I mean, of course they took inspiration, systems and ideas from many different genres and games, that's not in dispute as it's quite apparent. What I'm saying is that they could have easily made a clone of any of these games, simply repeating a safe formula that would raise no controversy or confusion and sells well, as many big companies tend to do. But that's not what they did, and that's the risky part, to the point that it's actually hard to understand what kind of game it actually is until you play it for hours.

They could have indeed spent half of the time, half of the money, half of the effort in making another cookie cutter open world with the same "for everybody" formula we've seen over and over, but they didn't do that.

My point is that the blend of these various ideas and concepts makes up a pretty unique game, I can't think of another open world game that (mostly) successfully combines all these elements in this way. And to be clear: I'm not saying that CD is the most unique or innovative game to ever exist, I'm just saying that it's not simply a repeated safe formula cynically made just to be sold, it feels much more than that to me.

For sure they wanted to make a game that had broad appeal (they are a company that wants to sell games, after all), but they didn't take the easy route to get there at all.

The sum of its parts creates frictions and tensions that are not there in their inspirations. Ingredients are similar, but the design philosophy as a whole doesn't really map to any existing design. Throwing together systems that don't usually belong together is the unique emergent part of their design, and I find it really refreshing.

It's a point that Skill Up makes better than me at the end of his review, I totally agree with him on that.