Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
XIV does certainly have some of the worst coverage in that regard. I remember the first time I was flying in the Dravanian Forelands and noticing that the whole thing seemed to be apparently on this roughly circular plateau that, chasmed off from further mountains that similarly end jaggedly. It was like the kind of thing you'd expect from a community map hastily made, yet all one needed to do to encounter the issue was... fly some three hundred feet, which... well, why wouldn't you? It was just so instantly immersion-breaking... And I know "immersion" gets ridiculed a lot in the first place in an FF game, but I don't mean perfect immersion, just whatever amount of it we had before; it was instantly gone. I tried to forget about it as quickly as I could and kept low enough not to see it in the future but still just felt so off compared to the quality of the map at ground level.
This isn't really an issue with flying though.

Since you can get similar experiences while on foot. Like, going to the edge of Southern Thanalan and noticing that the edge is a crevasse and beyond that... Some vaguely endless desert in the distance (As opposed to you know, actual ST which is full of mountains and dunes and the like)

Even in newer zones you have places like Azim Steppe and you can go to the eastern side of it and notice the same thing. A giant crevasse (Also, a broken rope footbridge of all things) leading into an endless flat plains? Again, while AS is full of hills, mountains as well as giant stone structures.

The issue seems to just be that SE haven't figured out how to make a believable "Edge of the map" that doesn't seem janky or out of place. Rather than flying being unique at exposing these things.

I might put my thoughts into some more of the points brought up in the OP at some point...