In the context of the trailer, of course they did.

It's actually 5 x the size of Xenoblade's world, not 4.

It's most probably from an alien race that already lives/lived there.

I take it as open world in the sense, you can go to different locations if you have the necessary vehicles to travel to them or are capable of handling the enemies. This is probably where the less exciting UNIONS are probably going to earn their keep as they will give the players the necessary equipment or means to be able to get to different areas or weapons capable of taking on hard enemies.

How does it confirm your suspicions? What in the map tells you it will have loading screens and artificial barriers? All of the barriers look geographic to me. In the real world continents tend to be separated by oceans and if they do connect it is by an isthmus or a mountain range creates a barrier. That is what we see here. 

Unless you don't have a Wii U, why not? 

 I have a Wii-U... I just have zero desire to buy any games for it... Not sure why. I would love to play games like SSB and this, but something about the console just throws me off.

lol, ok. I can't really empathize here. If I buy a console it is because I want to play the games I'm interested in. There is no other reason to buy a video-game console, in my eyes. If you are indeed interested in the game, I can't see why you shouldn't buy it, just because it is on the Wii U - a console which you own. I won't judge you, but your comment seems really odd to me. 

I just want to say that theres gonna be more areas than those. I am 90% sure of that. Those 10% only appear because of disk space. 

Otherwise, taking the original in account, there should be at least 3 more areas after those.

Multiple clearly defined areas all with a single chocke point(or more if they are connected with more areas). All areas are marked with mountains as barriers meaning you will not be able to access them through any other point as the clearly marked choke points. I'm assuming the black void is water and even if it is technically possible to travel to other areas via water, there won't be much to do on the water and I doubt it is intended.

That is not an open world as I define it. It's a random collection of seperate areas that are connected i.e. the exact same thing XC did.

Of course you could pretend that I'm just being ignorant and that this particular game will make everything different. But as someone who has played a lot of open world games and a lot of pseudo open world games it's very easy to see in which category that map falls.

I'm not saying that the game will be bad or that open world is the pinnacle of game creation. All I'm saying is that I was right from the beginning about XCX being open world to be an overstatement.