Coincidentally, I did play Wurm Online about 10 years ago with some online friends. We played quite a bit until someone came into our camp and killed everyone with a board. Turns out there was some kind of bug where the amount of damage you could do was related to your skill with that item. Weapon skills accumulated very slowly, but this guy was either a lumberjack or carpenter which translated into him being a one man army when wielding his board. We all quit that week.
These sound like interesting games, but they make no mention of one key component I'm after: play acting the character.
I checked ME forums, and the Roleplaying forum is a ghost town. I suppose I could create my own server and go around trying to recruit people to play on it.
Life is Feudal seems to be going the route of most poorly designed open pvp worlds--making the world safer and PvP more rare.
As I'm sure you know, PvP has to be baked into the design for it to work. I think CF just got extremely lucky in how MUDs are naturally a bit of a puzzle to get from point A to point B, and there is no way to move and keep your eye on another person at the same time. That makes chasing people down in real time challenging, and gives a slight advantage to a person fleeing combat as they only have to know where they are going. That way you can have combat, it doesn't always end in death, but extremely talented chasers can still secure kills.
There are other pieces to the pie, but I don't know of any graphical open world game that even gets this much right. If "getting better at escaping danger" isn't a skill a player can develop as they play (as it is with all decent RTS and FPS games), then the game is doomed to fail. For most of the open world sandbox style MMOs I've played, "getting better at escaping danger" usually meant not leaving the safe zones. There were no other options. It's very sad, and poorly designed.
The more I think about it, the more I come to believe that you are at the core demographic, the absolute target, for the recent explosion in "survival simulator" multiplayer games.
The Darksun setting of D&D is my kind of game. It has been ever since it first came out. If I could somehow create a multiplayer version of that, with players actually play acting the different factions, I'd be in heaven.