We're in the middle of Legion - the second raid tier is open, with half the LFR wings available, and a third coming on Tuesday. This is the biggest expansion in terms of lore and stakes that we've had (though the stakes are generally pretty high.) Given that the expansion has built up to the ultimate confrontation with the Burning Legion, with the spoilers coming out of the PTR's version of Antorus, the final raid of the expansion, suggesting a truly significant dynamic shift will occur within the Warcraft cosmos.
I don't know what will come in the expansion after next, but I have a strong feeling that we're going to be dealing with N'zoth, the last remaining undefeated Old God in Azeroth's surface.
First off, the game has not definitively said that C'thun or Yogg-Saron are not simply dead. There are hints that their presences linger, such as C'thun's ability to mutate Cho'gall in Cataclysm and the appearance of Faceless creatures in Ulduar during the Legion launch quests.
But N'zoth is certainly still around.
Datamining has suggested that Kul Tiras might be a future zone in expansion seven, or even possibly a continent (though while I think Blizzard is wary of having a true archipelago lest zones feel totally disconnected like in Cataclysm - which explains why the Broken Isles is really more like the Broken Isle - I still think it makes more sense for an expansion containing Kul Tiras to have other famous islands in the South Seas.) We can extrapolate a lot of potential elements to an expansion that would contain Kul Tiras: It's likely that Azshara and her Naga will play a significant role, given their dominance of Azeroth's oceans (also, the Naga presence in Tomb of Sargeras and Azsuna seems like a good reminder of their threat to prepare us for a more heavily Naga-themed expansion.) Now, Azshara is linked to two major evil factions. The first is the Burning Legion, but we will obviously have dealt with that and will be sick to death of fel green stuff. The other major evil faction she associates with is that of the Old Gods, and particularly N'zoth.
N'zoth is the most aquatically-themed Old God, and its appearance in Hearthstone suggests that it's the basis for the look of Kraken. We also know that N'zoth had been kind of the custodian of the Emerald Nightmare (even though Yogg-Saron was its creator - given N'zoth's predilection for fighting Yogg-Saron and C'thun, I wouldn't be surprised if N'zoth usurped the Nightmare from Yogg-Saron.) If we ended the Nightmare by slaying Xavius, that could mean that N'zoth, who had been occupied with "dreaming" up the Nightmare, might now have awoken (I also think that the Pillars of Creation probably did something to unlock the prisons of the Old Gods, but that's like a couple other articles I've already written.)
We also, (SPOILERS,) see a group of Ethereals practicing void magic on Argus - sort of a shocking thing, given that Argus is the Legion's headquarters and they're theoretically all anti-Void. I don't know what we'll discover about the Void in 7.3, but this seems like a very standard "set it up to pay it off" kind of thing in a late expansion patch.
Now, while void magic of Ner'zhul's and these ethereals' style looks very different than Old God stuff, the truth is that the Old Gods were created by beings in the Void, and that they're really one and the same.
An Old God-centric expansion would have to deal with void magic, and the link between the gross, tentacles-and-goo feel of Old Gods with the cold and cosmic Void could be explored in an expansion that focused on them.
Personally, what I would love to see is at least one zone that leans heavily into Lovecraftian horror.
Blizzard is actually quite good at making gothic settings. Gilneas, Tirisfal, and most recently Black Rook Hold have all demonstrated a great sense of the macabre (I also love the aesthetic of Helheim, though that's not exactly gothic, but certainly spooky.)
Lovecraft built on the foundation of Poe-style gothic horror, but added super-creepy aliens (and if you're not familiar, no, not little green men, but more writhing masses of tentacles and stuff like that.) The Old Gods are obvious homages to Lovecraft, but while Blizzard has gotten the weird, ancient and hidden civilization feel and certainly the creepy tentacle stuff, they've only rarely ever linked the Old Gods with the kind of madness it instills in populations. I would love to have us arrive in Kul Tiras and discover that there's some kind of creepy oligarchy that has developed in the absence of Jaina or any other Proudmoores that have the island on lockdown, and that there's a scared populace who are being dominated by a terrible cult (those same oligarchs.) The zone could then have you investigating this oppressive oligarchy and discover that they've actually sworn themselves to N'zoth, and he is slowly transforming them into aquatic beings - not unlike how he did this to the Night Elves to create the Naga or how Dagon turned the population of Innsmouth into weird hybrid fish-people in Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
World of Warcraft is generally a pretty bright and cartoony game, but I think that this makes the moments of creepiness hit that much harder. Diablo is kind of wall-to-wall gross monsters, and thus they don't really have much of an impact. But given that I imagine a South Seas expansion (if indeed that is what we are getting) will mostly be familiar Naga, maybe Zandalari Trolls, and other less horrifying stuff, it wouldn't be such a bad thing to have one zone really delve into just how horrific the Old Gods and the Void truly are.
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