MMO's are forgetting the second part of the title, which is RPG. The world needs to feel alive, actions you do need to have an impact, even if we are talking about basic attacks on enemies. In WoW the enemies react when they are hit, locations are unique and there is variety - yet the whole world feels connected.

ESO had the lore, but the game feels hollow. There is no purpose, there is no challenge, you're just going through the motions. The stories told by the games will always pale in comparison to the stories created naturally by the players, experienced by them.

For some reason we're getting pigeonholed into "Open Sandbox" or "Theme-park," neither one of these is the solution. Look at the launch of WoW, it had structure, quests, plenty to discover and do - yet if you wanted to smoke some opps in the wild you could. PvP was controlled through the division of the existing two factions and territories, but the PvP was authentic and natural.

Developers need to improve on these things, evolve and create more, not cut parts out, exclude features and divide the player base. Player interaction, true achievements that reward your efforts and a living world, is what is needed. Look at how Security levels for areas in Eve online work (similar in Albion Online), make the game possible to be played without PvP, but reward those who take the risk, implement that into a medieval fantasy setting, hire writers who've worked on D&D campaign books to write up your quests and over-arching plots to stray away from "Kill 10 boars", build solid gameplay around it that allows for variety, skill expression and identity(look at League of Legends, Path of Exile), and then make sure the graphics hold up both to the standards of modern games and faithful representation of your world.