The thing I envy about these MMORPGs is that they have these large sprawling and open worlds with such attention to details that I hate the fact that they are online MMOs.

I wanna play Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Everquest 1 and 2, Final Fantasy 11, and World of Warcraft as single player RPGs.

Don't tempt my addiction!

Some posts above me, there was a dream once that was MMO's, then it was nerfed, grinded, camped, griefed, "kill ten wolves for wolf pelts" and "End Gamed" into oblivion. Luckily I experienced some of that dream, it was called FF11. Which is inevitable for bad-fur-day to devolve into long reminiscing everytime MMO's are brought up. Oh, the times dodging Marlboros, weird bird creatures, giant catapillars, goblins and demons in deserts and beaches and jungles. I better stop now.

This is exactly why I don't play MMO's... because I am afraid I will get hooked and never move on to any other games!

This is my wish too. Having your character's achievements dulled by a meta-awareness that a hundred thousand players have already surpassed you, hyper-optimized their playstyles, and are competing with you on resources just feels... exactly like real life. It feels bad.

From the above mentioned I can only speak for WoW and a tiny bit of EQ2: While indeed massive they would be lousy lame-ass boring single player RPGs (srpg) for the most part.

Even if mostly soloing the social aspects or the knowledge that some areas are to fucking dangerous to enter alone are part of the charm.

Helpful to enjoy MMOs is to not approach them with the srpg mentality that you strife to be "The One"; trying to be a cool individual among others might net you more entertainment out of it.

Thing is to me MMO=WoW Clone=SPG with bolt on multi-player.

If that doesn't make sense to you, I'll give a longer explanation.
Every player follows the same script, even queuing up, at worst, for every stage of every quest, you are all following the same SPG story, the only difference is you can talk/help/be helped by all the others playing that SPG.

When Ultima/Everquest, were cloned by WoW, it was the best online could do, then, but it's never progressed.

To me MMO is a primitive SPG with crude multi-player mechanic, one that's lasted a decade longer than it should have, as all the publishers chase the same MMO user base, a decade ago, that peaked at around 30 Million.
Now there's around 20 Million MMO players and that number is steadily shrinking.

Market your game as an MMO, and your user base is restricted to MMO player base alone, those of us who can't stand the primitive methods of all MMO's, ignore them completely.

The thing is a Persistent Universe model, doesn't exist, even yet, when Zenimax announced TESO (The Elder Scrolls Online), wouldn't be just another MMO. non MMO playing modders speculated on what an online RPG, that isn't an MMO, would have to have, to make us even remotely interested.

Star Citizen, wasn't even announced back then and that was before the term "Persistent Universe", was being used, at least it was unknown to us. We were discussing the potential for a true online world, one where the players actions and choices determine the future outcomes, not a script, where you're a hero or villain, because the Players call you that, not a script. Questing isn't given, questing is done by exploring the world and even, generally given.
Sort of a wanted ad, will buy "this" with "that", but you don't get led to the item, just like in real life, you must find it using your skills.

The term PU, covers the concept quite well, the only persistence an MMO will ever have is in each Player's Character stats, nothing about the world is Persistent.

Market a PU as an MMO. and the customers are max 20 million.
Market a PU as a PU, not an MMO, and the customer base is potentially, 7000 million.

Star Citizen may be the first PU we get, I seriously doubt it will be last, but know of no other,s even remotely like that.
Elite and No Mans Sky are not Persistent universes, NMS is barely even online, by all accounts, and is not ever going to be Multi-player, in any meaningful sense, though technically a universe shared by all and updated with player given names. Each players universe is, still only on their own computer, more like sharing a world seeding formula and names database, than the usual MPG experiences.

If another PU exists/planned, but calls itself an MMO, it will fail due to lack of attention.
IN my experience, no-one loves the standard MMO content, it's pretty dire stuff, not as good as the SPG RPG, they copy. It;s the community that keeps most folk hooked, not the games content, which is long finished.

The very concept of an endgame, is admitting the game is actually finished, done with, has no more to offer.
The crude mechanic of repeatable end game content, is an admission, the MMO wasn't designed for online, it's a first attempt at online gaming, and a pretty poor attempt, but OK for the first attempt, it's not OK for the 5000th MMO.

It took a crowdfunding effort of unbelievable magnitude to try for a PU, publishers would still be fighting over the same still shrinking MMO crowd, 20 years from now.
Like CIG's fundraising methods or not, I love them, as I wont give leeches like "Kickstarter" and "Steam's Early Access" a cut of the funds, GOG's GID will be held to the same standard, though GOG has earned the right, to be considered, on it's own merits.

When it comes to crowdfunding, I have a simple red line, I only back game projects, where all my money goes, to the development, this usually means I direct fund only. That's usually the only way to ensure that every penny goes to the game.
The second red line I have, is no publisher involvement at all, I back a game to keep the devs in control of their game. Not to remove a Publishers risk of investing in game development, whilst they keep all the profit, and rush the release to do that quicker. So no Publisher involved or no backing from me.

In fact, i will never play any publisher controlled crowdfunder. Sony can keep Shenmu 3 on the PlayStation, for all I care, I will never play that abomination crowdfunding and anyone who backs a publisher controlled crowdfunder should be ashamed of themselves.

Shenmue 3 was already fully funded before E£, there was no way in hell that, Sony would have launched it at E3, and not made it. The so called "Kickstarter" was a cynical manipulation of the E3 event, to guarantee millions in pre-orders.

Pre-order the game, is all you really do, if a Crowdfunder has a publisher. You remove the publishers risk of investing, by paying for the development for them.
Publisher takes all the profit and the games IP, you lose your money and get nothing, if the game fails, publisher has no risk and gets all the rewards.
Direct funding, without a publisher involved, is the same risk for you, difference is, the devs get all the profit, and keep the IP as well, sequels can be funded by pure profit, i neither get, nor want anything but a great game, and without publisher interference, might even get one. Either way, the devs get money they earned, and can put the pure profit to the next project with more crowdfunding if needed.

First and foremost for me with an mmo is the atmosphere. If it doesn't have a world which I'd like to get lost in, then I'm not interested. That's what drew me to WoW back in the day, because I'm a tremendous fan of the Warcraft world as portrayed in the RTS titles. Incidentally, that is one of the reasons WoW stopped being fun for me: From lvl 80 onwards I had to spend a lot of time in zones that didn't seem very warcraft-y.