Today I was thinking of a game I wish existed. Skip to the bottom if you want to know right away, because first I will start by calling out the problems with your typical cRPG.
1) Finite, Small Worlds
Firstly, pretty much whatever the cRPG is, the player knows at the start that they are in an extremely finite world. Not only is it possible to physically visit every location, every dungeon every house - but you might well expect that you must do so in order to complete the game. Each NPC can be spoken to, each dialogue possibility uncovered, every quest completed (excluding those perhaps limited to certain classes, but these are rare). Classic examples would be the last three Elderscrolls games. A rare counter example would be Daggerfall, where the world is, for all intents and purposes, quite boundless.
2) Static World
Kind of building on 1. Not only are worlds generally finite and small, but also they are static. Nations do not rise and fall, people do not move from town to town, etc.
3) The player is the sole real changing element.
Building on 2. Everything else stays the same, while you develop. However, no matter how powerful you get, or how far you rise in the ranks of a guild or what have you, your role in the world always remains pretty much the same - the typically lone adventurer.
OK, ok - so now it should be clear what I want.
I want a first person perspective cRPG like what we have been seeing recently, yet with a near boundless, generated world that is non-static, and for the player to be able to effect change in that world. You got it, I want Dwarf Fortress adventure mode in polished first person form. I want intentionally less detailed characters so that hundreds can exist on the screen at once no problem. I want to participate in actual battles that actually change the political map of the world. I want to be able to lead groups, up to and including whole armies, Total War style. I want to be able to walk around cities that actually have thousands of NPCs in them, where I do not go up to each one attempting to systematically exhaust their dialogue options.
Surely this is not beyond the ability of modern game designers? Also, surely this game would have a big market. Why is it not happening already?!?!