I truly love my Western D&D based RPG's where you can do whatever the hell you damn well please. I don't like them in 1st person perspective though. As for the online characteristics, Never Winter Nights and games like Diabo have them. You can play with friends doing a regular campaign, or you can do a user created campaign.
I also truly love JRPG's, for being JRPG's. Linear story, but open world full of secrets. Grinding to gain levels so you can beat the next big boss. Talking to every single town's person to find out what happening, or to get a their 1 or 2 dimensional take on what his happening.
The last thing I forgot to include in my list of saving the JRPG's, get rid of the stupid planned encounters, and single placement of all enemies. I want my random encounters back. They make the game more difficult as well as give you a great source to level up. I would just do 1 thing, make the enemies run away from you if you are too strong for them. They used to do it in most of the older JRPG's why don't they do that as much anymore.