For context, initial WoW was developed until 2005, and up to roughly 2003 Blizzard was going to release it only for the US and Korea, because they thought “Europeans only play racing games” (source: WoW dev diary by Staats)
Source: was there
I mean, when you can see a 12th century church daily by just taking the subway in 20 minutes, Medieval stuff gets boring fast.
Even more if you own volumes at home older than the half of the US' history like nothing...
From that perspective, what you want to know and met it's the new, fancy, technological futurist stuff.
The US loved Ultima and maybe FFVI and medieval ARPG's. Europeans... maybe urbanites, townsfolk people loved racing/soccer games and futurist games like Half Life and Deus Ex.