As the player traverses the world ofHorizon Zero Dawn, they can come across collectibles known as Vantage Points. These were not scattered around the world at random, but were purposefully placed by a character from the old world, documenting his remaining time on Earth.
Collecting all the Vantage Points is not required to complete the story ofHorizon Zero Dawn. However, doing so is well worth the time, as these datapoints contain an emotional, brutally honest story — the story of Bashar Mati.
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Bashar Mati: Horizon Zero Dawn’s Unlikely Storyteller
There are 12 Vantage Points, each containing a snapshot of the old world, an audio log, and the transcript of a letter. These were all compiled by Bashar Mati,an employee of Faro Automated Solutions(FAS) who got his hands on some of the company’s Vantage spikes. Vantage spikes are portable drill applicators outfitted with Eternity chips — computer chips that could store data for at least 50,000 years. Once Mati acquired the Vantage spikes, he tooka tour to local landmarksthat were closest to his heart and planted a spike there.
Born in 2040, Mati was the son of Aamaal and Bayhas Mati. His father was a retired pilot who then taught at the Air Combat Academy, where he talked about human airpower in an age where air forces were predominantly automated. Still, not all aircraft were automated at the time, and this is what ultimately led to the demise of Mati’s father. He got into a fatal accident whileflying a Razorwing unit for Metallurgic International, a mining corporation. Because of this, Mati developed a strong contempt for the company. It also caused a rift between him and his mother.
After the death of Mati’s father, his mother convinced Metallurgic International to hire her, as the company refused to provide the death settlement. The corporation agreed and had her tend to mining robots, which paid just enough for the family to get by. At one point, a robot malfunction injured Mati’s mother, crushing her arm and clavicle, but Metallurgic International refused to pay for the injury. Both the company and even Matichalked it up to be human error.
Even then, Mati’s mother couldn’t accept this outcome as it would put a dent in her finances. Thus, she raised her complaint to higher offices until it reached Wyatt Mahante, who ordered an investigation around the matter. Mati notes that this may have been because he liked his mother as once the matter was resolved, the two started seeing each other.
Mati hated Mahante. He felt that his mother replaced his father with a “corporate drone,” and she made it as difficult as possible for the both of them. Mati accused his mother of only being with Mahante for his money, and even went as far as trashing a museum that Mahante was personally involved in setting up. Whenthe day of their wedding came, Mati refused to show up. Instead, he went to a concert and ingested all forms of drugs — including one called Razorwing.
That night, Mati overdosed. According to a police report, he attacked the Razorwing seller and burned all his merchandise. Not long after,security drones arrived that tasedand nearly killed Mati. Luckily, med-bots managed to revive him before taking him to the hospital. When Mati woke up again, his mother was the first person he saw. It was then that Mati realized what he was doing to himself — and his mother. The day after that, he agreed to go into treatment for his drug addiction.
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Write A Story Across The Stars
After Mati got out of rehab, he found that his interest in tech had been reignited again. As such, he was more eager to study, acing his academics and catching up on his lost time. On a family camping trip, Mati taught his mother about constellations, the solar system, andeven pointed out the Odyssey, which was still under construction. Then, he told his mother that he wanted to become an aerospace engineer. To which she replied, “You will write the story of our family across the stars.” Mati took this to heart, eventually getting into Standford University. After his time as an undergraduate, he immediately got a job as an Aerospace Control Engineer at FAS.
At one point, he took his mother to Bryce Orbital, where the company was launching a vehicle to gather resources from a nearby asteroid. The machine’s upgraded propulsion system was his design — something he was very proud of. Together, they watched the vehicle launch into space and Mati’s mother told him that he had, indeed,written their story across the stars.
The Beginning of the End
After some time, Mati’s mother became severely ill. Matirushed to the hospital, but by the time he got there, she’d already slipped into a coma. Mati would find out that his mother’s body had suffered from exposure to dangerous solvents during her time working at Metallurgic International. She’d been undergoing treatments without Mati knowing — all because she didn’t want to distract him from his important work.
Mati argued his way to a personal leave and stayed by his mother’s bedside for seven days. He wanted to be the first thing she saw when she woke up, but on the eighth day, she was pronounced dead. Mati fell behind at work and eventually started ingesting drugs again — a variety of them, except Razorwing. After, a friend convinced him to undergo treatment, for which he needed a psych leave from work, which he considered “career suicide.”
Sure enough, FAS reassigned him to the Vantage project after he finished his treatment. It was one of the company’s “doomed projects,” which Mati knew they would eventually cancel to lay off those working on it. During his time there, he was called to King’s Peak, where he was to be interviewed by Samina Ebadji, who had worked for the Odyssey andwas now part of Project Zero Dawn. Mati was unaware of this, however, and simply answered questions about the Eternity chip and its potential upgrades.
This sent alarm bells ringing in Mati’s head as he had an inkling that “something big” was going on behind all this. To find out, he hacked into another FAS employee’s Focus andlearned about the Faro Plagueand the fate of humanity. With that knowledge, he contemplated ending his life. He thought about overdosing in Mahante’s private cottage but, ultimately, decided against it.
Instead, he took a tour, planting spikes as he went. Throughout the journey, he realizes how insignificant everything is. He never wrote anything across the stars — no one did. The Faro Plague was proof that the entire human species failed. So, at the end of it all,Mati just wanted to tell his story— not a big one, spanning across the solar system, but the small one, embedded in the earth. He writes, “once upon a time, on a planet called Earth, there lived a boy named Bashar who loved his mother very, very much.”
Horizon Zero Dawnis available now for PC, PS4, and PS5.
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