WoW Forever PAX: What the Map Shows About the Future

A map of Azeroth covered in about fifteen yellow circles, drawn in MS Paint style: this WoW Forever PAX slide now fuels all the speculation about the future of WoW Forever. On October 23, Bellular Warcraft drew a twenty-minute video from it, claiming that Blizzard has revealed what comes next.

The images come from the WoW Forever PAX panel in Australia, held in Melbourne on October 9, 2026 by Holly Longdale, executive producer, and Clay Stone, associate production director. Bellular reads the next destinations in them: Quel’Thalas, Gilneas, a playable Emerald Dream. The panel transcript tells a more modest story. Read closely, it separates what Blizzard promises for the future of WoW Forever from what remains a player wish.

WoW Forever PAX: what Blizzard really showed in Melbourne

These slides do not date from PAX. According to the panel transcript, they come from the internal presentation made to Blizzard’s leadership to get the project green-lit, and the team showed them to the audience again as a look back. Clay Stone sums it up: “These were the things that we were saying we could do.” Holly Longdale says leadership first answered with a flat refusal, before concluding, laughing, that the team had done it.

The content slide lists what the team thought it could add to vanilla: new or expanded zones, dungeons and raids, a new race, class changes, reputations, professions, items, legendaries. All of it with a level cap of 60 from launch. Classic+ is presented there as a living world that expands horizontally through frequent, substantial updates.

For the map, Stone explains that the team started from the vanilla one and added territories, as announced at BlizzCon. Longdale jokes about MS Paint. In the transcript, none of the circled places is named. Knowing which circle stands for Quel’Thalas, Gilneas or southern Stranglethorn is therefore down to Bellular’s reading, not an announcement.

The only place Stone details afterwards is Riverglades, in the next part of the WoW Forever PAX panel. He describes it as one of the zones the team developed, among more than 1,000 new quests. He sorts the content into three families: the expected, with Mount Hyjal; the bold, with Zephras Isle and the Skyborn; and Riverglades in between, which nobody expected. On the firm calendar, what remains is the November 4 launch, whose release time in France is known, then the two Hyjal raids announced for December 9.

The Vanilla mythos, a list of memories and not a schedule

Between minutes 2 and 5, Bellular stops on the “WoW Development Mythos” slide. The panel report says what Clay Stone explained: over twenty years, the community has built a “mythos” around Vanilla’s unfinished content. Raids, dungeons, zones, battlegrounds, abandoned storylines, characters never used. Stone even mentions the photos of Chris Metzen pointing at maps of Azeroth painted on a wall at Blizzard, which players have been trading for years.

So this slide announces nothing. It comes from the internal file presented to Blizzard’s leadership to launch the project, and Stone presents it as a “treasure” of unfinished content in players’ memory. Part of it has already been handled in Season of Discovery: the Karazhan Crypts, and, according to him, “We are doing a Scarlet raid.” No developer on the WoW Forever PAX panel says that Grim Batol as a raid, the Emerald Dream or Azshara Crater are in production.

Bellular draws an attentive viewer’s conclusion: the future of WoW Forever will not rest on cut content alone, the team will also have to dig into Vanilla lore. His example is Riverglades, a launch-game zone for levels 35 to 45. According to him, it already existed in outline: it was the border of the kingdom of Stormwind, east of Redridge. Sunnyglade, its main town, was destroyed by the orcs in Warcraft 1, who left the mage tower standing. He also sees Farhold Keep, a stronghold of the Brotherhood of the Horse, the order of Lothar’s knights, an ogre fort of the Twilight’s Hammer and an ogre faction aligned with the Horde, driven out of the old Horde for refusing the cult of the Old Gods. That reading of the lore is his.

One last point, also from Bellular: Warcraft III and its predecessors showed a world far bigger than WoW’s, which shrank it to fit into a game. Places mentioned in the lore, like the Stonetalon Caverns, can therefore still be added without straining the map.

Quel’Thalas, Gilneas, Grim Batol: Bellular’s reading for the Eastern Kingdoms

On the map of Azeroth shown at the panel, Clay Stone did not name the yellow circles, as the Blizzplanet transcript shows. Between the fifth and twelfth minute of his video, Bellular nonetheless reads about ten of them in the Eastern Kingdoms. Everything that follows is therefore his reading of the WoW Forever PAX map, not a Blizzard announcement.

First circle, at the very top: Quel’Thalas. Forever has no high elves, its new race is the Skyborn. Bellular nonetheless imagines a complete scenario: Kael’thas gone to Outland with part of the blood elves, Rommath tasked with rebuilding Silvermoon, Liadrin and the Blood Knights, then high elves joining the Alliance. The idea is not absurd on paper, since the panel presents Forever as a “time bubble” that starts from canon without contradicting the rest of the story.

North of Stratholme and near Scholomance, two circles mark regions without much story. Bellular sees Scourge-related content there and, if Blizzard ever sends out class surveys, room for a death knight or a San’layn class. It is a lead, nothing more.

For Gilneas, he relies on datamining (digging through the game files to find what has not been announced): a “Battle for Gilneas” instance exists in the beta files. Blizzard has never talked about it. Same caution for the Half-Pint Tavern, in the Arathi Highlands, which looks like a dungeon, and for the space between Stormwind and Ironforge, which Bellular compares to “another Riverglades”.

First point backed by a slide: the “mythos” list mentions “Grim Batol – Raid”. Bellular imagines the Twilight Highlands from before Deathwing, with the Wildhammer dwarves and the Dragonmaw orcs. As a reminder, this list sums up what the community remembers of unfinished content, not a development program.

The same slide classes Karazhan as a “location”, so the tower from the vanilla version. Manor Mistmantle, in Duskwood, is the base of a quest chain with a macabre ending. According to Bellular, dungeon IDs found in the files suggest others are in preparation. Finally, in southern Stranglethorn, he hopes for the pirate war and the Gurubashi city, while Forever already adds a dungeon, The Drowned City, off the coast of the region.

Kalimdor: what is already there, and what Azshara Crater lets us hope for

Kalimdor was the least defined continent when vanilla (the original 2004 game) launched. Warcraft 3 had only covered the Barrens up to Mount Hyjal, and Feralas, Desolace or Silithus were invented for the online game, with their share of storylines left hanging. Bellular devotes the stretch from 11:41 to 16:55 of his video to it.

Part of it is already settled. The Mount Hyjal zone arrives after the Legion invasion, and Bellular notes that Archimonde’s corpse has become much bigger there. Two raids are announced by Blizzard for December 9, alongside Onyxia’s Lair: Barrow Deeps (10 players, 8 bosses), the prison that held Illidan, and Hyjal Summit (20 players, 13 bosses). Our page dungeons and raids covers them in detail, and the developers talked about their approach to raids in episode 5 of the podcast.

Launch also brings Shen’dralas: Prince Tortheldrin and the Highborne of Dire Maul have a hidden city in the mountains, reached through the Valley of Bones in Desolace. That is launch content, not a lead. Bellular’s bets come after: the Stonetalon Caverns, where Thrall and Jaina meet Medivh in Warcraft 3 and which nobody has ever found in the game.

Azshara takes up three tiles on the “mythos” slide: Azshara Crater (battleground), The Waters of Azshara (dungeon) and the zone to be finished. According to the panel transcript, this list reflects what the community remembers of unfinished vanilla. These are wishes drawn from the original pitch, not announcements made at the WoW Forever PAX panel.

The crater, for its part, did exist as a project. According to Bellular, it was worked on for vanilla without ever shipping, designed as a Defense of the Ancients-style map (DotA, the ancestor of MOBAs): NPCs fighting, players pushing lanes. The Azshara zone itself offered few quests apart from the rogue and mage class quests, and the dragon Azuregos. Bellular adds a battleground on Darkspear Isle and the continuation of the Desolace centaurs’ story, two more leads he reads on the map.

The Emerald Dream, the oldest wish on the list

Around minute 17, the last chapter of the video opens on the Emerald Dream. On the “mythos” slide, one tile classes it as a zone. According to the WoW Forever PAX panel transcript, this list picks up what the community remembers of unfinished vanilla content, taken from the original internal pitch. Blizzard does not say there that any of these zones is under construction.

The Dream has nevertheless been touched on several times, without ever becoming a real territory to explore. Bellular cites the Dreamway from Legion, the zones of the Emerald Nightmare raid, Amirdrassil in Dragonflight, and the phased zones in Season of Discovery (the same maps, seen under different lighting).

In his eyes, a zone worthy of the name would be huge, almost a mini-expansion, but within a precise frame: horizontal. No level cap increase, no power inflation. That fits the original pitch, which planned a permanent level 60 and a world that expands horizontally.

This frame poses a real design problem for the future of WoW Forever, and that is our analysis, not an announcement. Without new levels, players need other reasons to go there: reputations, items, quests. If the rewards exceed those of level 60, inflation comes back through the window. If they stay below, the zone empties after a week.

On the story side, Bellular places the first whispers of the Nightmare there. He adds Fandral Staghelm, who keeps the druids asleep. Players in the original version helped him in quests without knowing they were serving a traitor.

He ends with the storylines left hanging. The missing diplomat would be Varian Wrynn, who would turn up on Alcaz Island, a place known only from a comic. According to him, this finally enters the real game: that is his claim, nothing in the transcript confirms it. He also cites Broll Bearmantle, Valeera Sanguinar and the Dire Maul fighting pits.

The last tile on the list, “The Ashbringer – Questline”, points to the corrupted sword. Bellular saves it for a separate video, and says the next one will cover Classic’s unfinished quests.