>>36354085Depends upon what you mean by open world, I'd say.
Open world to me means you get to fairly freely explore things at your own pace. Gen 1 and 2 are mostly open world as far as I'm concerned since you can get over half the badges combined in any order.
They have issues because of that in terms of the level scaling but that is an issue easily fixed (if you're not Game Freak or Nintendo since BotW has similar issues with it's 4 main dungeons)
I'd also like to be able to get badges from side quest type things too kind of the anime mixed with trials mixed with the games where you happen across a Gym Leader who you solve the problems of. And not only have 8 badges, but maybe 16 or more of which you only NEED 8 for the League.
Lots of places to explore, lots of ways to get to the end goal, and as little of it as possible directly connected to the story (linear story is fine, it just shouldn't be intrinsically connected to the level design which it currently is).
So maybe it's not what other people mean but to me open world Pokémon is absolutely the goal because it's returning the series to it's roots.