She doesn't know what she wants for herself because she hasn't had time to think about that since her whole reality was flipped upside down and put into a blender in the last third of the first one. This is a middle story of at least 3 and they make it very clear going into it that's she hasn't focused on anything else other tracking down what she's tracking down at the beginning of FW. Assuming narrative Aloy beelines the story objectives, FWs story happens in a pretty condensed period of time.
She was also a literal outcast her whole life and has zero social skills, community, or attachment to social constructs. She grew up knowing that the things everyone else thought were magic, gods, etc, were just tech, so she doesn't trust the judgement of anyone else because they have always looked and acted like superstitious tribalists that would happily cut off their own nose to spite their face. Regardless of her special innate abilities, that's why she's a loner. That may or may not change in future games, but she's always been a very well fleshed out, consistent, and relatable character to me. I think some people may just be way too social to understand where she's coming from.
Er, gotta disagree on 'fleshed out' and 'consistent', but relatable... sure, I guess. I'm assuming you don't mean the whole 'girl with a saviour complex' thing for that part.
Aloy as a person has essentially one motivation: save the world. Everything else follows from that, which makes the disparity between her fucking around for people she just met and saving the world on a time limit a pretty big one, requiring a large amount of suspension of disbelief. Granted, I'm able to do this, because the alternative is a hard time limit, which isn't fun at the best of times. But here's the thing about Aloy as a person in this world: she started off as an outcast, then became the saviour of the world, has no time for friends ('I have to go',) but also has time to listen to random exposition dumps
from them, and to help out every rando she meets.
The issue is that Aloy as a character and Aloy as a player character have to co-exist. Aloy as the person
you play needs to save the world and help everybody and collect robodino parts and help salvage operations and clear camps out and spelunk caves and stab flowers because it's a video game catering to your power fantasy. Aloy as a character, then, exists mostly as a sketch because of this - she's every game's generic hero, with a few parts filled in, because more than that would highlight an even bigger disparity between your actions as a player and what she should be thinking and doing as a character with a deep dislike for her community.
So she shows growth in HFW by being snide to people getting in her way (see: the priest after the embassy) and losing patience with people who don't affirm her (see:
Beta), because that's most likely how you the player would feel after saving the world as Aloy in ZD, so that's as far as it can go. Which is a problem, because she has
no inner conflict whatsoever about what she's doing at any point in time in the game. She's always right, and the game proves her right at every opportunity*. There's very little introspection that I can recall, and I think there was like one side quest where she could have showed some real personality (the man with dementia), but her inner voice goes 'he doesn't seem to be all there' in her default critical tone. The only real fleshing out you see is when Burning Shores gives her a potential love interest, and it finally gives her the freedom to be awkward around another person and navigate her way through it in a conversation or two; but it's also given short shrift because, well, the world (or something threatening it by proxy) needs saving. There's never enough time for Aloy to be Aloy; but also, if she was asked to be anything but the world-saver, who could she be as a real person?
The answer is anything you as the player want her to be, so long as it's a hero. And that is because Guerrilla seems to think that's the wrong question to ask.
*Well, almost. The idea to
give the Zeniths a diversion didn't work, I'll give it that.
