Overworlds and underworlds. Outside and inside. Open worlds need a good balance of these two things. If an open world doesn't have that, they tend to suck.

By overworld, I mean a large area(s) that can contain dungeons, towns, buildings, and other interiors.

By underworld, I mean more linear maps within the overworld, typically accessible by a choke points like a door or a open entrance. Dungeons and buildings would be considered part of the underworld in my definition.

Some buildings are dungeons. Most caves are dungeons, though some small caves effectively work the same way a building works. Dungeons are defined by how they function. If an underworld area is designed primarily to be challenging to traverse in some way (combat/layout/puzzles/etc), then it's a dungeon. If an underworld area is designed exclusively to provide a practical function to the player, it's not one.

I think every open world game needs a good balance of both to be good. The critical flaw I see in bad open world games is focusing too much on the overworld and not enough on the underworld. If an open world game has a good overworld and a good underworld, it's always going to be a great game. If it has an amazing overworld and a terrible underworld, it's almost always going to suck.

I've never played shadow of the collossus, but if it's good, it feels like that's the only open world game I've ever seen that seems good despite not having a good underworld balance, so this may not be an absolute rule, but that game is designed in such a specific way it doesn't even need to have a good overworld. I've seen it called a boss rush game, so the overworld feels like it has a function very different to most other open world overworlds, and I can imagine a better underworld balance would mess up that function in a way that would ruin what that game is trying to do.

Zelda games are so good because they strike this balance consistently. If you don't like botw's open world, it's probably because you think it messes up this balance. If you don't like totk's, same reason. When people say there aren't "things to do" in an open world game, I think what they really mean is that the underworld sucks, because there's typically a lot of overworld things to do in these kinds of open world games. Tasks and stuff. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet has a really bad overworld/underworld balance. It's overworld is actually pretty good, but it's underworld isn't very good, and it's not well balanced with the overworld. If SV had a good balance, half of your memory of those games would be exploring inside places, like it is in older pokemon games. Ubisoft's open worlds tend to have this bad balance as well. I could go on.

What they all typically lack are enough good, intentionally-designed underworlds to access within the overworlds, 99% of the time in the form of dungeons. For towns, that's mostly buildings where you can rest, gain lore, world build, progress the plot, and shop for items. For the rest of the overworlds, that's just dungeons in the forms of caves, cave dungeons, buildings that are dungeons, etc.

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Most devs don't know how to fill that world with meaningful content and opt for busy work with icon vomit. Aka the Ubisoft way. Usually, it's just an empty backdrop with no life in it. Often, linear gameplay in a huge open area creates monotony. Again, Ubisoft which other devs adapted, even Spider-Man. This is why BoTW shines. It's a nonlinear game in a nonlinear world, and you can approach any problem whenever and however you want. TBH even GTA has struggled with this since the PS2 era.  Sure, the world is large, but a mission has to be done in a specific linear fashion the game wants. It's dated and needs to change.Daggerfall in 1996 understood this. Original Zelda and Ultima understood this. But this concept has mostly been abandoned since the PS2 era.

The world. NPCs. Needs to feel alive and encourage exploration. BoTW designed the world in a specific way to trick the player into wanting to explore. It has environmental storytelling. Not every game needs to be BoTW, but they could learn some lessons.

It is because most devs don't make actual open world games, but linear narrative games set in open worlds (which is almost completely opposite to what proper open-word/open-ended game should be).

I think your initial reasoning is very constrained since it takes into account only modern crop of "open-world" action-adventure/RPG/pseudo-RPG games, which trace their lineage all the way back to tabtletop D&D, but most fundamentally don't understand the balance of it (mostly that "overworld" is not a safe place for you to fuck around endlessly, and that there needs to be a cost for it).

But there are also open-world/open-ended games that stand near the top of greatest open world games ever made that don't have anywhere near that structure and work great (Elite and Sid Meier's Pirates being just two examples).

Open world games are expensive and complex to make. They are the gold standard for gaming. Linear games are easier to develop since there is more predictability in the design, and it is simply easier to fill small sections with meaningful content

I think there are two types of open world games: open world games designed for non-linear gameplay (the best example being Zelda: BOTW) and open world games designed for linear gameplay (the best example being Horizon Forbidden West)

However, open (or semi-open) games with non-linear gameplay tend to be overwhelming for casual players. I will use Divinity: Original Sin 2 (one of the best games released last generation) to explain this.

The first act of the game introduces you to a big map but locks your progress to some quests that you need to complete in a relatively small area (Fort Joy) until you finally understand how to play the game. Only once you manage to escape Fort Joy are you able to explore the rest of the island, and that’s when the map truly opens up

The second act, however, is a MASSIVE open area with many interconnected sections and dungeons, dozens of quests that interact with each other, and different expected levels for each section of the map. Unless you are good at RPGs, the second map is likely to be a roadblock for many players. Many will drop the game here because it’s too hard, and the quest progression is too overwhelming.

So, what developers do to avoid this is streamline the open world game with markers. The open world games then turn into linear games with simply more to see and more walking. Some people like this because just walking through corridors can feel constricted and even claustrophobic. Having the ability to walk freely, even if the story progression is fairly linear, can be more engaging for some people than simply following a predefined path. This is where all the "open but not really" games start to pop up

Whether you like linear games in open maps is up to personal tastes. I don't have anything against them, I actually kind like them.  The probably of those games is almost never about them being linearly designed, and more about the gameplay loop being tedious and unfun 

Exactly. This is why The Witcher 3 is such a masterclass for open worlds for a few things that the best open worlds have taken and ran with since such as the distance between events on the over world being very calculated to the players time, not too much on the map to get overwhelmed but not to little to loose interest. Assassins Creed copied TW3 for a few games there but failed and missed because of not understanding this philosophy of controlling over clutter and fell so short.

To your point though, There is only two open world game I know that bucks this rule you make early in the OP and that's GTA5 and RDR2, Ghost Of Tsushima also but that has camps that feel very much like dungeons just sat on the overworld with the way they are designed and how you can't access them until a certian point but I do think The Witcher 3 formula is the best, every chunk of of gameplay is enjoyable in different time frames. You can play for 15 minutes and get something out of it or you can play for long sessions, I done near 12 hours days with it and have gameplay loops within gameplay loops all tightly woven together, you go on a quest towards a dungeon on the main path but then on the way there you clear a camp and pick up a side quest and follow that for a bit, do the main quest and then instead of fast traveling back you complete the side quest and turn it in but clear a few monster nest along and have a game of Gwent while grabbing a card for your collection all the while you were gathering materials and gold for your master crafted weapons or stop to see the beautiful sights and explore a new area just to poke around and unlock a fast travel post for later and it all feels like it is part of the main quest even though you could have cut 40 minutes out of the hour by B lining it. It just flows so well.

Now as yo why GTA5 and RDR2 works even though so many that try to copy them like Crack down, Saints row and many others fall so short, I can't figure out. It must be something to do with the way the story is structured into the world and in RDR2s case how everything is so perfectly spaced and feels dyanimc and even though it all is quality it give even more of an impression of excellence as apposed to having loads of markers and clutter. GTA5 I just don't understand but I have played that game five times and it still amazes me but with the world being merely a back drop for the story, I don't get what exactly makes it so enjoyable aside from the fantastic campaign with such varied missions and such detail right down to things like the apartment Trevor occupies showing and not telling the story in between missions and the ever shifting nature of it in that manner, to give the impression that it isn't just some static world but ever changing. I think if The Witvher 4 takes on this level of ever changing detail much like you move around in RDR2 and gives that new Rockstar ever changing world feel whilr also and pulling back even a little more on the map clutter like GoT or Elden Ring has done, it could easily be the best open world game. Right now I'm 50/50 on wheter it's GTA5 or TW3.

I think a linear narrative game set in an open world is still an open world game. My critique is more about map design and content withing those designs. Even Zelda 1 understood this balance. You explore the overworld to find the underworld, and explore the underworld to re-enter the overworld. It's a perfect loop. The underworld felt like 50% of that game.

I think the overworld can totally be a safe place for you to mess about endlessly, if your game has a good underworld balance. I can totally imagine a game where the overworld is totally peaceful, but the underworld is dire. If there was ever a good open world Persona game for example, I'd imagine it'd have this structure. Peaceful overworld in a city, with explorable buildings and dungeons for the underworld. The balance just needs to be right.

We already have bigger worlds. We need denser ones.

Well, yes, it does feel that you were talking about Zelda alike structure from the get go - and not all open worlds are based on that structure. (As aside, original Zelda 1 didn't have overworld at all, it was just a hub form where you choose what "Labirynth" you enter (akin to Demon's Souls), but Miyamoto desided (under unluence of Ultima that he played) to add overworld as well.)

And yes, I agree, in Zelda alike games fine balance between "overworld" and "underworld" is crucial (and why BotW/TotK formula is not good in my opinion).

That said, Zelda, although somewhat open world-ish (its actually gated open world), is not open ended game, and thus, from my POV, is not epitome of open-world games (which again, stem from early D&D and its open ended gameplay).

I wasn't talking about a Zelda-like structure. Xenoblade has this structure, Zelda 1, as it was released, has this structure, and you can imagine a game set only in a city where most of the buildings are enterable having this structure (like Shadows of Doubt).

Note I said overworld and underworld, not overworld and dungeon.

If you don't think Zelda is open world, we aren't talking about the same thing. You can just call what I'm talking about "wopen orld" if it makes it easier for you. Nothing about my definition of wopen orld games says they need to be open ended. Wopen orld just has to do with how the player space is designed. I should have defined what I meant by open world in the OP to be fair.

For example, I think all mainline Pokemon games and most Zelda games are open world games. Most classic jrpgs are open world games. GTA 1+2 are open world games. Dark Souls is an open world game. None of the Persona games are open world games. Etc. I'm only bringing up contested example here to show how wide my definition is.

I don't know where you got the impression that open world games come from open-ended gameplay in D&D. I'm pretty sure open world is just a term about the interconnectedness and accessibility of all aspects of the exterior physical game world. A really linear story in a big interconnected world is still an open world game by most people's understanding of that the term is meant to invoke. Most of the time when people call a game an open world, they just mean a game with only one map with no loading screens between area on the map. That's more specific than my definition, but nothing about that has anything to do with the gameplay being non-linear.

Zelda is gated open-world (you might find some calling that semi open-world). Which is, IMO, best way to do (mostly) linear narrative, yet with enough player freedom. It's shame that most modern devs just follow sales trends and are senselessly putting linear narratives into fully open worlds, often making unnecessary ludo-narrative dissonance.

Open world games do come from D&D - you either trust me on that one or you go do some research for yourself. It's just that initially it meant open-ended gameplay, which was indeed done on large "open-world" maps - which is very hard to next to impossible to do in any sort of narrative video game RPG without actual DMs. That is why, ever since first RPGs, you have stripped down "open-worlds" where map might be open, but narrative is not - those are limitations of video games, that, sooner or later, might be solved to a degree via AI DMs.

Again, your solution of fixing open world via overworld and underworld balance is very limited one, since not all games have those, nor do all games need to have that balance. But some do, and are better if they have it (3D Zeldas being clear example of games that have its balance off in either direction ever since OoT).