BFA promises to put the conflict between the two player factions center-stage. It's reflected in a lot of the expansion's features: each faction has its own continent (though of course we get to go to the other one at the level cap, meaning that for most of the expansion you'll experience it as kind of one bifurcated six-zone continent,) we have Island Expeditions in which we race to grab resources faster than the other side can, and then we have Warfronts, where we battle it out with the other side over key locations (I missed the actual Warfront test, but if you were disappointed that Arathi Highlands barely got a revamp in Cataclysm, the Warfront version of it looks totally re-done, including the terrain. It almost makes me wish that they'd do this for the whole old world, but, you know, not, because I remember what happened with Cataclysm.)
The faction conflict has played a major role in earlier expansions - Cataclysm saw full-scale war break out in many of its low-level zone revamps, and Mists put a lot of focus on the war while we were exploring (and exploiting) this new land we had found.
But even if the faction war was very close to the center of an expansion like Mists, it hasn't really been front-and-center since perhaps Vanilla (and even then, while the cinematic and advertisements emphasized the conflict, the actual story was much more about faction-neutral threats.)
Take, for example, the settings: while the individual zones are all new, we have a long history with both Zandalar and Kul Tiras. Many Alliance characters (those who were around during the Second War) might very well have been to Kul Tiras before. The Zandalari have been perhaps more isolationist in their history, but both factions got to know them decently before Zul turned the empire against the rest of the world. One assumes that before Zul started preaching that Zandalar was reasonably open in communication with the rest of the world.
Obviously, it remains to be seen just how much we deal with the faction conflict in this expansion. I'd honestly not be terribly surprised to see something of a stalemate that ends not in some grand peace treaty but more like a de-escalation at the end of the expansion.
Conflicts are difficult to resolve. If you look at world history, simmering rivalries don't tend to go away once a war ends. World War II was largely launched by Germany as a kind of retaliation for their loss in the previous World War. It was only after an utterly devastating defeat and confirmations of the horrific crimes their country had committed, not to mention a very forceful division of the country into different occupied territories, that Germany really made a lasting change toward peaceful co-existence.
And there's no real "end of history" as long as there are still people around. The best people can work for is a longterm peaceful state that they try to preserve as long as they can.
So matters settling between Alliance and Horde is not the be-all-end-all of their relationship or even individual identities. We've seen with the Void Elves that sometimes members of one faction will leave (or be chased out) and join the other. Hell, if the Void Elves made a push for it, you could even imagine Silvermoon City becoming an Alliance city once again.
There's also, of course, the gameplay mechanical problem. Even if the story absolutely justified a longterm peace and unification between the two factions, there's still so many aspects of the way that WoW is built that make peaceful cooperation not work. If I take my human to Orgrimmar, I'm going to get swarmed by guards and potentially other players (even as a PvE player, you get flagged in the other faction's cities.) So as much as my character might have bonded with that Orc Hunter - we've gotten to know each other and realized that actually, we're really both looking for the same thing in this world - the game's mechanics would not let me go visit her nice apartment in the Valley of Honor.
So we can talk about two things: story changes and mechanical changes.
Story-wise, I could imagine a kind of "stay on your side" solution to the conflict. If the Forsaken abandon Lordaeron, fully relocating to Kalimdor, that would leave the Eastern Kingdoms basically in full Alliance control (even the Searing Gorge/Burning Steppes region would now be in Alliance hands, with the induction of the Dark Irons.) The only Horde territory would really be Quel'thalas, and perhaps the factions could negotiate a peaceful "leave the Blood Elves alone" treaty. With the Eastern Plaguelands between Quel'thalas and the rest of the continent, I could imagine the Alliance leaving them be.
Meanwhile, the Night Elves might leave Kalimdor after the burning of Teldrassil (though I'd imagine far more bitterly) and settle in the Eastern Kingdoms, leaving the 'Myst isles as the only real Alliance territory there, which the Horde might respect given that A: it's not actually on the continent and B: the Draenei are basically never aggressors.
There would still be serious conflicts (I imagine a big splinter-faction of Night Elves unwilling to leave Kalimdor and a total mess left behind by the Forsaken) but without many contested borders, you could see the conflict start to die down.
But you could go farther if you changed gameplay mechanics.
I have no idea what the population of WoW players is these days. They used to publish this, but as things started to decline toward the end of Cataclysm, they eventually stopped talking about those numbers (presumably because it wasn't as effective as bragging rights.) There's still enough players to do stuff in game, thankfully, and I imagine that that will hold as long as they put out expansions more like Legion and less like Warlords. But one of the oddities of WoW is that you're always only playing with half the players. What if you could group up with the other side?
Now there are areas where this wouldn't work: battlegrounds, warfronts, and faction-conflict-centric content would probably never really work for cross-faction grouping (though we've seen them straight-up do this on Ashran, so we know that the technology exists and that they're willing to do it sometimes.)
But Blizzard claims that BFA is going to "resolve" the faction conflict. Most of us, I think, assume that this will not really change the fundamental mechanics of the game, but will simply allow them to focus on other stories moving forward.
But what if they're actually thinking of something more radical?
People have wanted cross-faction grouping for basically all of WoW's history. But we also know that Blizzard doesn't like doing something in WoW unless there's both a gameplay and story justification. As much as we might have wanted Demon Hunters as soon as we knew that Blizzard was willing to add classes to the game, we didn't get them until Legion because we needed to justify them.
A lot of people kind of groaned when we discovered that the next expansion would be focused on a conflict that many players find played out. But what if that's the whole point: Blizzard wants to end the faction conflict, and once they have, that will open the possibility of grouping up with your friends regardless of faction?
Take the change to the PvP servers: In BFA, PvP will be entirely opt-in (unless you go to an enemy faction's location or instanced PvP like a battleground. Essentially, it means that PvP servers will now be the same as Normal PvE ones.
Could that reflect the future of the story?
Any time peace is made, you have people with grievances who aren't ready to stop fighting. Now, you'll be able to declare your stance on peace mechanically. Sure, the leadership at Stormwind may decide to sacrifice Ashenvale in the name of an end to war, but if you're some Kaldorei guerrilla who's not going to let some 20-year-old human give away the forests you fought 10,000 years to protect, you might flip on that PvP flag and take on any damned greenskin who wants to log your trees.
Thus, the conflict between the factions becomes more of an individual choice for players and characters, while those who aren't interested in fighting against each other can work together to fight the other threats to life on Azeroth.
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