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It seems that Bethesda's LOD mesh for Cyrodiil is already affected by precisely the same LOD joins that many modders are faced with; mis-joins between quads, non-existent islands barring rivers, slopes that are suddenly cut sheer, sometimes even gaping holes in the land.
Some of these effects are less noticable on the ground due to tree cover, but they still frequently show up and look plain weird when they do.
This could be because the LOD mesh is taken from an approximation of the heightmap for each quad, rather than an approximation made of the entire heightmap before creating the mesh for the quad. If so it's fixable with a wiser LOD mesh generator. If not it could be a more fundamental problem with the game engine ...
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At cell (-38,1) there are LOD mesh holes at Kvatch.
Crack in the landscape; who needs Oblivion gates to get to Tamriel? ;)
Just a little further on, a typical bad join between 4 quads.
Outside Skingrad there are height mis-joins, running under the town itself.
Just ouside skingrad, you can see this one from normal playing height.
A non-existent island stretches across the river at The Imperial Bridge Inn. In fact the whole land on the right bank has a sheer in it.
This magical disappearing land greets every visitor just as they exit The Imperial Inn.
Looking north from (-1, 15) in Weye Village.
Right across Weye and up in to the mountains ...
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Unfortunately these problems are much less subtle in a more varied landscape. Vvardenfell suffers with numerous river
barriers, barriers across valleys and in the worse cases, meshes that you can walk through and will totally obscure any buildings placed in those areas.
These shots have been taken with a really high grid count load count (uGridsToLoad=7), but this is not sufficient to remedy these bugs.
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Balmora, probably the most recognizable landscape in Vvardenfell is hard to recognize from a distance in TES4; a huge chunk of land dams the river and the western (left) should be platformed.
With a uGridsToLoad=15, Balmora is more recognizable, though the river mesh disappears at times. Another problem becomes apparent ...
This interpolated mesh obscures the platform and all the buildings in Balmora.
It improves too slowly as one gets close, but even with a high uGridsToLoad value, this is still showing too much at this distance.
This mesh never disappears - you can actually walk inside the mesh and it'll always obscure the buildings that should be placed in that area.
You can't see the river from Moonmoth Fort, this thing obscures the view.
Valley views are often obsured by multiple non-existent barriers, one behind the other.
This happens everywhere and makes the landscape quite confusing.
The join problem results in total mismatches between terrain; sides of hills/mountains appear in the middle of nowhere, more barriers across rivers.
Apart from the obvious join line (bad 'luck' because it runs right down this valley), it shouldn't climb that high.