I played a lot of WoW in vanilla through the second expansion. The world was, I feel, the most explorable in vanilla. The game designers had started but never f

I played a lot of WoW in vanilla through the second expansion. The world was, I feel, the most explorable in vanilla. The game designers had started but never finished lots of content, and there was lots of randomness and hidden gems that weren't calculated 'content'. Just artistic touches that had been added to the world. After vanilla, it started to feel like everything was very much added 'on purpose', which detracted from the feeling for me. [This is a feeling I have about lots of games, and even software and real-life experiences too. Methodical polish can really make things less endearing.] I have great memories of wandering zones I had no business being in. Especially wandering Alliance zones and cities on my Horde rogue. When achievements for exploring the whole world and doing so many thousands of quests came out with the second expansion, I had them all (Loremaster, Seeker, Explorer, ..). And I probably did 500+ quests beyond Seeker - I would just keep doing every low level quest I could find, just to experience all the random hidden pockets of content. It was a great feeling, and one that I didn't grow up finding IRL. The vanilla world was also... rusty.. in a really charming way. It was pretty easy to crack the holes of the world open and find things that weren't meant to be found - like half finished zones, giant peculiar monoliths, and tidbits of things that had been mentioned in lore here and there but never fully implemented. A famous (at the time) video was "Exploration the Movie' by DopeFish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWMz7-7SGlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWMz7-7SGlo The soundtrack is really great too. It's electronic / trance-style stuff that I guess isn't very popular (or wasn't where I'm from). But, the first song ('When Things Go Wrong' by Airwave) became my favorite thing to listen to for at least a year or so in high school. When I got my driver's license I would put it (and similar) songs on in the car and drive around my town at night, aimlessly. Those are some memories I'm really fond of.