Absolutely, Vanguard was all about being the spiritual successor to EverQuest, and tried hard toward it, and failed for many reasons. Their failure was not due to their design concepts in my opinion, but the game was heavily rushed and failed to deliver on a lot of promises. Perhaps the biggest mistake was selling out to Sony only about 6 months after release and being relegated to the list of "Sony Graveyard MMO's." It was fully canceled and all the servers disabled not that long after.
Everquest 2 attempted it in many ways, but in many others catered to the casuals and had a lot of concepts that irritated me. Even still, wasn't a terrible game as a whole and I spent several good months with it.
Early Final Fantasy XI had a lot of the these concepts and was good fun for a while. I started right at the North American release, and English speaking Americans were forced to play on servers with year-old veteran Japanese players with already established characters. This was a massive, massive turn-off for me.
You also have Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, and classic Lineage, but these were significantly different than EverQuest in many ways. That being said, they still fit most of the concepts that made classic EverQuest what it was. And I played each of them for a long, long time.
With any luck Pantheon will succeed and offer many of the things that made EverQuest and Vanguard great. Definitely my most anticipated MMO in the recent years.
Just wish more non-indie Developers / Publishers would attempt it. Far too much catering to the casuals these days, especially in MMORPG's, a genre that's arguably the most hardcore in essence of any gaming genres.
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