What would your ideal Warcraft 4 look like?

Since 2004, the Warcraft franchise has been fairly centered around the MMO genre. World of Warcraft and its offshoot, World of Warcraft Classic, have been the main focus for the series. But after Warcraft 3 Reforged failed to really engage the players, and the success of Diablo 2: Resurrected, I’ve been wondering if anyone at Blizzard is considering going back to the RTS field with a new Warcraft game. Lately, with Hearthstone getting the new Mercenaries mode which is more tactical RPG than card game, the focus on borrowed power systems in Shadowlands, and Diablo 4 looking to embrace more of the franchise’s roots, it’s hard to really pin down a Blizzard aesthetic or design philosophy, and that has me wondering.

I mean, would Warcraft 4 be a straight RTS? I can certainly see the case for it — it feels with Diablo 2: Resurrected and WoW Classic that we’re seeing a fair amount of nostalgia among gamers who enjoy Blizzard’s games, so a hearkening back to the older games in the series might pay off. But looking at Mercenaries mode, I find myself wondering if the designers might work in some more 4X style gameplay, or make efforts to put the ‘Orcs vs. Humans’ aspect of the game front and center in the RTS so that they can back away from it in the MMO.

It’s also possible they could deviate from the World of Warcraft storyline, setting the game in the distant past or the future, some point well after the current games — a few hundred year time skip would make any changes they wanted more believable and they could just say that the events of Warcraft 4 are in their own storyline and not necessarily the future of World of Warcraft if they wanted to keep their options open. So I guess it’s your turn — what do you think a Warcraft 4 would look like? What systems would it contain, what would the story be, would it be in the same universe as WoW?