Board Thread:Online Discussion/@comment-25340654-20141010201330/@comment-25340654-20141017155938

Draevan13 wrote: ViVe wrote:

It doesn't mean that something is blank it can be freely edited. You must look at the consequences and since it happend before skyrim they must take a look after the cities and their history in Skyrim before making the same city in Online As I explained, there's a logical explanation for Windhelm looking brand new, it was just rebuilt a few years before, of course it won't be ruinous.

As for Riften, it's hardly a "metropolis", it's no bigger than any other city in the game. Smaller than some, actually. As to it looking different than it does in Skyrim, it does take place several hundred years before. Cities change over long periods of time.

The cities will always change appearance from game to game. For example, none of the cities in Skyrim, Oblivion or Morrowind look anything like they did in their first appearance, Arena. Not even close. Lore changes happen quite often in long series, TES has been no exception to this rule, even Bethesda has done this in their games. Remember them retconning Cyrodiil's entire climate and saying "because Talos".

City architecture/layout changing over the centuries requires no such retconning, fortunately. But it has it influences on later variants. The Imperial City can't look the same as Solitude and so on.