Yeah. I think it's feasible to have a good looking game with a sizable world and a relatively high number of diverse points of interest/towns populated by meaningful content and balancing all so that it doesn't look like either a wasteland or an amusement park.
That's why I'm a big advocate for out of bounds imagery and why I'm not too into the open world game idea for FF XVI (I still love that type of game, mind you). Take the Crystalline Dominion: if we're able to explore a sizable and dense enough portion of it, go ham with the skyboxes to sell on the awe-inducing scale. Same for the overworld: I don't care if I can't reach a mountain or even a village in the distance as long as the actual exploration is meaty enough and there's a nice balance between dead spaces and points of interest. I welcome it, even.
As of recent FFs, some of the hurdles in FF XV and VII Remake shouldn't really apply to FF XVI (hopefully): the former is a game that got a relatively rushed development in its current form (otherwise, it's not crazy we could have gotten shit to do and see in Tenebrae and, sure enough, Insomnia) and there's only so much you can do with just Midgar, I guess.
Regardless of the world structure, I hope they can take advantage of a seemingly defined political and geographical map and covey the feeling of meaningful stuff regularly happening across a continent-sized land.
