6. Riverglades
Clay Stone: Get ready. You’re gonna see more of that in a sec. And one of those areas that we developed is our brand-new zone called the Riverglades. You’re not supposed to go there now, but I’ve watched the beta, and I know some players have found their way in there through large, large parties, which is fine, but they’ve gotten to experience a taste of this. So I want to take a second to talk about Riverglades.
So the Riverglades existed; this is a look, a space-eye view of the vanilla game and the vanilla map of the area. And what we did was we took that area, and we talked with our concept artists, and we said: “Hey, we’re thinking we want to do a zone like this. It’s going to contain these elements; it’s going to be located here; we want to have these sort of biomes, and then our amazing artists create an image like this that then we use to be able to inspire the whole team around what the vibe is going to be like for this zone.
And then we return to that original vanilla map, and we work with our worldbuilders, and they worked their magic, and they transform it into something like this.
So, a space-eye view of what the Riverglades looks like in our new World of Warcraft: Forever map of Azeroth. So the Riverglades is located in the Eastern Kingdoms, that’s one of our two continents, and this is what it looks like with the actual in-game map, the finalized version of it.
And this is what it looks like once it was complete, at least one section of it. Although I do have to note, the Riverglades is massive. It is a whole new place; it has a whole bunch of new questing content that is part of the over 1000 new quests that we’ve added to the game, and we’re excited for players to be able to be able to experience it at the appropriate level once we launch the whole game. And it kinda fits into the way that we talked about adding new content to the game, too.
There is sort of three buckets that things fall into. There’s the expected, so when players dream of Classic+, they think of places like Mount Hyjal, of course. And then there is the completely unexpected, a little bit more high-concept, like Zephrys Isle and the Skyborne. But we love this because this fits right in between the two.
Feels like it fits seamlessly into that original vanilla era WoW. If you’d never played the game before but you came in, you would feel like, “Oh, this fits perfectly into it.” But no one was expecting something like this with Riverglades.
Let’s talk about Krol’dok Stronghold. So Krol’dok Stronghold is one of our new dungeons located in the Riverglades. We’re very excited for players, of course, to check this out. And what I want to do is take us on a little bit of a development journey for how we developed Krol’dok Stronghold.
For any of you who may know about our dev cons that we’ve been doing, which we could spend an hour on, we have the great fortune, with World of Warcraft: Forever, to release a weekly podcast. And it just so happens that today’s episode of the podcast was all focused on our dungeons. So shout-out to that group because they talked about a little bit of this in there.
| NAVIGATE - PAX AUSTRALIA 2026 - WORLD OF WARCRAFT: FOREVER KEYNOTE TRANSCRIPT | ||||
| 1. Intro | 2. Classic Releases | 3. WoW Mythos | 4. Dev Pillars | 5. Content |
| 6. Riverglades | 7. Idea | 8. Enemies | ||
