Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
A mission storyline, whether put in place by exact quests or by simply having the NPCs and certain plot locations necessary to progress several different ones, is needed, but it doesn't need to be as urgent as an actual "mission". General plot connectablity is just as viable, and does not limit the city's use to just a small set of quest lines.
Storyline does have to explain why this particular town is not coming after you when the rest of the empire is. This is why "enemy side" parts in a game's story are brief and temporary, and you usually never see that element again after it is no longer relevant to what you're doing in-game.

Phasing it the zones into oblivion as with Cataclysm's Vash'jr and Mt. Hyjal, inversely, tends to leave only a shoddy mess of a half-assed plot progression.
While I'm not one to turn to phasing as the first option in telling a story, the convoluted mess seen in WoW was due to shoddy writing. The phasing itself had little to do with said mess.

WoW examples aside, I agree that being locked into places such as to create the feeling of really being lost in a jungle or unable to escape from a city can be great. However, there's a lot that can still be done with less urgency in these zones.
I don't think you can really have an enemy city that is friendly to you "just because". There's a reason you usually have either purposeful infiltration, anmesia, and general displacement as devices used to explain why these people are not killing you on the spot.