No new ideas:
- make a decision on what the game is about. Is this a game about factions? Is this a game not about factions? Going back and forth just dilutes the resources and makes both paths worse. Understanding the direction will be a major stepping stone in gradual and long turn to unify the message of gameplay and story.
- blizz is not the only company in the world that works with old IP and established audience. There are other ways to handle it, not just “do whatever, regardless of the playerbase”. For example
“you have to come from a different angle. You have to be super true to the plane [replace with whatever is meaningful for the WoW story], but you have to not figure out what the plane is exactly - you have to figure out what the plane means to people.”
- If there is a lot of free time at some point, there is good (IMO) presentation that I would use as a basis for both gameplay design and story revision. I think both elements co-exist and connected.
Once again, not WoW, but IMO a solid foundation for where to start the concept.
Overall, if I could make a call on where to go, that would be an exploration of why people liked the things to begin with, and then the story would be going through what it became to restore the basics, where the previous (sort of) iteration of the story was, W3-TBC concepts, carefully considering WotLK ideas. And then to go from this onward.
gl hf