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Fallout: New Vegas lately really made me reflect on the quality, or lack thereof, of WoW. Yes, FNV is a single-player game. Yes, it's a grimy, violent shooter, not a brightly colored all-audiences RPG.
The comparison is still valid because FNV does at least three things very well that Cataclysm does very badly: questing, world environment, and player engagement.
There are no "kill ten bears" quests in FNV. A lot of the quests are slightly embellished versions of what a lot of Vanilla quests were, which was "person A wants you to talk to / take a box to / kill person B". This is an approach to questing Blizzard devs have decided they don't like, but it's actually a lot less grindy because it engages the player in the story and opens up the world. Almost all quests have multiple solutions and multiple endings, or are execution based; some are pretty challenging. There's a few quests where aggroing an NPC at different times affects the story (for example, if you jump Mortimer before he finishes his speech, his reaction - and that of the audience - is different than if you let him finish).
Bloodsplattering, gunfire and grimy palette has no bearing on this particular element of the gameplay, and there's no reason questing in a general-audiences MMO can't be this good.
World environment is extremely buggy due to lazy and rushed development, with a lot of serious clipping/falling through world issues (which also affect WoW to much too great a degree given its greater simplicity). But again, it does something very well that Cataclysm does badly: encourages exploration and open-ended play. You walk out into the empty wasteland and you see rocks and shrubs positioned randomly, organically. Shacks in the middle of nowhere, you can go inside and see what's in there. There's just a ton of stuff out there, and unlike in WotLK/Cata, there's a ton of space, there isn't the sense of excessive crowding that has affected post-TBC content.
Player engagement - everything in the game is a choice. FNV is much less reliant on "Essential" NPCs than Fallout 3, but the game is still structured so that almost no decision the player can make permanently screws him over. If you kill a bunch of NCR guys, you can just join the Legion, or vice versa. If both hate you, you can join Yes Man. If you kill him, he'll just pop back up and apologize, for reasons that are both humorous and internally consistent. If you wipe out a minor faction, the ending will reflect that.
This is opposed to WoW, where basically every NPC that isn't a generic mob has some sort of protection and no decision has any real weight besides deleting something a GM won't restore. Yet FNV shows that sort of excessive lack of decision-making isn't necessary to make a game that doesn't really let players screw themselves over.
FNV also does something much better than Fallout 3: it eliminates the bland and totally unbalanced gameplay of Fallout 3 endgame world environment, where walking across the wasteland is just a bunch of unimaginative random mob spawns for no reason, mobs have retarded amounts of health and either nuke you instantly or have to be disarmed then kited around for 10 minutes while you empty a dozen clips into them, or cheesed by pitting them against other NPCs of opposing faction or exploiting terrible pathing.
F3 really had the same problem WoW did, which was excessive survivability and too many ways to get out of fixes (stimpack spamming, knockdown cheesefest, dart gun, stealth suit). FNV solved it by making everything hit much harder relative to both player AND NPC health, and increasing the role of cooldowns and choice in player survival. Stimpacks aren't spammable, opponents don't have a zillion HP, consumables aren't unlimited, but are more varied and powerful and really make a difference in winning or losing difficult encounters.
Same problem in WoW: cooldown/consumable use is pretty homogenized, and also pretty weak. Raiders are sticklers for flasks, but they act like Cata is Vanilla/TBC, or similar to a very few numerical encounters since (mostly in Ulduar or ToC) where consumables really did make a huge difference, when most modern encounters are mostly balanced around specific mechanics.
FNV also does achievements much better than in WoW. They aren't grindy or annoying - most are earned incrementally, and well-rounded general gameplay will award most of them.
It's funny to think that if you took WoW's general style and appearance, combined with FNV's depth of play, chronological mechanics, and visual/world detail, you'd actually have one really amazing game.
Now if that game were set in the Kingdom Hearts universe, you'd have a game to end all other forms of entertainment.
Aestu of Bleeding Hollow... Nihilism is a copout.
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