Honestly it is designed better in other games like Guild Wars 2 and the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I can't think of any EA games in which open world was designed well.
A number of games on this list use procedural generated worlds which I do play and enjoy quite a lot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_using_procedural_generation
Spore was the last procedural generated game Maxis made. Personally I much rather have a procedural generated world for the Sims than open world because in comparison procedural generated worlds are limitless while open worlds have their limits and performance on computers is much more solid on procedural generated worlds.
