As we all know, in Morrowind, buildings were separated from the outside world by a loading screen. In Oblivion, this expanded to cities.

Will Skyrim continue this trend, or will we buildings and cities truly be a part of the world?

I don't know, but I hope not.

Nothing said about it.

The Xbox 360 and PS3 hardware say no, the cities will remain in seperate cells.

this puts a strains on a lot of systems and not all people can handle it
I would rather have cities with a loading screen than no city at all any day

You don't want open cities?...

I doubt it.

we really dont know the difference between the game engine so who knows except bethesda employees

This is my biggest fear and will be my biggest gripe. Something about being able to look out a window and actually see outside that really helps build immersion and a seamless environment. In all the previous games going from inside to out always felt disjointed.

I believe in GI it said that some towns (between the tiny Oblivion settlements and large cities) will be open world but it didn't confirm anything about major cities. They could easily just put an invisible barrier around a city above the wall that makes you load into it if we have levitate. This should have been done in Oblivion.

Exactly what I'm thinking.

Though I can see how hardware is a constraint.

Some people believe we will have open cities due to a comment about fighting dragons in towns from random en[censored]ers.

Most of this is specultion from speculation of the GI article.
But I wouldn't get your hopes up.

For all we know some cities might not have seperate cells and it just extends to buildings in the cities like Morrowind.

I wouldn't mind cities being in different cells. I'd be alright with cities in different cells, but I hope that buildings and such in cities don't have cells separate to that of the cities'.

there was one city in a picture that you can tell wasn't walled in

good point but i hope not although it is more likely it will because the cpu has more "stuff" to handle.

Open cities? Possible.

Interior cells merged with exterior cells? Highly doubtful.

Now that I think about it, wouldn't mind the cities so much as the buildings.

Whenever I've played a game that had houses in the world, without their own exterior cells, That has always broken immersion for me. I like open cities, but not houses.

I prefer to have cities as good if not better than http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16513 and being closed than have boring,simple,less NPCs,etc. open cities.

How so?

I would guess for most it's the other way around.

I hate how people would just fade in/out of doorways instead of actually walking inside. Having everything open celled would be amazing, although system and engine restraints will probably prevent any real progress in this area.

The graphical requirements have increased while the grunt of those machines have not. Either something gets cut or the cities stay as seperate cells since the 360 and ps3 don't even have 2gb of ram.

I don't see why they "need" closed cities.
Sure, they have to load, but cities have walls. So you can have things start loading as you approach them, like the outdoors, but because we have so many walls to constrain our line of sight we can reduce the distance that would invoke loading. Or they could implement a line of sight loading scheme. What I mean is things that are in your line of sight, or could be in your line of sight in X frames, load before other things that will not be in your line of sight. NPC's can be walking around without their model loaded, which means little loading for them, as they walk around the town FAR away from you, then as they approach this line of sight "aura" they load.

Sure, its a something else for them to program, but it would be very good for their game engine. Maybe you are standing halfway up a very steep, and very narrow mountain. The idea is there is a whole valley that "should" be loaded with the previous loading system in Oblivion and Morrowind, due to your proximity to it, but because there is a considerable amount of mountain blocking your view it isn't loaded. Thats a whole valley worth of stuff you didn't need to load, meaning more stuff that could be loaded on your side.

Now im no game developer, and maybe this system could take up too much memory deciding what to load and what not, but its also something that they could have considered.

So, point is, its possible things will be open, and as far as I see there was never a reason not to have open cities and open cells.

Do you think we'll at least be able to look through windows and see the snow falling outside?

Open cities may be possible, or at least larger open towns, but there's no way we'll get open buildings.

You see that in games like GTA and RDR because there aren't as many objects with physics. Compared to the exteriors, interiors in Bethesda games tend to be much more densely packed with objects, all of which have physics and can be scattered by a powerful spell, etc. Asking the game to process all that *and* the NPCs outside would be an extremely daunting task, not just for the consoles, but most likely even for a high end PC.