The later zones (of Vanilla Wow) were pretty boring and ugly, assumedly because they ran out of time to develop them further. They definitely put a lot of iteration into the earlier zones and it paid off.

Looking back, there just wasn't anything that looked like WoW, but a lot of that included the perspective of running around in a comparatively polished world with a ton of comparatively polished game systems, with friends. The first long flight I took from two major cities across most of a continent (that I was familiar with from experience with the IP) was absolutely nuts to me.