WoW was amazing. But I am mostly referring to vanilla WoW. I have no experience with later content and environments. I think there are several factors that mad

WoW was amazing. But I am mostly referring to vanilla WoW. I have no experience with later content and environments. I think there are several factors that made WoW feel extremely cozy and fun to play. First one is the game is very open. From the beginning, outside of monsters, if you stick to the roads you can go to high level zones if you want to. There's nothing for you to do, but the game is not blocking you. Also, there are no loading screens between zones, so you can cross between zones wherever you want (if there aren't mountains blocking you). In other games you have to go back to the road and go through a portal to load the next zone. I like how in WoW the game didn't tell you where to do your quest. It often told you "go south", but that's it. Sure, these days you have wikis that tell you exactly where to go, but I prefer that anyway over the big arrow telling you "GO HERE NOW". I tried other MMOs, and I lose attention on the tutorial. I feel like the game is on rails and it's just telling me which buttons to press and there's little feel of exploration. Another factor is that WoW created a world first and then filled it with content. There are many places in WoW that aren't connected to a quest at all, they don't have a gameplay purpose but they are there. A drawback of this is that some zones didn't get finished in time. Famously Azshara, Silithus and Deadwind Pass were mostly devoid of content upon release. These days MMOs design progression and quests first and then create a world around it, which ends up a series of linear paths and quests that feel more forced than the ones in WoW (which do feel often forced). WoW's stylized look aged very well. I actually prefer it to modern MMORPGs. Modern MMOs have the same issue Warcraft 3 Reforged has against the original - the new models look pretty, but with higher detail comes more visual noise and they stand out less in a crowd. A group of players in a modern MMORPG looks like a grayish blob, in WoW it's much easier to tell the players apart and what equipment they have. Also, simple stylized look allowed WoW to have great view distances and many entities on the screen. Places like Mulgore look amazing in 1440p@144Hz on a modern PC. You can see most of the zone, some is obscured by the fog, but you can see Thunder Bluff in the distance and it all looks amazing. WoW has some good fog and rain effects which are built to create ambiance. The music in WoW is also good. It's low key enough to not be distracting, but builds the atmosphere of the zone well. I am getting increasingly tired of epic orchestral music in RPGs these days, so music like in WoW is a relief for me. I disagree with the opinion that WoW's attractiveness was unique for being in the right place at the right time. It's success perhaps was, but I don't think any game managed to copy the look and feel of the zones, that felt just right for the most part.