One really good alternative however to me was Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2010. When you start playing the game, it's exactly like these older non open world games, you pick a track, you drive on it, and that's it. However, it also has an optional free drive mode, and when you play that for the first time you realize that all these individual, well designed tracks, are actually all connected and part of an open world, which felt even more insane than most actual open world racers to me. I don't know if I make much sense, but it almost gave me a dark souls vibe in the "ooh, so this and this are connected like this?!", it was really great