We Know Shockingly Little About the Arc of BFA

By the time Legion was less than a month away, we knew a lot about the plot going forward:

We had Emerald Nightmare coming in as the first raid, and we knew that we'd quest through Suramar at max level before heading into the Nighthold.

But beyond that, we also knew that the whole expansion was building to a confrontation at the Tomb of Sargeras, giving us all but the last raid tier and the surprise mini-raid of Trial of Valor.

I don't think we knew that Kil'jaeden would be the Tomb's final boss, but other than the big reveal post-launch (I believe at Blizzcon 2016) that we'd be going to Argus, we knew a lot about where things would go in Legion.

In BFA, we know far less.

We've got the six zones - three per continent - and we know about the expansion's first raid, but beyond that, in the story moving forward, we only know that Azshara will be the final boss of the first big raid - if we take Uldir to be sort of the equivalent of Emerald Nightmare, that means that (other than another ToV-like,) we'll be confronting Azshara after that.

We don't know where we're going to fight Azshara, though. Naz'jatar would be the most logical place to do so, given that it is her capital, but that's an underwater city that does not seem logical to put near any existing zones. We don't have a Kul Tiras raid as of yet. Might we wind up fighting Azshara outside her home?

But beyond even that, we really have no clue as to where the expansion will be heading.

Clearly, the Alliance/Horde conflict is center stage in a way that it wasn't even during Mists. The question then is whether it would make sense to do a full raid that was faction-based. The premise of the expansion seems to suggest that would be the right way to end it, yet the implications of such a raid would be tricky to work out - even if you see two battles, perhaps taking out a major player of the opposite faction, won't both feel like pyrrhic victories if we realize that while we were raiding, say, Thunder Bluff, the Horde was attacking Ironforge? And vice versa?

One of the biggest bits of speculation is the presence of Old God stuff in BFA. Uldir is obviously going to be heavily Old-God/Titan themed. But G'huun is a lore newcomer, and given the nautical theme of the expansion, a confrontation with N'zoth seems highly possible as the culmination of the expansion. Still, we have no confirmation that that's the case.

One can definitely imagine that the faction war is going to develop in different ways over the course of the expansion. Sylvanas' plan to plague Stormwind might be on the back burner for now, and it's not clear what decisive action post-Undercity the Alliance wishes to take to counter the Horde threat.

Both sides are going to their new continents to strengthen their navies, so it seems a big naval battle ought to be in the works (if the devs can figure out how to make that work in gameplay.)

The other question, story-wise, is where things will end. It's clear from the mechanics of the game that neither faction can truly be eliminated, and there's got to remain some conflict between them. But after the post-Garrosh armistice, what needs to happen for there to be real peace?

Eliminating Sylvanas could secure it, but that would feel a bit too much like Garrosh 2.0. If the Alliance had been the aggressors in this conflict, with some charismatic leader refusing to entertain the notion of peace, and for inner conflict to build up in the Alliance, you could see something happen on that side, but that's not the way things are going. The plot seems to be Anduin learning to balance his desire for peace with the need to defend his people. That doesn't sound like a madman who needs to be taken down.

The thing is, much as any expansion called simply "Legion" would need to resolve the Burning Legion plot in some definitive (if not entirely closed-off) way, Battle for Azeroth needs to see some fundamental shift in the faction conflict so that it can feel like something was accomplished.

But we also need to see that conflict flare up like it hasn't done in the past. Granted, the burning of Teldrassil and the destruction of Undercity both sort of accomplish that before the expansion even comes out, so the question then is "where do we go from there?"