
I like FF15 and the Xenoblade games myself. I also like the later Fallout games, which do at times suffer from empty sandbox syndrome, but the post-nuclear settings are interesting and there are fun bits to do.
I actually got bored with GTA once the novelty of causing havoc with pedestrians wore off. And even with that, you couldn't cause any lasting chaos. As soon as you took your car to a Pay-n-Spray, law enforcement went away and things returned to normal like nothing ever happened. Even if you went on a rampage with a tank. The day-to-day havoc of GTA is segregated from the story missions even in the more recent games. I had the same issue with Red Dead Redemption.
Ubisoft is just kind of a crappy, overrated developer. They do make an occasional good/okay game, but I never understood how they went from obscurity to being a major third party other than getting lucky with Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell back on PS2. They were a decidedly lower tier publisher/developer up until then. Most of what made them successful was scripted set pieces, so that's a lot of why their efforts at open world are falling so flat.