World of Warcraft: Forever adds to the Azeroth of 2004 instead of sailing away from it, and the new ground it opens sits inside outlines players have been walking past for twenty years. Some of that ground was drawn and left unfinished. Some of it was finished and then left standing there, visible from the road, with nothing on it worth the climb. Knowing which is which is the first thing worth sorting out before launch night.
The new regions do not compete for the same character. One decides where you go once the leveling is over, one covers the stretch of the journey Classic left thin, one belongs to a race that is new to the game, and one Blizzard has been careful not to explain. Which of them matters to you depends on who you are bringing, and getting between them depends on boats that did not run before.
Forever launches with four new regions. Three sit on the original continents, on ground where the vanilla map had nothing worth visiting, and Zephras Isle hangs in the elemental plane above them. The over 1,000 new quests Blizzard added run through the entire level 1 to 60 range, so these four zones are the headline rather than the whole story.
| Zone | Levels | Where it sits | What is inside |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mount Hyjal | 60 | Kalimdor, above Winterspring and Felwood | Both launch raids, new reputations, Darkwhisper Gorge |
| Shen'dralas | - | Kalimdor, between Mulgore and Desolace | The Shen'dralar story, centaur war, new reasons to run two old dungeons |
| The Riverglades | 35-45 | Eastern Kingdoms, between Redridge Mountains, the Burning Steppes, the Badlands and the Swamp of Sorrows | 150+ quests, a goblin port, Krol'dok Stronghold |
| Zephras Isle | 1-12 | The elemental plane, reached from character creation | The Skyborne starting experience |
Forever sits at year one of Warcraft's timeline, before the Dark Portal reopened and long before anyone sailed for Northrend, and it picks up directly after the campaign of the Warcraft III expansion Forsaken Kingdom. That placement is what lets a zone like Hyjal exist in the state it does. There are no flying mounts and no level scaling, so the regions you travel to are reached on the ground or by boat, at the level each was tuned for.
Mount Hyjal is the level 60 zone, and it carries the endgame. You arrive after Archimonde's defeat, into a mountain still marked by the battle that ended the Third War, and the work is putting the place back together: solo content, group content, new reputations to grind, and quest chains that decide what the slopes look like once the burning stops. Both of Forever's launch raids open inside it.
Archimonde's skeleton still lies by Nordrassil, which is the detail that fixes the whole zone in time. Forever runs before Cataclysm and before the Caverns of Time version of this fight, so the wreckage at the summit is recent history rather than a memorial. The land is still recovering from it, and parts of it have not recovered at all.
The zone is built as an endgame leveling area rather than a raid antechamber, which is a meaningful distinction at 60. Reputation grinds, quest lines and group content run alongside each other, and the route through the mountain takes you down into Darkwhisper Gorge before it takes you up.
Look, the gorge is the part worth knowing about in advance. In the original game it was not part of Hyjal at all: it shipped as a corner of Winterspring, tuned at level 60, and the game's own quest text still places its Hederine demons in the foothills of Mount Hyjal. Forever finally runs a road through it.
Hyjal hosts both raids that open on December 9. Hyjal Summit is the 20-player raid and sits at the top of the mountain; the Barrow Deeps is the 10-player maximum-level challenge, and one of its three entrances opens inside the zone. Blizzard has attached new tier sets and a legendary reward to the pair of them.
Neither raid is available at launch. Forever goes live on November 4 and the raid tier follows five weeks later, alongside the original 40-player Onyxia's Lair, so the first month at 60 is spent on the mountain itself rather than inside it.
Hyjal is the most famous unfinished zone in the original game. The mountain was drawn on the Kalimdor map from launch, terrain and trees and ruins and the remains of the World Tree at its summit, and Classic did not make it a place you were meant to go.
Players got in anyway, by every wall-climbing trick the engine allowed. The reward was scenery and silence. Hyjal came back as a Caverns of Time raid in Burning Crusade and became a fully playable zone in Cataclysm, and Season of Discovery sent players up for a quest along the way. Forever is the first release to build the mountain out inside original Azeroth — at the point in the story where the battle for it has just ended.
Shen'dralas fills the grey shelf of mountain and dead ground that the vanilla map left between Mulgore and Desolace, with Feralas off its southern edge. Blizzard calls it a long-hidden mystery, and has been deliberately vague about the rest. What is not vague is who the zone is about.
The Shen'dralar are the night elves who stayed in Dire Maul. Their city, Eldre'Thalas, was one of the centres of Highborne civilization before the Sundering, a library and a court as much as a fortress. Losing the Well of Eternity cost them their power source, and Prince Tortheldrin's answer was to bind a demon behind pylons and drain it instead. It kept the court alive. It also hollowed it out — by the time players first walk into those ruins the halls are held by ogres and the prince has gone thoroughly mad.
Shen'dralas is the zone built around what is left. The story continues out of the ruins and into the open, which is a significant change in how that faction has been presented: for twenty years the Shen'dralar existed as a reputation grind behind a dungeon door.
The war between the centaur tribes of the region runs through the zone alongside the elven plot. The Gelkis and the Magram are the two clans it follows, mortal enemies who have split Desolace between them since vanilla, and Forever treats their conflict as live rather than as flavour text on a Desolace quest.
Shen'dralas also hands out quests that send you back into Maraudon and Razorfen Downs. Both are dungeons that Classic players run once for the loot and then avoid for the rest of the expansion, and both sit close enough to the new zone to make the trip short. That is the pattern across Forever: old instances get new reasons to exist rather than new bosses.
The Riverglades is the zone that fixes the worst stretch of Classic leveling. It sits in the Eastern Kingdoms on the empty ground bounded by Redridge Mountains, the Burning Steppes, the Badlands and the Swamp of Sorrows, and it is a frontier of rivers, grasslands and trade routes rather than a war front.
The Riverglades is a zone about living in Azeroth rather than rescuing it. Struggling communities, old grudges and trade are the material, and both factions quest in it.
The zone runs levels 35 to 45, which Blizzard describes as covering much of the mid-30s to mid-40s experience, and it ships with more than 150 new quests. Honestly, anyone who has leveled in Classic knows exactly which hole that fills. The high thirties are where the quest supply thins out, Stranglethorn Vale becomes compulsory, and the alternative is grinding Scarlet Monastery until the wings blur together.
You do not have to commit to the zone to use it. The Riverglades is built so you can break off from questing in Stranglethorn Vale, Desolace or Arathi Highlands, spend a few levels here, and rejoin your usual route afterwards. Ogres hold the roads, the Twilight's Hammer is in there with them, and a neutral goblin port opens up the travel routes.
Krol'dok Stronghold is the zone's dungeon, and it is an outdoor ogre stronghold rather than an instance carved into a hillside. It is tuned for levels 40 to 55, a fifteen-level window, and a genuine alternative to running Scarlet Monastery another forty times. It is one of nine new dungeons in Forever, and it sits at the high end of them alongside Alcaz Prison and the Shaper's Terrace.
Zephras Isle is where every Skyborne character begins, and it runs levels 1 to 12. It is an island anchored in the elemental plane, built out of Classic art with architecture borrowed from Skywall, and you reach it by making a Skyborne rather than by travelling. Failing structures and isolated communities set the tone; this is not a pastoral starting valley.
The Skyborne are Highborne, and their history starts in the same place Shen'dralas does. They were the rebels who fled Eldre'Thalas after the War of the Ancients, and the air elementals of Al'Akir carried them to Skywall, where wind spirits anchored their island home in the elemental plane. Two zones in this release, on two different continents, are about two halves of the same broken court.
That shared ancestry is also what splits them. Skyborne aligned with the Horde keep to the elemental traditions that saved them and gain access to Shaman; those who side with the Alliance pursue the arcane legacy their ancestors ran with and gain access to Mage. Both sides can also play Warrior, Hunter, Rogue and Druid, with druid forms made specifically for the race.
The Skyborne are not a neutral race in the way Pandaren are. You pick Horde or Alliance at character creation, before you ever load into the island, and the choice is locked in by the time you take your first step. Thing is, there is no neutral stretch of leveling and no later decision point either.
Zephras runs to 12 and then hands you off to your faction's normal 10 to 20 zones, so the island is a prologue rather than a parallel track. Playing it at all needs the Skyborne race, which sits in the paid editions rather than the base game.
Full Skyborne Race GuideThere are no flying mounts in Forever, so travel is the boat schedule and the road. No joke, the timetable matters again. Blizzard added three new ports to the world, and two of them exist to solve problems Classic players have complained about for two decades.
Mount Hyjal sits above Winterspring and Felwood in northern Kalimdor. Shen'dralas opens off the Mulgore and Desolace borders. Zephras Isle is the exception: it is a starting zone, so you get there by rolling a Skyborne and nothing else.
The four new regions are the headline, but the 1,000-plus new quests are spread across the whole 1 to 60 range, and a good share of them land in zones you already know. Every starting zone gets new NPCs, quests and experiences layered alongside the original content rather than replacing it, so the Classic route you remember still works.
Desolace and the Wetlands are the two Blizzard singled out for major quest additions, both of them zones with a reputation for feeling empty. Mulgore gains a new plateau area overlooking Thunder Bluff.
The visual pass is the other half of the change to old zones, and all of it is optional. A toggle switches between the original presentation and the updated one, and the Classic art style underneath is unchanged: what changes is the rendering on top of it.
Water gets a new renderer. Lighting gets the larger share of the work, with global illumination, real-time shadows and volumetric particle effects, and the difference is most obvious across a full day cycle rather than in a single screenshot. Rivers run through Elwynn Forest, mist sits on the water in Darkshore, and moonlight breaks through the canopy in Ashenvale.
For what it's worth, the 2004 look stays available untouched. That matters more than it sounds, because the toggle is the reason the visual work could go as far as it did.
Everything New in WoW ForeverFour at launch: Mount Hyjal, Shen'dralas, the Riverglades and Zephras Isle. Alongside them, more than 1,000 new quests are spread through existing zones across the whole level 1 to 60 range.
Level 60. It is the endgame zone, and it holds both launch raids as well as new reputations and group content.
The zone is built for that band and carries more than 150 quests, and it is also designed so you can drop in for a few levels and go back to Stranglethorn Vale, Desolace or Arathi Highlands afterwards.
Yes. Zephras Isle is the Skyborne starting experience, so reaching it means having the Skyborne race, which sits in the paid editions rather than the base game.
No. You choose Horde or Alliance at character creation, and Zephras Isle is played from level 1 to 12 as a member of that faction before moving into its normal 10 to 20 zones.
The terrain was drawn from launch, but Classic did not make it a zone you were meant to enter. It returned as the Burning Crusade raid, became fully playable in Cataclysm, and Forever is the first release to build it out as an open zone inside original Azeroth.
Yes. The Riverglades is explicitly built for both, with a neutral goblin port serving the zone's travel routes, and Mount Hyjal and Shen'dralas are shared endgame and story content. Zephras Isle is the exception, since it belongs to one race.
No. Forever has no flying mounts and no level scaling anywhere, so every zone is crossed on the ground and entered at the level it was tuned for.
December 9, five weeks after the November 4 launch. Hyjal Summit is the 20-player raid and the Barrow Deeps is the 10-player one, and the original 40-player Onyxia's Lair opens on the same date.
