I think Sleeping Dogs , Saints Row 3, InFamous 2, and a lot of RDR missions along with Assassin's Creed (listing most of the 'sandbox games' I've played since GTA IV) have a lot of variation of how you can complete missions.
I don't know, Sleeping Dogs is actually the one I was thinking of when I wrote that. I remember it being
incredibly strict, to the point where it had all these chase missions that you could never actually 'win'. Every footchase is you chasing some guy with the same parkour abilities as you have, who runs at the same speed you do, so they only end when the bad guy stops and finds a bunch of guys for you to fight (except that one date with the rooftop race). I remember one mission where I had to shoot some guys, so there was a guy standing with his back to a crate so I could jump over it and steal his gun. Then the game wanted me to chase a guy in a car, so it switched to a cutscene and put Wei in the car for me so I wouldn't miss the hint. Then the guy in the car was uncatchable all the way down this highway, and there was a big icon on screen saying he was always 81 metres away no matter how fast I went, just so I knew I could never catch up to him. Then, instead of his car becoming destructable, he actually hits a trigger point and
slows down so I can do the Vin Diesel airjack thing.
I don't really have anything specific against heavily scripted missions in open world games. Vice City and San Andreas had their share of missions like that, and a lot of them were fantastic, but I feel like they kept a good balance of more open-plan stuff, too. I just feel like it wastes the potential of the open world when they don't let it come into play. Scripted crashes in GTA IV's car chases were probably the worst thing for me. All my favourite memories from the old GTAs were just random things that happened to me
EDIT - I think I still played at least a hundred hours of GTA IV, though, so OMGOMGOMGNEWTRAILER etc
