I'm currently unable to play the Alpha due to a bug that is affecting Mac users (the client crashes right after the blue bar on the loading screen fills.) It's a shame, as the build that broke the game also allowed access to Stormsong Valley, leaving Vol'dun (the desert zone in northwest Zandalar) the only zone left to open up.
I'm expecting (and honestly kind of hoping) that there's a fair amount of quest redesign coming (currently my biggest critique of BFA is a certain "Christmas Tree effect" where you get quests sending you in a million different directions instead of having a more manageable story to pursue through each zone with very little sense of flow,) but thanks to the all the other people who have been able to access things, I've started to get a better sense of what's going on.
The central theme to the expansion is, of course, the Alliance/Horde conflict, but my sense is that there's still going to be a lot of focus on third-party villains.
The only announced raid instance is Uldir, a Titan facility within the Zandalar zone of Nazmir. Within is a being known as G'huun, who is called a Blood God. It's not entirely clear whether it was a fifth Old God or something cooked up by the Titans that went terribly wrong, but we know that a great deal of the plot on Zandalar (and particularly Nazmir, of course,) is going to revolve around G'huun.
It is an open question as to whether N'zoth will, as well, be present in BFA. Given its nautical associations and both islands' nautical cultures, that wouldn't be too crazy. But while N'zoth's role is unknown, we do know that Queen Azshara will be a big part of it as well.
Azshara seems like she's being built up as a very major villain for the expansion.
SPOILERS TO FOLLOW
Both Zandalar and Kul Tiras have powerful people who are, in secret, working for Azshara.
We first heard about the Prophet Zul in Mists of Pandaria, and while Zul appears to be working for Rastakhan, at some point it is revealed that he has in fact sided with Azshara. Zul was the one behind the campaign to reunite the Troll empires and wage a war of conquest against the Alliance and Horde, but while this seemed to be motivated by a desire for Trollish nationalism, it seems that instead it was to serve the Queen. I'm slightly disappointed that Zul is not, in fact, an Old God (in the vein of Nyarlathotep,) but his villainy is actually a good way to justify forgiving the Zandalari and bringing them into the Horde.
In Kul Tiras, Lady Ashvane - the head of one of Kul Tiras' four major houses - seeks to use her considerable clout (and pirate connections) to unseat the Proudmoores as leaders of Kul Tiras. And she seems to have sided with Azshara in order to accomplish this.
As of yet, I don't believe we have any confirmed boss listings for either of these figures (though I think there's a rumor of Zul as a mythic-only Uldir boss.) Lady Ashvane is present in the Siege of Boralus dungeon, but I don't believe we fight her.
I think we can reasonably assume that we will get at least three raid instances in BFA - while I realize that "tiers" aren't really a thing anymore without tier sets, we can look at how Warlords had only two tiers and yet had three raid instances.
So Uldir is the first - what else are we getting?
Clearly, there's got to be at least one on Kul Tiras as well. So where might that be?
My guess is that the most likely zone to house one would be Stormsong Valley. It's the largest zone on the island, and my understanding is that its "Sea Priests" are very likely to be worshippers of N'zoth, given their tentacular imagery. There will be a dungeon involving them called Shrine of the Storm, but one could imagine that as a kind of first step toward confrontation.
On the other hand, if Ashvane is the main villain to deal with on Kul Tiras, perhaps we'll get a more pirate-themed raid in Tiragarde Sound. One could imagine a sort of industrial area (not entirely unlike Blackrock Foundry) where Ashvane's goons build their warships.
I suspect that Azshara would at the very least have a patch that adds a new zone where we can fight her - it's a question of whether it's an Isle of Thunder-like mid-expansion patch zone, or the ultimate culmination of the expansion.
On the other hand, while Azshara could easily be the final boss, I also wonder whether Blizzard is really willing to take this Alliance/Horde conceit all the way to the ultimate conclusion.
The last time the factions were at total war was Mists of Pandaria, but Garrosh's brutality became so much that both factions turned against him - even if the final raid was Orgrimmar, it wasn't Alliance versus Horde as much as it was both factions against a threat to all, as things usually go.
But could BFA make a truly Alliance versus Horde final raid? And what would that look like?
We have had raid encounters that are cosmetically different based on faction - you have the Icecrown Gunship Battle and the faction champions in Trial of the Crusader. Could this principle be applied to an entire raid?
But this of course opens up a whole can of worms: which side canonically wins? Is it ok for one to win and the other to lose? If not, are we ok with different canons depending on the faction you're playing (Warcraft I went by this principle, which was later retconned, I believe, to place the human campaign chronologically before the orc one.) And if that's not ok, are we all right with this ending as another stalemate?
Having faction-neutral villains makes a ton of sense from a gameplay perspective as well as a thematic perspective. If I had to sum up the moral of the Warcraft story it's that we all do better when we put aside our differences to work for a common goal, but that old rivalries and resentments force us to keep re-learning this lesson.
Of course, there's always interesting questions of which villains are considered big enough to be raids versus merely dungeons. Helya came somewhat out of left field, and we got the somewhat unexpected raid with her after beating her in Maw of Souls. Personally, I'm intrigued by the Drust (from Drustvar,) and while I hope that there's still time to add more quests to learn about them in the leveling process, I also would not mind having some kind of Drust-themed raid. But I really don't know how big a deal they're going to be in the long run for the expansion.
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