i have tested this out myself with Cheat Engine. i could alter my own X Y Z coordinates and so i went ahead and skip the trigger of where you are suppose to get a clue about the whole invisible bridge thing(beginning of the game right before alisha) and you cannot talk to her, also if you advance further(outside to elysia) nothing is there as its suppose to like NPCs are missing and triggers. you can actually leave elysia no problem while normally you're stopped doing so.

Apparently and this is my assumption is that the devs went ahead and made an failsafe system where as if you start falling a certain amount it trigger that you are not in the blessed domain of a seraphin and teleports you to another location also shown in the video.

i don't know how to embed the video properly to make it show as an actual video instead of a link. in the video i go to various locations including every major town and even traverse the malevolence past camelot bridge.

yeah there's a glitch you can do (although we haven't been able to replicate it on PS4 or PC) that allows you to clip past NPCs that block your way (like the ones in Glaivend before all the events at Marlind).

whilst you can't sequence break the story events, what you can potentially do is journey to areas that you're not supposed to be able to get to yet, touch savepoints for later teleports, and grab equipment. You wont lose much time to not having windstep because, well, you dont use it much until you get Zaveid anyway, and grabbing the equipment earlier would more than save that time.

as stated though, i couldn't get it to work on PS4, and Itoshira couldn't get it to work on PC, so maybe some hardware limitations that allow it on PS3 or something (not that i can confirm he's doing it on a PS3 in the first place)

i wil probably try that to recreate that glitch when i get to that point in my practise/save creation. cant hurt to try it some more to get it to work on PC/PS4 hopefully its not console limitations since thats gonna suck :(