us to, but that is to wait for the next game.
Guerilla Games does do a great job in all of the games so far indicating where the journey will take us, and Hawaii should make for a ton of new adventures for Aloy. We’ll need to wait a long while most likely as there was a five year gap between the first game in 2017 and Forbidden West in 2022. Hopefully, won’t have to wait that long. Let us know below what you thought of the DLC.
In the meantime, check out our guides on where to find the aerial captures and delver trinkets collectibles.