To throw flames on this old topic. A source at Larian mentioned to me that a lot of additional content was cut, although they would not confirm either way if it was the upper city (although they said it was extensive.) That said, they mentioned that the Emperor was a late addition who resulted from players not engaging with the tadpole mechanic. Food for thought.
That was already clear when they still printed Daisy in the artbook and not the Emperor and that the voicelines still suggests that using tadpoles is bad.
It looks to be they had someone competent work on the story for EA who then left and every change after that was made by a hack and made the game worse.
But if true that they rewrote the main story just to implement their shitty tadpole powerup system no one uses the Larian is even worse than I thought.
