I'm gonna comment on your post into two parts:

1. Chill out! The whole point of games is they're meant to be fun and a form of escapism. That means some people like to do things that they blatantly couldn't do in real life. Not every game has to have a full and over-arcing story to be fun. A lot of people enjoyed GTA games because they gave the player complete freedom to mess around in the sandbox whilst having an element of dark humor to them.

You keep wanting to apply some structure or add a more strict moral system but these aren't important to the fun and appeal of these games. The moral structure is simply what you the player decides it to be. In the case of RDR and GTA most people would laugh at calling them innocents because quite simply people distinguish between real life and a virtual world. It's simply a form of dark humor as most people don't care about depth in games and just want fun and escapism.

In many ways it's why Call of Duty has become so big, player can just enter the multiplayer and start playing without even having to think about the motivations. Just plug n' play.

2. I'm not sure why you seem to think these games require more thought to be put in when the story is being told passively rather than interactively. You have to put relatively little thought into the story as the characters and motives are their for you to see.You don't have to think about their motives, you're told them and then you decide whether you agree or think they're a whiny idiot.

In fact, FFXIII is probably one of the worst examples of storytelling in video games. The basic story is told through cut-scenes (which is fine), however, the details have to be read in a datalog. This technique may have been fine 15-20 yrs ago, but in this day and age the interactive element of games needs to be used. Past Final Fantasy games actually did this (e.g. FFVII: Go back to Nibelheim before the final fight and discover the secret of Cloud's past and the story of Zack).

Also, freedom doesn't take away depth from a game but it does completely alter intensity and pacing. You may enjoy this but others want to control the pace instead. I also find it funny you name FFVII as the PS1 classics are fairly open world after a certain point. It's completely contrdictory to the point you're trying to make. They had multiple and optional side-quests that didn't really add much to the game. FFVII is a good example as meteor is heading to the planet, but you can still go off and breed chocobos, right?

It seems your complaints about freedom have more to do with storytelling methods/pacing rather than actual player freedom.

i agreee with the original poster. ive played all the GTA on ps2 and they are boring including san andreas. i would take a linear ff over a sandbox game anyday imo

Thank you very much... they do it better. Jiraya-san

sandboxes used to be fun but now its getting kinda stale if you ask me

And if you consider it didn't won in any of the consoles or PC... it must be the best game on the Spike Console or netherealm console...

They don't make much sense, do they?

THEN YOU GONNA HATE UNCHARTED 3 COS IT GONNA BE ONE BIG SANDBOX!!!

I think like someone said above it's all about how good the story is and if there is *character progression (new weapons &new locations that have real variety, new abilities that change the way the game is played, like speeding up travel in Infamous) and stuff like that that keeps a Sandbox game feeling fresh. It's true that its harder to set up big set pieces in the story in case you skip an area entirely. In general I find sandbox games that give too much freedom and don't hold your hand and guide you through the story have generally weaker stories. But of course they can still be a lot of fun.

Try a playing one of my favorite sandbox games: Fallout 3. Being able to play as good or evil make the choices you face in the game very interesting. For me it was thrilling to explore the wasteland and discover new locations on your own. Fallout 3 was definitely one of my favorite games of 2008.

I would also argue that ANY game gets boring after a while. Play any game too much and that will happen. For you sandbox games just get boring faster due to repetition and maybe the worlds are too big to travel?

Far Cry 2 had the too big to travel feeling. Driving around in the car constantly and stopping to repair was boring. Not too mention when I cleared out an enemy camp they would all respawn when I drove back a minute later. So annoying. I gave up fast on that game.

Reminds me of a saying my mother used to say "Only boring people get bored"... she could nail you with a line like that.

To be fair though, sandbox games are limited due to design constraints and tend to focus you on set ways of having fun vs your example.  So, while in GTA IV I can create my own emergent gameplay to an extent, I can't, for example, decide that actually I want Niko to just work with Roman, built up the cab company and not get involved in the mob at all.  The game won't allow that - the second I move away from mucking around within the limited set of open activities Niko's fate and path is as sealed as Mario's (not a comparision I ever thought I'd make!).

I think your pointd are vaild, but sandbox games today are I'd argue a compromise, or halfway house, between some structure - for example the second in any sandbox game I've played you activate a mission structure kicks in - and a limited set of open activities.

Really, sandbox games for the most part are as linear as any other title they just provide in-between sections where you can 'goof off'.

Still good points, mind, and I agree with them, I just think sandbox videogames remain limited next to the real sandbox of our imagination.

1. I am calm. I just do not see why that would be fun to shoot and kill simple pedestrians. They are not attacking you and they are bearing no weapons. Thats a simple but important difference to having fun in an egoshooter-multiplayer mode. And I don't get your argument of running amok as element of dark humour...

I did not say that Sandbox games are bad, just that I get bored of them because I feel them lacking. That does not imply that noone can have fun with them. I just don't understand the general praise of open world and seeing linear gameplay as outdated and boring as some reviews implied (FF13 for example). 

2. Just because you see the cutscenes simply does not mean that you automatically understand what is going on. You have to think about what is going on and there are many things that are not directly spoken out, but only hinted at. If you just passively watch the cutscenes you will probably not get the whole story experience because there is purposely left enough room for interpretation. Thats often the case with japanese storytelling.

Final Fantasy XIII has a really deep story. You can sure see that one of the underlying theme is the holocaust and how people reacted to the minority. The deporation trains in the beginning cutscenes and that the people in the train would in reality be killed on arrival although the public opinion was that they would simply be brought to Grand Pulse.

The Fal'cie are more powerful, but they lack free will. So regardless their power they are not able to destroy Cocoon by themselves. So they had to make a plan spanning over thousand years to incite fear in the hearts of the people in Cocoon, so that they eventually will destroy themselves in a civil war. There are many things that are only hinted at and not everything would be clear if you just watch the cutscenes without thinking about what is going on. But I will not going further into Detail.

How is FF VII Open World? You have a clear oath that is simply going from A to B until the last CD (with Wutai being the exception). There are some minigames like Gold Saucer or the digging game, but I would not call that sidequests. And the "sidequests" like the 3 Weapons and Chocobo breeding are not normal sidequest, because you can get extremely powerful Materia through it. I would rather call them secrets than sidequests, because there are only a few, they are optional, giving valuable items (knights of the round 2xsummon mime?, omnislash and level 4 limits?) and are more more difficult/time intense than the normal game was. Sidequests in typical western games ( like borderlands or Deathspank) are available throughout the game and they offer not really the strongest items in the game There was a world map, but the there was not much exploration possible and the only difference was that your position on the world map decidede the possible random enemies. You could not access the whole map from the beginning, you gained access only after you progress in the story.

In the end the whole game was almost completely linear with only a few optional secrets at the end of the game (last cd) and a few minigames in Gold Saucer. And you had very little benefits of visiting old areas again late in the game...

Tell me, how can you create depth in a game where you have freedom to do what you want? FF X dealt with the dilemma of personal benefit vs  group benefit. Square did put much efforts in showing how the people of  Spira were suffering through Sin. There were so many little Details that showed the fear of the People and how much hope they put into the summoners. How much they expect from Yuna, since her Father brought the last calm. And then how Yuna is slowly falling in love with Tidus. Thats what made the moment so special when Tidus and the gamer finally realized what was the prize for the calm. It wouldn't have worked so intense if the whole game wasn't build around the key moments of the game. If you break the linear storyline you would ruin this whole moment and take away from the intensity of the whole game.

I can play FF for several hours because I always looking forward to the next cutscene... Borderlands or Deathspank however are getting boring after an hour because there is no thrilling story to keep me interested. Often I stop bothering with reading the actual sideqest because it is just a totally unimportant task...Go there, kill x enemies and return, repeat procedure. In FF, you see the character develop and you often have a different impression from them at the end of the game that you had in the beginning. You see the character grow. In Borderlands, I stopped bothering since there is almost nothing to see. The whole game does feel different after 30 hours of playing. It is just doing the same things over and over again ...

Or maybe we just want more possible actions than shooting everyone and stealing cars.  Maybe those aren't that fun to everyone.  A lot of open world games aren't very  open in that respect and the mechanics on those actions generally suck worse than in other games with that gameplay.  Maybe if they added more interesting qualities to the world we would experiment more with the gameplay.  As it stands there are very large worlds with the only real things to being shoot someone or steal their car and screw whores and awkwardly at that.    

The key to having fun in a sandbox game is variety, and good gameplay from which emergent gameplay can come which a lot of open world games lack.  Maybe some of us look at the world as more than simply a place for wanton violence and would like developers to as well.

If you cannot have fun in a world designed for wanton violence and crime maybe that says something good about us as individuals. Or maybe even the developers have simply neglected to make these games open enough to engage us who want more than awkwardly cobbled together adolescent violence.