I also enjoy a world with tight geography that enhances gameplay. It's one of the reasons I liked Skyward Sword.
To be honest, though, it's also a reason I loved the original Xenoblade, which had plenty of terrain and challenges that were facilitated by the level design. Exploring that game was a wonderful thing because so much care was put into the locations, and I doubt that Monolith would just throw that out the window with a sequel. Not only to the continents all look quite beautiful, but I'm sure each will have its fair share of hidden paths, nooks, and crannies to discover. The combination of enemy difficulty forcing you away from those areas (and thereby pushing you to become stronger) as well as the newfound resource mining, enemy slaying, objectives, and continuous guild quests the game will have for each hex of the entire map mean this is going to have quite a bit of content. I think the director was quoted saying the final product had a 200-hour completion if you went for every sidequest and the like?