I’m with you on this. The sense of wonder and the unknown was vast in the original game. At best you had some spotty article pages on Thottbot if you were lost. Now every inch of the world map has been marked and gone into detail by thousands of YouTubers. Not to mention every min/max guide for the flavor of the month so your character just ends up being uncompetitive or a complete cookie cutter. Really I wish we could go back to 2000s era internet in general, it was a lot more exciting.

Tirisfal Glades and Silverpine Forest were always my starting areas (Undead). I loved those areas so much especially coming off the high of WC3. The early years of WoW really were something special.