Okay, reviving this.
I'm thinking of a reealllyyy pretty obscure old, windows game I used to play. Here is a list of facts:
1) It was RPG-ish in nature, but combat was realtime. Sort of.
2) At all times, there were two sidebars with various information: one on the bottom, and one on the right.
3) The art was hilariously bad. This was someone's pet project.
4) There was a large world to traverse, and a level editor to make your own world.
5) Your primary form of alternate attack came in the form of a long list of spells. There were six or something opposing schools of spells. If you learned one your skill in the other would decrease, and vica versa.
6) The spells looked like badly done 2D particle effects.
7) One of the spells (on the "darkness" or "mind" or some sort of similar school) allowed you to tame a monster in battle. There was an elaborate pet simulator that used the monsters' battle sprites in the pet simulator window. You could raise your pet and send it into battle.
The game was not shareware, but you could donate something on the order of 20 dollars or something to the author for specific bonuses during online play.
9) The game had pretty identical online and offline modes. It was not really an "MMO" though.
10) When you died you respawned at some sort of shrine where the NPC who gave you the starting tutorial is.
11) You could choose your character sprite but I don't think it affected your class or stats.
12) There was some manner of joke class.
13) Most character sprites just sort of floated above the ground. All the battle backgrounds were prerendered. You could just click to move anywhere. In fact, most everything was done by clicking.
Anyone got anything? I'm surprised I remember this much. I don't remember the name, but it seems like it was "World of"... something. I might be wrong, though. Here, I drew a mock up of a screenie of the game completely from memory. It's been years since I played.