going by that analogy (open mission structure, etc.), then there are a lot of open sandbox titles with similar traits (Jak 2,3, etc)

And yes, I’ve played Bully, but it was different enough to feel like something other than GTA, it just had things in common with it, as do a lot of other games that used the same basic formula that GTA3 created.

They did have a same writer in Dan Houser, though (but they had different co-writers), so that would help explain the writing style, but they had completely different teams working on the games themselves, Bully just borrowed heavily from the GTA formula. And Dan Houser is VP of Creativity in Rockstar Games, so he has the ability to work with any of the other teams anyway, he doesn’t work for Rockstar North

Did you play Bully?

The whole game was structured very similarly to GTA. You have a map compass with missions to go and start. You had vehicles, home bases, mini games, and easter eggs.

Plus all of the writing, character dialog and cut scenes just felt like they came from the same team.

As far as LCS and VCS go, they used most of the assets were already available in GTA3 and VC, but the actual games themselves were subpar compared to R*N productions. Sure, the GTA team at R*N would help them, but Leeds still had most of the creative freedom

Also, given the length of the games, they’re about half the length of console games, so going by that, you could technically count LCS and VCS as one full game. Neither of which, though, were as fun as R*N’s GTAs.

Today, I think they cross polinate their teams much more, and the lines between dev teams are more blurred. Bully lists Rockstar Vancouver as the main studio, but clearly they used the GTA engine, GTA writers, lots of high level creative directors (Dan Houser), and had technical assistance from the GTA team.

Good analogy with Final Fantasy. Sure, all those Final Fantasy offshoot games don’t “really” count as a big FF title. But if Square was using the same engine to make a similar type of big full release game, with shared dev talent, I think that would count.