Proposal: "story-instance" für story-related cities

As we know it is very hard if not impossible to create different instances in housing-zones. This leads to us not seeing any visible and lasting consequences to our actions. A child can never be reunited with its mother. A murderer can never be hanged or thrown into prison. This is very disappointing because SotA is advertised with this sentence "Players will adventure through over 40 hours of story in an interactive world where their choices during ethical paradoxes have consequences."
Also other RPGs do show consequences to our actions - for example The Witcher 3 or The Elder Scrolls Online and it would be a real bummer if SotA wouldn't do this, too.

How about story-related cities would get a separate "story-instance" without housing. If a player approaches a city or village in which story-related quests and side-quests take place, he can choose if he wants to enter the "story-instance" or the "housing-instance".
The "housing-instance" contains all of the player houses and merchants as well as non-quest NPCs.
The "story-instance" contains no player-housing but still merchants and quest-NPCs.

This would solve some problems:

1. There could be visible consequences to our actions. NPCs could die, houses could be destroyed, a mother can be reunited with her child, NPCs could be thrown into jail or leave the scene...
2. The story-instance could get buildings which fit the style of the city, leading to unique looking areas like it was the case with for example Yew, or Trinsic in the old Ultimas. Cities could get their own "personalities" which would not be "ruined" by chaotic player housing.

How to solve the problem of different players making different choices:

The simplest solution would be to make the story-instances single player only or if others want to join they simply have to accept the fact that they are now in the instance of the party leader.

Maybe it would be possible for NPCs to be only visible to certain players according to the choices they made. If Player A let the NPC live, he is visible for him but not for Player B who let the NPC die.

Is this solution perfect? No. But neither is not showing any consequences at all...

 

Für?
Erwischt

 

@ topic
I think this is a somewhat clumsy but non the less brilliant solution.
I support this idea.

 

Basically it's what Blizzard uses in Wow, too for example... yes I used those forbidden word... wohoo... What they do is to create a whole story-based instance of an area or city when you are participating at a certain (mostly epic-graded) event. Once you finished that event, you enter the city as normal and everything is where it used to be... I don't see why this could not work here, too. It would allow for really cool and epic battles AND keep playerhouses where there are...

 

Don't get me wrong.
I would be for more lasting consequences.
But if that's a compromise I can get I will take it.

 

Brilliant idea!

 

Excellent idea, I like your suggestion

 

Yes, this way housing fans won't feel shoved into instances and can happily display their awesome decorations for everybody to see

 

I think the idea is a bit too simple, I would rather see they make housing districts surrounding the NPC town center and use the invisible walls porting you from one instance to the other so that you do not actually realize you are changing scenes (this means using preloading and dumping the long load screens). This way when you run downtown to the public vendor and bank, if you feel like doing a quest you can. Much simpler than leaving town, and reintering into the story version. My idea is more like a congressional district meandering a dividing line, when you cross the line your state changes from housing mode to story mode same as when you swim out of the Pax Lair sea you change instances. It gives the appearance of housing and story existing side by side, when they are in fact not in the same database instance, it just looks like they are.

It is the same result that when you are in the story part of town you see no player housing. But you could still have player merchants as they are just NPCs anyways. You could still live downtown in a rowhouse, you just cross the invisible wall when you go into the door. You can still see the outside from your roof because the NPC part of town is just scenery. Everyone in your housing district outside of town center can still see each others yards like it or not, although I would accomodate those that want to be further removed from the housing district and make their house an instance in the instance just so they do not have to see the lighthouses on the lake from their tower that it would be a more natural lake.

The OP idea is better served for implementing town raids in PRT/POT where there are no storyline NPC to invisibly wall off (and currently do not even get gate seiges) The event just takes you to a different instance but there is no need to maintain it's player state as with quests. Soon as the town is restored back by everyone your house is restored from the backup database. Maybe your crops and crafted items got burnt, that is OK because the system already supports these items being dynamic.

Town swapping works better for this astrological event and nothing wrong with it ending the same way for all players. Who cares if the PRT NPCs that died in the raid come back to life, they are generic and bland with no story to tell. Just like Skyrim town guards they are all the same. Who cares if the snowmen should have melted in the fire, I can imagine someone just made new ones from the everlasting snowball box.

So lets do both invisible walls for PC questing so that people you cared about can die, and swappable towns for town raids where it does not matter.