When making a game world, there are many parameters you can tweak. One of them is the distance between points of interest. I think WoW struck a good balance bet

When making a game world, there are many parameters you can tweak. One of them is the distance between points of interest. I think WoW struck a good balance between short distances (where the game feels like a casino or theme park, where everywhere you look there's some quest or shiny item begging for your attention) and long distances (where the player might get bored pressing the W key to move forward). It actually fell a bit of the "long distance" side, and it did this by keeping the environments grounded in reality. But, like, a caricature of reality. Each zone feels like the WoW devs looked at a location on Earth and said "okay, how do we turn this up to eleven?". You've got Durotar, which looks like the Kalahari desert in the southern African countries, but with huge stylized rock formations and oversized trees. Then you have Tirisfal Glades, which looks like a generic pine forest in Canada (with gothic elements added, and again, larger trees). Then you have Thousand Needles which looks like Utah's Bryce Canyon or the Karst Towers in Yunnan, China (but what if there were rope bridges connecting them?). Winterspring looks like many places in winter (but there are those oversized trees and mountains again!) Another important aspect is, not much was prefabbed. While it was possible to find buildings reused across the game world, they were all decorated differently, and had different NPCs inside and out to give them uniqueness. Also, not everything in the world had purpose. This goes back to the "theme park" idea. There are many, many unique buildings, NPCs, and outdoor areas with absolutely no purpose. No enemies to fight, no quests to do. But someone put effort into making sure that this NPC and this carrot garden looks believable (as much as the stylized world of WoW can look believable).