By the way. Sid Meyer's Pirates! is an actual sandbox game. Comparing it to GTA is also stupid.
Even games that would fall in the same genre often fail at comparisons.
If for example, a baseball game used the GTA overmap, and had some minigames where you earn money by doing odd jobs between games to power up your gear... like mowing the lawn... and basically the jobs in no more heroes...
is that a GTA clone to you?
The Gameplay is what's important. Not how you get to the gameplay.
There is zero gameplay in the actual open world. You can't steal anything, pick fights with people... pretty much do nothing but use your bike to get to gameplay segments. (And look for meatballs.)
You go to a building... then get a job. Which is basically like any sports game where you pick a training and then do it for points.
