I'm not opposed to full open world but I hope they manage to gatekeep certain locations to story progress.
Flying around Cauldros for 15 hours before the plot progressed to Blade discovering the Gangalion had their base there was extremely awkward.
As was finding several of the life pods or whatever the game says everyone is desperately looking for, not being able to interact with it at all, until 10 or so hours later when you meet the level to take the quest to find it, and everyone pretends they are surprised, like they are seeing it the first time.
Or even worse, getting your act together on equips and combat, and besting enemies well out of your range, only to be denied equipping the fruits of your labor, until you are a level where that equipment is no longer special, bit mundane.
I'd really love to get some interviews on the Xcx dev process some day down the line when maybe they can be more candid about it.
As much as I love X, it had a lot of really weird aspects to it that seem like the result of troubles with development, like rigging something together at the figurative last minute so it works, but not the way it was supposed to be, and you can tell.
That's how the entire game being attached to the level system feels.
In order to track whether and when a player has visited an area, and activate a change in related scenes in response for a large game like x, would take a pretty dang complicated finite state machine.
But this is also the company that made a ridiculously complex and involved finite state machine that tracked the evolving relationships between every character in the game world in a massively unwieldy spiderweb map, seemingly just to look at and admire for the most part.
X's character affinity map, was bizarrely simplistic in comparison. And I even remember it causing glitches.