"True Definition" huh? As someone who has played online games since before they were graphical I have to say that I'm quite pleased with the move toward open world exploration that happened with later MMOs. I'm ok with the stuff you absolutely need a group for being limited to small regions. That being said, EQNext has already announced that they plan to have no levels at all in their game, so I suspect we'll have to see what that looks like before we can guess if it will become a trend or not.