Few games really let you do whatever you want. That's where sandbox comes in. A game like Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row, Just Cause, Bully, Red Dead Redemption, Infamous, Elder Scrolls and many more are all great games that let you play the way you want to play. If you want to do a mission, you can do a mission. If you want to kill a civilian, you can kill a civilian. If you want to drive a motorcycle off of a sky scraper, you can. But there seems to be a lack of attention to how much detail and effort that are put into these games. I'm no programmer so I don't know what they do exactly but I do know for sure, that if a game let's you order a jet and have it be destroyed as you fly down peacefully or kill someone and have every last person in the game recognize you as the killer, that must be a hell of a lot of work put into it. Personally, I like to play the games that make me explore the beautiful worlds in a variety of ways. The Elder Scrolls (I am a huge fan though) doesn't let you explore it in many ways. Although I love Oblivion and Skyrim as much as the next guy, I'm talking about swinging on webs like spiderman, flying through the air like in Infamous and Prototype, and flying in jets and helicopters like Saints Row and Just Cause. Some of these games have their own way of being unique, and that is way the open world/sandbox genre stands out for me. In Elderscrolls if you kill someone, that could effect you later on. In Grand Theft Auto, the city makes me feel like I actually live there. In Saints Row, it's so outrageous and not repetitive I sometimes wish I lived there. In Infamous, your powers change based on your decisions. And even in Toy Story 3 (a gamemode is actually called sandbox) you can edit the world and make it the way you want. I love the variety in all of them, that there is so much to do I can find my self playing hours on end. The games I never get bored with are sandbox games. They have no end. In Skyrim, there are no credits after the main quest is complete. Develepers spend so much time creating a world just waiting to be explored, but there is only so much to do in the world that only some games can truly be explored freely.