First impression was there's too much space.

Ideally what the devs might be going for is a grandeur type of epic feel when a player sees the huge buildings and vast spaces...

What it translated to me was... if this area isn't populated it'll feel like a big ass ghost town.

If the time between getting from one functional point of interest to another is too large then it'll feel annoying more than grand.

They did mention it's something that they're aware of with spaces and time a player could navigate the city but that's my first impressions.

Big is good... big for no real reason isn't. If they could get the proper ratio of players in an area to space available right then it'll promote the feeling of Epic and Large vs having a Big Area and it seems small because the ratio of players vs space is off.

If they could get the lore across from the PoV that most players will view their characters through a 3rd person PoV then they'll hit the vast majority of their players.

Do players really look up to see how high a gate is? will the length impact them the way the developers are intending it to? I feel that most of the scale will be lost in translation... but that's just my first impressions.

Who knows how it'll feel when in game accompanied by the ambience... i dunno.