I wouldn't care if not for one factor:

You need open cities if you're going to bring back levitation.

City walls with invisible barriers and placeholder assets make the prospect of levitating over those walls game breaking. Since I would like to see levitation make a comeback, I'm definitely for seamless cities, as that would facilitate it.

That said, hardware has limitations (especially for the consoles), so I'll remain very doubtful about this happening unless we get official word otherwise.

First time that happened to me in morrowind i found it hilarious, with the new engine hopefully that could happen again .

or they could make an engine where framerate remains constant even in a city! could it be?

They already did. Having open cities isn't the massive frame rate killer everyone claims it is. That fallacy has been ingrained in everyone's minds for so long they've obviously forgotten than Morrowind had all but one city out on the open landscape and the game suffered no ill performance because of it.

I'll bet you anything that if Bethesda had stuck to what worked, nobody would have thought twice about the issue and would be placing the blame for performance issues where it belongs instead of scapegoating a mod for it.

My fps dropped from 30+ to 10 when i entered balmora. It diddnt change when entering mournhold. For me, at least, open cities kills fps.

It depends on what is actually in the city area. Open Cities...minimal loss in FPS, if any.

Open Better Cities...large loss in FPS, only really playable on upper range computer.

Yea i liked that in morrowind. I want levitation back aswell.

Oops doublepost :S

Would be nice to have ... as would be seamless outside / inside transitions.

We'll see what we'll get.

Connected, if possible. As some have said having big cities in separated cells wouldnt be too much of a problem for me. Maybe levitation is banned in the cities to ensure easier law enforcement? Would be kinda hard getting that murderer on the escape if he was 50 meters up in the air...

Yes. For sure. It just depends on whether or not the consoles could handle it though. I'd love to see a couple of wild bears breaking past the guards and going rampant in a town

This sums it up well I think.

And that's bad because...?



I also have to agree with that point - huge dense cities to explore as separate areas would be well worth the trade-off.
And on your last note, I hope the 'small backwater towns and villages' in Skyrim are bigger than they were in Oblivion. Or at least, that some of them are. Variation would be nice, rather than having them all tiny again.

Having the cities and the landscape connected would make the world feel bigger I think. It would reduce the loading time a lot, and would make the world feel more real. One of the things they could do if they wanted to have huge walled in cities with massive gates: Run a script that see's how close a PC or NPC is to the gate and when they are within such a distance of it, the gate opens. Maybe only during certain times of the day.