For those who dislike sandbox games let me ask you a simple question, did you have a sandbox when you were little?
A sandbox in of itself is nothing more than a box on the ground filled with sand. When a child plays in a sandbox they may be supervised from afar by a parent, but it is not the parent telling them how to play; instead the child is creating his own play with his green army men, toy cars, toy dinosaurs and the like. The adult is not telling the child how to play other than advising him not to eat the random piece of cat crap AKA cat almond rocca every once in a while.
A sandbox video game is only as fun as you. If you are the type who likes objectives, going from point a to point b like a Mario game, and constraint, then sandbox games are not for you because you are a boring person who cannot have fun unless the developer has created the game in very specific constraints where the fun you are having was designed by the developer, not you.
Lets take a Mario game and put it into a sandbox. A real sandbox. Imagine Miyamoto and a crowd (the development team) towering above you when you were little. At Miyamoto's command you will go from one end of the sand box to the other. As you complete his dictates, he will throw in more complicated order to get from one end of the sandbox even varying it up ordering you to crawl, jump, do a handstand, do the worm dance to the other side of the sandbox and on.
See, Mario and linear games do not work well in a sandbox, thus forth they are not sandbox games.
The key to having fun in sandbox games is you, if you cannot have fun in a world designed where you can create your own play, then what does that say about you as an individual?
I would say you are boring and would probably find military bootcamp "fun," but that is just me.
