8. Enemies
Clay Stone: So then we talk about enemies. And for this part, we really look through this incredible catalog of everything that we’ve built in World of Warcraft history to look at enemies that either already exist, or we can create new versions of them that we can bring into this dungeon. An important point about this: if you look in the top left, it uses the world Valid Old School Ogre Models.
Critically important to us. I am gonna double down on the world valid to make sure that any of the assets we may be pulling from or recreating for this game feel like they fit into the world. And that’s been a process over the course of development to make sure that everything feels seamless and we’re only working with the assets that make sense for it, too. So we have to be very strict about that.
So then that, of course, takes us to our actual Bosses. And for this, I’m not gonna spoil any of them, but right before coming out here, I did reach out to our encounter designers, that same team that you may have seen in our podcast that we aired today, and I asked them, okay, what’s really fun about creating these bosses. And they said, “Writing dialogue about them. Specifically, for the ogres. So I’m gonna read a couple of their lines of dialogue that they wrote for these ogres, and we have such soon-to-be classics as: “Bigger rock, bigger stick.” Or “Puny pathetic, you suffer now!”
Or what would be the all-time favorite: “Grok’s break all your bones.” Truly, truly some amazing lines of dialogue.
Holly Longdale: How many iterations did that go through?
Clay Stone: Probably not that many. I think they just had fun making a whole bunch of them. Yeah. But yeah, we’re very excited for players to encounter these bosses in the game, for sure. So then that takes us, of course, to… ooh, you know what? I’m gonna tee this up. That takes us to Playtesting.
Playtesting is exciting for us. I asked the Encounters Team and some of our QA team if I could use a video recording of their team’s chat, which is basically our same thing as Zoom playtesting one of these, and they said: Clay, we’re pretty sure PAX is an all-ages show; you should not show one of these recordings. And I said, “Okay, that’s fine. Well, let’s tell a funny story instead.”
So as we’re playtesting, especially the first time, and we’re looking at all the objects and all the different components coming together, sometimes there’s geometry- not necessarily problems, but just interesting things that we find, like little holes in the world or different things like that that we know we’re going to patch up later. So, sure enough, in one of our playtests, our designers are playing together, and it turns out on this bridge, there’s a big hole.
I say big; it’s not massive, but it’s big enough for a player to be able to fall down. Hopefully, I’m not spoiling too much, but when you’re going over this bridge in Krol’dok Stronghold, we’re sending waves of enemies at you. So if you don’t know that hole is there, it’s very easy for a player to fall down. Perhaps the funniest part about it is that the character will live, typically. If you fall down, which means they have got to figure out some way to be able to get all the way back up to the top. I’m really excited to see what that’s gonna look like for our Hardcore players when they get there.
But anyways, we talked about it, and normally we would just patch right up over this hole, maybe put a little sign in there, you know, something like that, but as our encounter team was talking about it, they thought, you know, it’s kinda fun. What if we just leave the hole?
Holly Longdale: You know how I said sometimes designers do awful things to players? Here’s an example. (laughs)
Clay Stone: The good news is you’re watching this presentation; you all know about it, and hopefully, you’ll avoid the hole, but we talk about this, and our instinct, of course, is to fix things like this. Just fixing things left and right and everything. So even from a lore perspective, we ask ourselves, okay, well, why would this hole make sense? Wouldn’t they patch it up or something like that in-universe? And essentially, what their response was… “Bro, they’re ogres.
Holly Longdale: They’re not falling through there.
Clay Stone: So, you know, between them being ogres and it being a potentially fun gameplay mechanic, we have left it in. We have left it in there.
So yeah, so when we take all these different elements- we take worldbuilding, we take world art, we take encounter design, we take all of the art for the bosses, the animations, everything else- combine all together, and that gives you our brand-new level 40-45 dungeon located in Krol’dok Stronghold, which we are excited for intrepid adventurers to discover for themselves, located in the Riverglades.
Holly Longdale: Excellent!
Clay Stone: Yeah. So with that, I did just wanna circle back to the beginning. I was listening to you talk about this and it reminded me of something that happened. Very shortly after you asked me to help lead the classic team, or just prior to that, I was helping to lead a slightly different project at the company, and I was not very senior at all at the company, but because I was helping to lead this other project, I got to join a weekly meeting with the executive producers, the other executive producers at the company, of which, of course, Holly was one. And I remember going to these meetings, and every time, whether it was in person or on Teams (the Microsoft software), I was like: I’m not supposed to be here. This is not a meeting I should be invited to. But after joining the Classic Team, I went to my last one of those meetings, and I was very politely asked to excuse myself. Of course, ahead of time, very politely. And so I got to talk about what it was I was going to do. Very excited, of course. And I remember, one of the last things I said to the group of executive producers was I can’t wait for you all to tell us what we’re working on next.
And the response was, you all looking directly at me and saying, Clay, we’re waiting for you to tell us what you’re working on next. And I think about that all the time, and when you talk about the passion of developers, and the passion of groups of people coming together, and kind of just pushing for things, doing things, and a leadership team that gives you the flexibility to be able to try that, that’s how we got here. It wasn’t me; you were literally saying Clay, you go tell us.
But we’re waiting for the developers to tell us what they want to do, and so obviously, the natural progression there was that whole thing, and that we just went through on Classic+, and that led us to World of Warcraft: Forever. So thank you. Thank you, Holly.
Holly Longdale: Aww, sweet. You guys did it. (laughs)
(Audience applauds)
Clay Stone: But yeah, that leads us to where we are now. World of Warcraft: Forever launching on November 4 (USA), November 5 here (Australia). Super excited for this.
Holly Longdale: Yes. Yeah. Thank you so much for being here. We are always so grateful for gamers and people who love and live in their imagination. Really, thank you for coming here today. It gives us so much; it’s fuel for us to be able to get to be with you. Thank you.
Editor: That’s a wrap. Hope you enjoyed the PAX Australia 2026 World of Warcraft: Forever Keynote Presentation transcript. If you wish to donate as a thank you, be it for a donut, a smoothie, or to keep the Blizzplanet server running (since 2003) share at Paypal.me/blizzplanet
| 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 | ||
