Well, I suppose it does have a consequence. An extremely underwhelming and stupid, circumventable consequence, but a consequence nonetheless. I think what people imagined the Upper City to be makes the story of Larian going from mentioning it in their latest panel shy of a month away from release to just straight up deleting it for full release with no trace of it in the datamines too incredible. I try to stick with Occam's Razor for this one.
Except that the razor says that Larian was/is lying for marketing purposes like they did for other topics.
And its not as if they are above making radical changes to the game in the last minute. See the entire Emperor storyline.
The Emperor's storyline wasn't drastically changed. He was always meant to be the source of the dreams even though the content of the dreams was changed with him taking on a role that was less obviously deceitful. And it seems like more drastic consequences of using the tadpole was cut much earlier for story/combat mechanic reasons.
