Are story and MMO seperated?

I've a question about the story which will be told in SotA. Is it possible to follow the story in each of the four modes or is this only possible for the single player (offline?) mode?

 

The way I understood it was that the story could be played in every mode, and that the only difference between them was the number of players that were visible to you. If there is deviation from that, I suspect many people will be rather upset.

Edit: My logic for this was the statement regarding the Pledge Lot process in which Port stated that [some areas may not be accessible until you play through the story]. Paraphrasing, of course.

 

You can play the story in any of the 4 game modes.

 

Thank you for your information Solstar and enderandrew.

 

If I get a quest to kill an evil Lich in some ruins, will other players be there, too in open online mode, trying to kill the Lich? An what happens if another player kills him? Will he magically reappear out of the air? Or will I be there in an instance so that only I can kill the Lich? Will he stay dead? Or can I kill him over and over again?
Will the Lich stay dead in single player mode only?

 

This is a good questions - among other open questions concerning the story part of SotA. To separate the story from the MMO part could solve many or all of such potential problems. But this isn't the solution which I would like. And this is the reason why I asked.

 

Very good questions and things they haven't yet revealed how it will play out. The easy answer is that for certain quests where you have to kill a story-based MOB, the game will force you into SPO as you enter the scene. They've stated they will do that for certain parts of the storyline, so that mechanic can be re-used for any or even all parts of the story.

For example, how will they solve the Myra/Myron problem? If I killed Myron, why is he still alive to you if this world is truly persistent? The game would need to break its own rules about maintaining persistence across instances if they want to give every player the same quest / experience. They still need to fix it so that Myron stays dead in my instance if I were to return.

We know that scenes will have different states, like Solace Bridge on fire or not, or The Clink undergoing a riot or not, etc. So they could tie quest results as different states of a scene and spawn the correct instance depending on how you "solved" the quest. So ultimately there may be multiple states of every story-based scene and you'd get put into whichever one is appropriate for you and you'd never see the others which means you'd be segregated from other players that went the opposite path -- including your friends and even party members -- because choices and consequences.

But again, speculation until they actually implement more quest mechanics.

 

smack,

There's also an issue with scenes where you might not be able to see other players but can bring in a party -- say to defeat a dragon. For example, if half of the party defeated the dragon and the other half didn't. One solution is for it to depend entirely on the team leader, though its hard to say if that could be used as an exploit.

 

I guess if it was critical enough to the story that you experience it only with others who have yet to kill the dragon, the game should split the party. If it's not that critical, they can leave the party intact if at least one person has yet to kill the dragon. If everyone in the party has, the scene should be of a dead dragon, perhaps?

 

SWTOR puts any story scene in a single player instance. When you walk into that instance, you can make a decision (such as killing an enemy or sparing them). You're the only one in the instance. You can't repeat the story instance. When someone else walks in, they see the scene for themselves and make their own choice. FWIW, this is an MMO that allows this behavior.

The other option is to control mob visibility. If I killed him the mob just isn't visible to me, even though I'm in the same instance where you may be able to see him. I've seen Wizard 101 (a kid's game) pull this off.