The Hyjal crater kept as a duel map: what Forever’s 15 October podcast said about it

Late in Blizzard’s official PvP episode of The WoW: Forever Podcast, published on 15 October, the panel turned to a duel arena that had been planned for later and pulled forward into the beta.

How the crater was kept

According to the account given on the episode, a large crater existed in Mount Hyjal in the original game but was not a good space for questing. While building Mount Hyjal into a zone, the team changed that terrain, using a mix of new terrain and terrain from the Burning Crusade raid. The respondent recalled wanting to keep the crater as a duel spot, so it was split off onto a map of its own.

Brought forward for a beta tournament

For the beta, the map was dusted off for the second day of a tournament, where the remaining top players were to fight. The episode described that as the plan; this account does not cover how the day went.

Access for the event

The answer said this was not somewhere anyone would be able to go freely. Participants would have to be placed there, with staff helping the organizers get set up.

Event preparations were described too. Vendors were planned for a nearby building, although the answer corrected itself that they had not been spawned at that moment. One would sell Soul Shards to help get people in, another would sell reagents, and an NPC to reset cooldowns was possible, depending on what the tournament decided it needed.

Not ready to ship

Asked whether this was something like a GM island for the tournament, the answer said it was not ready to be released into the shipping game. It was something to keep working on, along with other dueling spots, and players might see more of it in a future patch. That is a possibility the answer raised, not a dated plan.

This account paraphrases the 15 October recording. It is not a transcript. It does not describe what was on screen, or whether or how the map can be reached today.