Discuss: What is an ORPG.

[Salar Adin]

ORPG is a type of map found in warcraft 3, meaning Open Role-Playing Game.
Originally, it took inspiration from the campain made by Blizzard known as The Founding of Durotar, which tends to imitate some of World of Warcraft gameplay.
Many map followed made by the community, inspired by WoW and other games, such as Gaias Retaliation, The Kingdom of Kaliron, The Black Road, Twilight's Eve, Dark Invasion...
A new genre of game was born.
Now the question is, aside from WoW, does this genre exists oustide of Warcraft 3? Is there any other game which could be qualified as an ORPG?
What elements makes the ORPG a singular genre?
Discuss.

[cksiu]

WoW is a very large game, most of the wc3 rpgs can only imitate or excel in a small fraction of what wow offers. tkok i think excels in boss fights and stuff like dark invasion II does the open world exploring really well (also DI2 takes a lot of influence from some older JRPGs especially in the battle system)