Arthmoor posted:

Why are there dead Oblivion gates in the cities now?

While the gates in TES4 were shown to collapse into their debris piles, the only known reason for why the physical parts vanished is because that's just how the animation was done. All gates used the same resource file so they all collapse the same way. Further, the gates that you as the player close down are done via removal of the sigil stone power source. So when those close, they're doing so under a controlled set of conditions and the physical portal withdraws as per whatever designed system the Daedra use for that.

When Martin pulls the Akatosh avatar bit at the end of TES4, whatever gates were standing open would have had their dimensional bridge abruptly severed, and I believe that would result in the physical manifestation remaining behind since it was NOT properly shut down. The end result of this should logically have been a series of gates still standing but with no portal. This was limited by how the scripting works to call their shutdown code though. All it did was instruct every gate to run the reverse animation. The code was also supposed to have caused all the debris everywhere to vanish as well but that doesn't happen, nobody reported it as a bug, and Bethesda didn't care enough to fix it.

So there ought to be various gates all over Tamriel that were left intact, including gates within cities. 200 years isn't long enough for solid stone to crumble into nothing. It is long enough for those gates which aren't being marginally maintained by those near them to become overgrown, cracked, damaged by weather, wars, etc. Could be up for debate as to weather the Nords would leave them sitting around like this or not, but there's nothing in the lore that says these couldn't simply have been left there as monuments to the Crisis.

Even here on Earth we build monuments to incredibly painful events in our history - like the WWII memorial at Pearl Harbor where they left the sunken ships in the harbor and turned it into a national monument. The statue representing the Battle of Iwo Jima. Whole museums dedicated to WWII history, and other wars fought as well. Battlefield memorials for the Civil War are everywhere. People even reenact these battles on a regular basis.

Arguments of it being feature creep don't fly either. No more so than a smelter in Riften where none exists, or gatesmen who open the gates for you if you're on horseback. These gates add a touch of uniqueness to the mod, and pay what I believe is an homage to TES4:Oblivion as one of the best games of its time. They are not active portals and nor are they eyesores. They're not even in your way.

Still not happy? Thomas Kaira has created a patch to remove the gates. Keep in mind that use of this patch is unsupported by me. Any problems arising from using it will be ignored. His is the only authorized patch, any others have been produced without permission and are likely to have game killing bugs in them. Any mention of an unauthorized version will be reported.