Please send your own opinion and criticize mine if you want!!
It’s safe to say that modern WoW does not focus on exploration nearly as much as it should. Travelling through expansive environments and discovering new things should be one of the most memorable things in any good RPG. As an MMO, journeying through the world and discovering points-of-interest should be extremely rewarding and part of the challenge and the gameplay. This is not the case in WoW, where the player is forcefully steered into each area of “main story”. Alongside this, the content outside of the current expansion is almost perceived as a different game entirely, where it should all feel like part of the World of Warcraft. In Dungeons and Dragons, exploration and mystery is important.
The world should be larger, with a similar amount of content, only dispersed. There should be more areas of “wilderness” through which players would travel, and where world-oriented content such as professions could flourish. For much of the time there should be no defined objective or “main story”, where the player would be encouraged to discover new content independently. Alongside complementing the genre and gameplay, the focus on the world would complement the game’s brilliant art and sound. This would also encourage a lot of using your imagination, which is essential for a successful RPG, and something that has been lacking in recent years, with more “TV show” like storytelling.
One way in which they could achieve this would be by reworking much of the “old world” or “legacy” zones to today’s visual standards and filling them with content, events, encounters and objectives, while maintaining those zones’ expansive appearances. Alongside making the game feel more like World of Warcraft, this would also make “irrelevent” zones and cities relevent again. Even some end-game content could be spread across the wilderness, resulting in both low and max-level players travelling the same world.
Warlords of Draenor can predictably be credited for the start of the stray away from exploration focused content, but it had been deteriorating since Cataclysm, which released with the guise of an exploration based expansion, but really wasn’t. Hopefully the next expansion won’t be another content theme park, which the last few have been (despite sometimes doing well in other regards, keep in mind this is an evaluation on exploration only).
but more exploration is what this game needs instead of mindless grinding and farming.