I’ll simply never understand how you can go from a wide-scale faction conflict, zombie apocalypse, alien world incursion, and a world-annihilating demonic threat without having a significant rebuilding time. They jumped straight into another war, and burned through both Azshara and the Old Gods within a single expansion.
If Legion was followed up with Dragonflight or War Within, the time line will make a lot more sense. It’ll also give them time to let the faction breathe and build up tensions again. It gives more time for us to see Sylvanas as a capable and beloved warchief, and time to show us dissent within the Alliance due to Anduin’s inexperience with leadership and Genn influencing things.
Give it a couple more expansions, throw in some skirmishes that really get the factions itching for war, and develop Azeroth a lot more, and then BfA would be the kind of epic war they were hoping for.
There probably was a few dozen people that said, “Hey, aren’t they evil demons?” Anyone that just glanced over the WC3 manual would have mentioned. Likely he just hoped players wouldn’t have noticed. It was 2006 and he didn’t realized how the internet worked.
And I don’t think I implied he had no influence, where did you get that? Just that he doesn’t have some master plan. Just because he references another game, doesn’t mean he planned on some expansion made 15 years later when he wasn’t working on it.
BfA comes across as someone that looked at WWII and tried to work it into their game. There never seemed to be an objective, just fight each other. No trade routes, no supplies, just invade.
Like the Invasions of Vol’dun, what would be gained? A foothold? To what? Might as well stay on the ships, more food there.