I found two mods and they seem to be the same except for the name. Open Cities Classic and Open Better Cities. So which one is better? Do any of them have conflicts with Bananasplit's Better Cities?

Open Cities Classic is Open Cities without Better Cities being integrated.

Open Better Cities integrates Better Cities into Open Cities.

So, they are not the same, and both of them conflict entirely with Better Cities, though Open Better Cities is a merge so running them both would be silly anyway.

so I shouldn't go with either of them then?

Ultimately it's a personal decision on your part.

Personally I went with Better Cities. Originally I was interested in Open Better Cities but it's not being maintained any longer so you won't get the benefit of newer and future updates to Better Cities. Better Cities also has less conflicts with other mods.

It depends on what you want relly... if the open city aspect is more important than the cities actually being more detailed the go with Better Cities, if you want Open and nice looking cities then get Open Better Cities, you wont get any new updates but you will have nicer looking cities and they will be OPEN BTW... you may know this, Open Better Cities will kill your FPS unless you have a great graphics card, open cities wont do much to FPS (it didnt to me).

It's all a question of whether Open is more important to you than "Better" (in quotes, because it's very subjective whether you consider the changes an improvement).

Open Cities will cause issues with any mod that directly uses content in the closed cities worldspaces, and does not provide alternate handling of the open version. In some cases, the required patches are supplied with OCC, and in others, the changes have been made to the mods themselves by the authors (like mine). You'll only have issues with a few mods that don't know OCC exists. Better cities leaves everything in its original worldspace, so there's less opportunity for conflict with other mods, but that does happen too.

Either way, you are definitely going to be trying them out first. All three of these mods will hurt FPS, regardless (unless you have some monster machine.) You are going to have to evaluate whether or not the performance trade for the visual enhancement is worth it.

Well I tried out the open better cities one and found a pretty major glitch. When trying to walk into Anvil the door opens then I stop about 2 feet in the door way. After FINALLY finding a way to fast travel into the city I look and the [censored] gates are gone. It's just a brick wall where the door should be. I guess I'll just have to forget about using open cities. It was a neat idea but not at the cost of lower FPS and broken gates.

Messed up gates is a user error. Clearly, many people use that mod. You should install a mod properly before talking about what its negatives are.


Edit: The problem could be load order or installation error.

Your giving up after only trying one (and picking the biggest performance killer that is no longer be developed on top of that!)? If you want open cities, try open cities classic. It is the least demanding of the three performance wise as it is just the vanilla cities moved into the Tamriel worldspace. Better Cities will likely cost a few fps but changes the cities layouts to be more interesting.

Sorry you're right I shouldn't bash something I only tried once. I'll have to try the two out to see what one I like best while not running better cities.