WoW's first three expansions centered around powerful big bads - yes, Burning Crusade had something of a bonus-half-tier that made Illidan its penultimate final boss and you could argue that Halion was the true final boss of Wrath, though I would fight you if you made that argument - and built the story around an eventual confrontation with them.
BC took some criticism due to the fact that you basically didn't see Illidan until you got to him in Black Temple, and while his influence is felt, the actual status of the larger Illidari coalition was not super clear - like how Kael'thas and Vashj seemed to only sort of maybe have any loyalty to him, and the former certainly not in the end.
Of course, BC still largely operated on the notion that NPCs in WoW only existed in one place at a given time, with Thrall's arrival in Nagrand as a surprising fist-pumping moment (little did we know that showing Garrosh that his father was actually a hero was maybe the worst thing Thrall ever did - other than make the dude Warchief.)
Wrath corrected for this by having Arthas show up in practically every zone at least once, making it very clear that the entire expansion was leading up to the big fight with the Lich King. Some people complained that it required him to do an evil laugh and leave without killing us for no apparent reason, though I preferred the hands-on style.
Deathwing anchored Cataclysm by striking a bit of a balance - interestingly, his most common appearance was outside of any quests and instead saw him fly across a zone and torch everything and everyone in his path.
The point is, in these expansions, we knew what fight we were building up to the whole time.
Mists changed things by presenting no obvious final boss in the early patches. Blizzard ultimately wound up revealing Garrosh's final boss status right around the time the expansion launched, but since then the company has been reluctant to tell us.
Warlords seemed to me like it was building up to a fight with Gul'dan - especially after Blizzard acknowledged that it would be pretty unsatisfying to have us fight another Mr. G. Hellscream as final boss two expansions in a row. The result, however, was the rather "out of the green" arrival of Archimonde, who had had basically no presence in the expansion prior to that, and we only found out in the lead up to the final patch of that truncated expansion.
While Legion was a far better expansion, the final boss also sort of came out of the blue. We had only just gotten confirmation that Azeroth was a nascent Titan, and now, in the final hour, we suddenly discovered Argus was as well. Fighting a Titan was a decently sufficient final challenge for the expansion, though I think a lot of us were looking forward to fighting Sargeras himself.
In BFA, we've similarly been given no explicit message about the final boss. That being said, the leading contender is looking more likely now than ever before.
Spoilers to follow:
According to Taliesin & Evitel, Blizzard has said that the final fight of Azshara's Eternal Palace would make it clear what the final boss of BFA would be. Then, when T&E looked through the Dungeon Journal on the internal testing server on which they were invited to play, they discovered that the fight with Azshara has her attempting to unseal N'zoth.
Which would seem to hint strongly at N'zoth playing the big bad of the expansion.
Indeed, given that all the Old Gods like to manipulate things - especially N'zoth - it would be very in-character to discover that N'zoth has been egging this war on all along - we could discover that certain NPCs (even friendly ones! Especially friendly ones) might have actually been doing N'zoth's work. N'zoth both just enjoys chaos as an Old God, but can also make use of it to divide and conquer his foes.
Now, there is some possibility that we're misinterpreting what's going on. Take, for example, the fact that Sylvanas seems to be taking up the dagger that once held Xal'atath - which I guess is still the Blade of the Black Empire but not Xal, who got a nice blood elf body to live in instead - and what we could possibly see if Sylvanas sucking N'zoth's essence into the blade and wielding its power for herself (I even wonder if they're going to pull the "this was the whole point of the war, sorry we killed so many civilians" even if that logic doesn't make a ton of sense.)
But for now, until the end cinematic of AEP goes up (it looks like since Legion we're going to be getting at least one pre-rendered cinematic per major raid) either confirms or refutes this notion, I'm thinking N'zoth is the final boss, and expecting Ny'alotha as either a new zone or the final raid.
So now the question:
Was the coyness necessary?
There are plenty of hints in the 8.0 content that we could be heading toward a fight with N'zoth. And indeed, I think a lot of players who were not so jazzed about bringing the Alliance/Horde conflict back into focus (myself included) would have probably been more excited if N'zoth's presence in the expansion had been felt stronger to start with.
I think that, culturally, we live in a spoiler-averse world these days. And I'll admit I'm a big fan of watercooler speculation. But is there something to be said for giving us a clear foe to fight?
The march through Northrend, going to colder and higher-elevated zones as you leveled up, felt like a really big campaign - a true war - against the Lich King. There was a clear end-goal, the top of the Frozen Throne, and the whole expansion seemed like a build to that. Other expansions we've seen since then have often had us asking the question of who, exactly, the enemy really is. Hell, Grom is even fighting beside us in the final boss of Warlords, when he seemed to be the big bad when it started.
And that ambiguity can be compelling and fun, of course. And I'd argue that N'zoth makes a lot of sense as the kind of villain who would be the behind-the-scenes manipulator.
But a reveal like that needs to be a good payoff. N'zoth is, thankfully, getting some foreshadowing in the Crucible of Storms raid - though foreshadowing might be putting it lightly. The best twists, to my mind, are the ones that seem so glaringly obvious in hindsight. If you've seen Fight Club, for instance, the big reveal that starts the final act is actually something the movie has been practically screaming at you the whole time, but it's unlikely that you'll guess it until much later in the movie, and I think most people don't see it coming (ok, little brag here, but I did predict its twist - but it's done so well that I don't in any way see that as a flaw in the movie; in fact, I see the fact that you could predict it as a sign that it was a properly foreshadowed twist.)
MMOs, particularly with the constant messaging on the part of the developers and the data-mining that goes on, have a hard time keeping things secret. The only thing they don't seem able to datamine these days are the cinematics, which I think don't go live until the content is actually available.
So in truth, what even counts as a spoiler is sort of ambiguous in the first place.
I do wonder how the remaining story of BFA will go - indeed, while I'm not a big fan of the faction conflict (largely because the Horde never seems to legitimately have the moral high ground, every crime committed by the Alliance being precedented by the Horde doing something far worse,) the actual storytelling of BFA has been very compelling, seeing Zandalar and Kul Tiras transform due to our influence.
Maybe this was the expansion where some ambiguity was necessary. But I think there is also a place for having a villain who is less secretive and more flamboyant. We, of course, don't know what expansion eight will hold, but I wouldn't mind having a clearer goal to start with next time around.
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