Untold Games’ City 20 Consequences trailer demonstrates how your actions impact the world

Developer Untold Games has released a new trailer for its upcoming post-apocalyptic survival game, City 20. In it, we’re walked through a short play session following a quest to locate a record and how the consequences of the player’s actions are reflected in the city at every turn.

This simple quest to find a record for an NPC results in a lot of breaking and entering, as well as some bloodshed. While nobody notices these actions at first, they’re still talked about around the city, meaning the player must be careful not to get caught out by acting suspiciously. When someone finally does catch the player in the act of stealing and fighting, they’re immediately reprimanded, and the citizens of the city all turn on them after finally realizing who has been causing problems in their otherwise safe haven.

Every action is seen by the city

Untold Games explains that the consequences players will experience are all part of City 20‘s procedural Social Tension system. In some ways, this works exactly as you’d expect it to. For example, if you break into an apartment and loot through someone’s things, they’re going to talk to their neighbors about that.

The story of a beak-in will spread, and NPCs will be more careful about watching who is around. Things will only become more intense if you kill someone while looting a dwelling. Not knowing who the murderer is will be worse for the citizens, so they’ll look at you with more suspicion simply because you’re an outsider.

Furthermore, checkpoints will pop up and require you to store some of your equipment as local law enforcement attempts to find the criminal. Committing crimes and not following the rules can make your life much more difficult, but sometimes, it’s essential for a quest.

The most interesting feature of this system that I noticed in the trailer is how vendors can be killed and will then be replaced with another citizen from the city. Those citizens may have different values from the last vendor, so killing a shopkeeper who won’t cut a deal with you might increase security but could also come with other benefits.

You can try City 20 out right now in the game’s demo on Steam. It features a slew of improvements over the previous version, and the Social Tension system has almost been implemented for you to test the limits of. Just don’t be surprised when you have to answer for all the socially acceptable things in Fallout 3.