Twelve circles on a map: where WoW Forever could go next, from Quel'Thalas to the Emerald Dream

At its PAX Aus keynote on 9 October, with executive producer Holly Longdale on stage, Blizzard put a map of Azeroth on the screen with twelve yellow circles on it. Associate production director Clay Stone named just one area. The circles carry no labels, and nobody on stage walked through them.

Bellular's 23 October video, "Blizzard Revealed Where WoW Forever Is Going Next", fills in those blanks, and it had 617,486 views and 1,200 comments when we checked on 2 November. It takes that map, a list from another slide and a handful of names in the game files, and argues they could add up to years of new places: Quel'Thalas, Grim Batol, Azshara, even a real Emerald Dream.

Apart from the announced Blackmaw Hold dungeon in Azshara, none of that has been announced for Forever. But the evidence is more interesting than a wish list, and it comes in three different grades. Here is which is which.

What Blizzard said and showed

The map. It comes up about an hour and eleven minutes into the recording on the official Warcraft channel. By our count, five circles sit on Kalimdor and seven on the Eastern Kingdoms. The video says the map highlights "areas that Blizzard themselves wants to develop". Stone's words were narrower: starting from the original map of vanilla Azeroth and, "as we revealed at BlizzCon", the team has "added to that in a whole bunch of different ways by expanding the world out", and "one of those areas that we developed" is the Riverglades. That describes work already done. It isn't a statement about the future, and it doesn't explain the rest.

That is also why the map stays intriguing. Blizzard's September recap names four new regions: Hyjal, Shen'dralas, the Riverglades and Zephras Isle. Some circles could match those, or the new dungeons. We can't match the circle over the northern tip of the Eastern Kingdoms, where the video places Quel'Thalas, to anything Blizzard has announced, or the one around the western peninsula it calls Gilneas. That is our reading of an unlabelled picture, not something Blizzard said.

The pitch deck. Earlier in the same talk, Stone showed what were described as the actual slides used to pitch Forever inside Blizzard, never before seen outside the company. One of them, headed "WoW Development Mythos", lists ten things: a Mt. Hyjal zone, the Ashbringer questline, Azshara zone completion, a Waters of Azshara dungeon, Karazhan as a location, a Karazhan Crypts dungeon, an Azshara Crater battleground, a Grim Batol raid, an Emerald Dream zone and a Stormwind Vaults raid.

Read the slide's own wording before getting carried away. It calls this a "treasure trove of unfinished and hinted-at content in the community consciousness". We read that as the team telling its bosses what players dream about, not as a list of what it would build. Still, Hyjal made it into Forever at launch, and Blizzard's dungeon list puts a new one, Blackmaw Hold, in Azshara. The September recap doesn't name the other entries on the slide.

The promise. A summary slide that Stone said he added from a slightly later greenlight says Classic+ will feature a living world with frequent large updates, "creating a horizontally-expanding, evergreen, Classic Azeroth". The September recap makes the public version of that promise: more raids, dungeons, PvP updates and world content, "a revamped iconic raid" it doesn't name, and major updates "that will keep expanding this evergreen version of Azeroth over time". Where that expansion goes is the open question.

Stone also gave a way to think about it: the expected, like Mount Hyjal; the completely unexpected, like Zephras Isle and the Skyborne; and the Riverglades between the two, which fits the original game but which "no one was expecting".

What the game files show

This part is datamining, not announcement. Blizzard has already said that some datamined beta art isn't meant for this version of the game, and that some things were switched off for the beta. A name in a file proves the name is in the file. The video shows a table of the client's map records from an earlier build, and we compared it with the installed client we examined on 27 October.

Battle for Gilneas is the big one. Its map record is there in both, with this description: "As the Greymane wall collapses, the inevitable conflict between the Forsaken and Worgen reaches a new climax." It has the same instance type as Darkspear Islands, Forever's announced new battleground, though unlike Darkspear Islands its objective text is blank. In our client, 3,637 pieces of terrain are tagged Battle for Gilneas. Separately, the Eastern Kingdoms has area records for Gilneas, Gilneas City and Ruins of Gilneas, with 2,270 pieces of terrain tagged simply Gilneas. For scale, 2,688 carry the Riverglades label itself, and its named sub-areas, not counting the sea, bring that to 6,156. A label doesn't show what has been built on that ground, or whether anyone will ever walk on it. The video says this instance won't be available at release, and Blizzard's recap names only Darkspear Islands as the new battleground.

Half-Pint Tavern shows how quickly these things move. It appears as a map record on the video's screen. In our later client that map record is gone, and only the place name remains, pointing at a map that isn't in the table.

Manor Mistmantle has a map record in our client, of the same type as the new dungeon Hall of Thanes. But the map file it points to wasn't in the client's file list, so this is a definition without a place behind it.

"nothing to see here" is an actual map name, sitting in the table between Hall of Thanes and Manor Mistmantle. The video says the numbering hints at another dungeon in that gap without naming it. The one readable record we can see there isn't typed as a dungeon, so we can't back that up. The client's eight encrypted map records have visible ID numbers, and none falls in that range in this build.

What Bellular thinks it could mean

From here on, this is one channel's lore-driven speculation, labelled as such, and it's the fun part.

• Quel'Thalas. The video says "there is clearly something going on here", and pitches the moment the last high elves join the Alliance while the blood elves take their first steps with the Horde.
• Around Stratholme and Scholomance. It sees northern Stratholme as a launch point for a death knight or San'layn class, if class questionnaires ever become a thing, and the spot beside Scholomance as a possible outdoor Scourge dungeon or necromancer home.
• Gilneas. It admits the timeline is fuzzy, since the Greymane Wall fell in Cataclysm, and suggests an early, failed incursion. Our note, not the video's: Stone's pitch slides also rule out "stomping" post-vanilla lore, so that one has to thread a needle.
• Grim Batol. It imagines the highlands beside it as a classic zone of Wildhammer holdouts and Dragonmaw orcs, which is where the raid on Blizzard's slide comes in.
• Between Stormwind and Ironforge. It calls this potentially another Riverglades.
• South of Stranglethorn. If this area is ever expanded, it expects the pirate war Blizzard has teased since vanilla.
• Stonetalon. It bets on the caverns where Thrall and Jaina were sent to meet Medivh, which players could never find.
• Azshara Crater. It recalls a lane-pushing battleground that was worked on for vanilla and never shipped.

Then there's the Emerald Dream, which the video calls the big thing. It doesn't want another phase or green filter, but a real zone. "It would have to be huge. Almost a mini expansion," it says, built horizontally with no level cap increase and no power creep, with the first whispers of the Nightmare rising and Fandral Staghelm working in the shadows.

Where that leaves us

Forever launches on 4 November with four new regions and nine new dungeons, and Blizzard has publicly promised to keep expanding the world. The team has shown that it knows exactly what players have been dreaming of for twenty years. It has also shown twelve circles and named one place.

Any of the unannounced places here could turn up. None of them has been promised.

Blizzard's remarks come from a machine transcript of the official recording, and the slide text was read from its frames. Client details describe one installed build and may not match the live game.