“Scarlet Enclave will return.” The line comes at 22:46 of the seventh episode of the official WoW Forever podcast, from Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield, a WoW Forever developer at Blizzard, and nothing follows it: no date, no format, no tier. Our Scarlet Enclave page nonetheless describes a 40-player, eight-boss raid inherited from Season of Discovery, which remains in the game client with no announcement for Forever.
The episode is titled “Turbo Nerds Lore-ing Out”. It was posted on November 12, 2026 on the World of Warcraft YouTube channel and runs 1 hour 15 minutes 58 seconds. It is devoted to lore, meaning the story and universe of Warcraft. The host, CountdowntoClassic, welcomes Greenfield, Sean Copeland (Lead Lore Historian, Blizzard’s chief lore historian, who keeps the story consistent) and two content creators, Platinum WoW and Nobbel87. Warcraft Tavern picks up the blackboard message from the episode: the numbers 26, 21 and 7, repeated twice, spell ZUG ZUG once converted to letters. Episode 8 will cover systems, classes and PvP (player versus player), Greenfield announces, adding that other developers will rotate through this seat.
Scarlet Enclave, Ashbringer, Scourge: three degrees of promise
The episode contains three statements that sound like announcements and commit to very different things. The first is the clearest, but it only concerns a return. The other two are a vague timeframe and a personal wish.
| Topic | Exact words | What it commits to | Timestamp |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scarlet Enclave | “Scarlet Enclave will return.” | A return, with no date or format | 22:46 |
| Ashbringer | “Ashbringer will return at some point. You know, it might be a while, but that’s going to come back.” | A return, with a delay admitted to be long | 22:48 |
| Scourge invasion spread over several updates | “that’s something that excites me personally the most” | A personal wish, no announcement | 35:53 |
Greenfield recalls at 12:28 where the Enclave comes from: during Season of Discovery, it was “a thing that we sort of were able to squeeze in”. Greenfield was already thinking about Forever by then. Ashbringer, the legendary sword, is among Greenfield’s favorites, and Greenfield has touched it “a little bit”. The episode does not say what form the Scarlet Enclave’s return would take, at what level it would land, or where it would sit in Forever’s raid calendar.
A branching continuity, decided in front of food trucks
The raid would not come back as it was, because Forever no longer lives in the same story as Season of Discovery. At 9:19, Copeland explains that the decision was made very high up: Forever had to be “a branching continuity”, its own universe, “like Hearthstone is”. The original plan, summarized during the episode, was to go back twenty years and attach everything to the main story. Greenfield tells how a chance meeting with Chris Metzen in front of food trucks on the campus ended in a single sentence (10:03): “we need to split this thing”, or the two teams would plant “landmines for each other”.
The Enclave example follows right after. Greenfield admits at 12:44 that the Ashbringer quest “doesn’t actually fit all that well”, that it reads as “a little bit of a what-if scenario” and that it is not “a one-to-one fit” with what came decades later. On the timeline, the team places itself five years after the Third War. It prefers “to build off of it as it was in 2004”, while acknowledging nods: characters players will meet in Cataclysm already have a written past in Forever.
On the story side, Greenfield describes a general plan spanning several years, with no big golden “main campaign” marker to follow: the quests players already do can belong to a larger thread, as in the original WoW (14:25).
Naxxramas, Northrend, Lich King: what stays open
At 34:28, a question concerns Classic’s limited-time events, such as the opening of the gates of Ahn’Qiraj or the Scourge invasion. Greenfield answers that Forever’s timeline is the first year of WoW “ultra dilated”, which leaves time to explore what was only a flash. In game, the Scourge invasion boiled down to a few undead camps where players farmed necrotic stones to get sharpening stones. “What if that spawned three different updates”, in several phases? The answer (35:53): “that’s something that excites me personally the most”. It is a wish, not a program.
The end of the episode ties it all together. Asked about Arthas, the elephant in the room, Greenfield describes him as “still glued to his chair” in Northrend, and cites Naxxramas and the Scourge invasion as “anchors” of the story (1:12:08). Going to Outland or Northrend is not ruled out: “It doesn’t mean we won’t ever go to Outland or we won’t ever go to Northrend”, even without raising the level cap or going through the Dark Portal. As for the Lich King: “I can’t see us fighting him. I don’t think we can take him yet”. The site Output Lag reported these answers on November 12, 2026. Our November 1 article on the 2008 zombie plague found in the files noted that no event had been announced; the episode still announces none, it expresses a wish.
Storytelling without cutscenes or a single villain
Greenfield sets out a principle at 27:02: in the original WoW, “you could kind of completely ignore the story, and that’s actually okay”. Forever aims for the same thing, so no race for cutscenes and no central hero: “a hero, not the hero”. Same logic for adversaries. The team wants to avoid a single villain who would matter alone for years, and instead uses the original raids as anchor points. Molten Core has not been tackled yet: it will be “at some point”, followed by Blackwing Lair and Ahn’Qiraj (32:06).
A game’s ideas also come from the inside. The torch, which players can pick up in game, was born from a message in the internal alpha’s feedback channel: someone at Blizzard, outside the team, regretted having no light source while crossing Duskwood. Greenfield says the quest was written within the hour (38:48). The following table sorts what the team brought up without announcing anything.
| Topic | What the team says | Timestamp |
|---|---|---|
| Cutscenes | No rush: “not tripping over ourselves to add things like cutscenes”, but “we’ll never say never”. | 27:44 |
| Role-play slot (torch, back) | The team discusses it, but “obviously that’s not me announcing that we’re going to do that”. | 37:16 |
| Library of audio journals | A question from two creators: the team answers “not an announcement” and “a thing we talk about quite a bit”. | 1:08:07 |
| Cross-faction races | “I don’t think we have too many plans to do something like that again”. | 51:42 |
| New race and class combinations | Never say never, but “we need to put content in that supports it”. | 1:03:10 |
As for new zones, Riverglades was born of a gamble: three small zones planned east of the Burning Steppes became a single one, at the initiative of world builder Matt Armstrong (43:04). Lions finally populate the Eastern Kingdoms, a topic of discussion from the first week of work on the zone, since the Stormwind emblem is a lion. The Brotherhood of the Horse, from Warcraft II, poses a dilemma: follow the expedition leader through the Dark Portal, or stay and defend the peasants. On the Horde side, players meet an ogre clan that left Cho’gall’s Twilight’s Hammer.
The PvP lock, in a few sentences
The episode opens with an update from Greenfield, between 1:51 and 5:10. On European RP-PvP (role-playing and player versus player) realms, it is Alliance character creation that is tightened; in most other cases, Horde creation. The gap tolerated at launch is about 10%, with a ceiling at 55/45; level 1 characters and trial accounts change nothing about it. Each zone’s population has been lowered and remains adjustable. The detailed figures are in our November 12 article on the faction imbalance.
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