The Boston office did the Adventure World game. I tried it out and found it pretty frustrating - you can only do a few things before you run out of energy and need to harrass your friends or wait 24 hours. It's not a mechanic that works well with an adventure - nobody wants to chop through a few bushes and then wait to enter the temple. Plus there's this gratuitous Indiana Jones thing which is just glommed on.
The difference I think is that in a sandbox game doing a handful of things every eight hours or so can feel fairly satisfying but in an adventure game there's a sort of story and you're interrupting it after you're just getting started.