How to save warcraft universe, step by step guide for Blizzard

Problem 1: Warcraft as a game universe is not as popular as before, warcraft franchise could earn more money for the company. Warcraft is not that famous in younger social groups, most of warcraft games fans are from the older generations.

Problem 2: The story potential of the current warcraft is depleted. All popular and loved characters are used, all visible and more or less realistic menaces defeated, all meaningful storylines are finished. Players now are forced to a new places that have never been an authentic and important part of the warcraft universe, like afterlife, other worlds, planes of death or life, etc.

Problem 3: New generation of blizzard employees who work on wow are hostages to the previous warcraft stories, characters and achievements. They can't create new good stories that could be perceived well by the community, as their hands are tied with what have happened in warcraft - both from a story standpoint and financially - earlier. So they're forced to reach new levels of epic (which already looks quite absurd) or tell a completely secondary, lateral stories, that players don't feel involved in.

Problem Solving

Step 1.

Create a new campaign expansion for Warcraft III with the following list of criteria:

- all completely new characters

- campaign is about character development, just like it was about Thrall, Illidan or Arthas. They have their own comparatively small things to do, that grow into bigger lore later in the campaign

- in the end of the campaign, level of epic is close to warcraft 2 or 3, we need no gods or titans or other cosmic powers involved. Maximum something like kil'jaeden. Maximum.

- strangely, not a single geographical or character name that is familiar to us is mentioned

- even more strange: we meet new races

- it seems every character in this story minds his own business and has never heard about scourge or titans or horde or alliance

- at some point, someone accidentally mentions the name of the planet where the campaign is happening, its not Azeroth

- closer to the end of the campaign we get a slight hint that this is one of the worlds that have been created by titans, as azeroth is not the only one. We can see some familiar natrezim finally, who tries to corrupt on of our main heroes, just like it was with Arthas.

- players finally realize that this is not a weird story of Azeroth. This is some other world with its own rich history, ancient secrets, ruins of fallen empires in jungles and deserts and new alliances. We even don't know what time is it on Azeroth at this moment.

Step 2.

Next steps depend on a popularity of this expansion. Anyway, we all know, that creating a new expansion for warcraft iii is not as expensive, as some managers may tell us. We all know that a team of 9 (pm, writer, map creator, map designer, 2 QAs and 3 modellers) can do it in 3 months.

If it is successful, we can see further development of the warcraft franchise, maybe new games that happen in this new warcraft world. Maybe even warcraft 4 or wow 2. As the franchise develops, we obviously see that this story continues without any strong connections to our Azeroth, only hints. Many years will pass, you and i will be in our 40s (assuming now most of us are close to 30 or in our 30s), when finally characters of this new story find out that there are many worlds in this universe and someone opens portal to Azeroth... We see that many years, maybe even centuries have passed since the events of Dragonflight expansion. Some characters are dead, others got older. Azeroth is a completely new world now and we can rediscover it!

If it is not as successful as expected, than anyway, this warcraft III expansion was a comparatively cheap tool to add whole new set of heroes, lore and stories, that could be used to solve problems 2 and 3. And earn more money for investors!