When we previewed the PAX Aus dungeon segment, we said the test of any recap would be naming which segment a claim came from. This is that recap, built from the full panel transcript of the official Warcraft stream. Holly Longdale opened with the Storytime keynote; Clay Stone then walked the audience through one new dungeon and, for the first time outside Blizzard, the pitch slides for Forever.
The dungeon is Krol'dok Stronghold, in the Riverglades
Stone confirmed the location and level band: Krol'dok Stronghold, a new dungeon in the new zone the Riverglades, at level 40 to 45, which matches the range Blizzard corrected in September.
The Riverglades, he added, is "massive", a whole new zone in the Eastern Kingdoms that is part of the over 1,000 new quests added to the game. It is not reachable at beta level caps, though he noted that some players had already forced their way in with large groups.
An aside worth knowing: the zone art existed as a concept before the dungeon. The map space was always there in vanilla, empty, and the team built the zone to fill it.
Nine dungeons, not six
This is the most quotable number of the panel. The dungeon roster started as a brainstorm:
"Originally, I think we said we could build six dungeons. Spoiler alert: we ended up building nine."
Stone's explanation is that "we just had too many really good ideas." That is a scope story: the launch roster grew rather than got cut, which is unusual enough in game development to be worth printing.
How the dungeon was built, step by step
Stone walked the full chain, and the interesting part is how much of it is theme archaeology:
- It started as a gnoll dungeon. Gnolls are, in his words, "extremely vanilla WoW-coated."
- Then they changed their minds, on the grounds that they had "done a lot of gnoll stuff." They looked for another creature that fits the same brief. Answer: ogres.
- The ogres needed lore, so the obvious anchor was Cho'gall, the two-headed ogre tied to the Twilight's Hammer and the original Warcraft RTS games. So the dungeon became a Twilight's Hammer-themed ogre dungeon.
- It slotted into the zone, which also holds an Alliance faction from the original Warcraft RTS: the Brotherhood of the Horse.
- The art had almost no vanilla reference. Ogre structures in vanilla are essentially mounds, which Stone doubted could carry a dungeon. The team reached slightly beyond the era to Blade's Edge Mountains from The Burning Crusade, full of ogres and full of reference.
One detail that matters for the project's stated art rules: the enemies use, in Stone's phrasing, "Valid Old School Ogre Models", selected so that everything still reads as classic-era. That is the same constraint driving the Skyborne visual revisions.
They playtested it and changed the route
The first layout sent players "all the way up the hill, and then back down the hill." Stone's verdict: "turns out that's not very exciting as far as progression is concerned in a dungeon." So the route was inverted: you now go up the hill and the dungeon ends at a high point.
This is what a dungeon preview is actually for. Not the art, the structure.
And they kept a bug on purpose
The best story of the panel, and it is a real design decision rather than marketing:
During playtesting, designers found a hole in a bridge big enough for a player to fall through. Waves of enemies come at you on that bridge, so if you do not know the hole is there, you fall. The character usually survives the fall, which means you then have to work out how to get back to the top. Stone said he is "really excited to see what that's gonna look like for our Hardcore players."
The team's instinct was to patch it. The encounter designers argued to keep it. Then came the lore question: why would nobody in the world have fixed it? The team's answer, quoted by Stone:
"Bro, they're ogres."
So the hole stays. Whether that is charming or infuriating is a matter of taste, but it is a deliberate piece of the dungeon, announced before launch rather than discovered as an exploit.
No bosses, but two lines of dialogue
Stone did not show or name a single boss. What he did was read dialogue the encounter designers wrote for the ogres, calling them "soon-to-be classics":
"Bigger rock, bigger stick." "Puny pathetic, you suffer now!"
That is the entire boss reveal. Everything else about the encounters is still unknown.
The pitch slides, shown publicly for the first time
This is the part that will matter beyond launch. Stone prefaced it by saying he was "a little bit nervous", because the team had never shown the actual pitch slides outside Blizzard. The slides are the real ones, with only minor formatting changes and one added summary slide from a later stage.
What they show:
- It was pitched as an experimental "Season." Set in classic-era Azeroth, focused on "new mysteries in the familiar world, new class abilities to shake up the meta, new content in the classic space, but most importantly, unsolving a solved game."
- Four principles. Approachable and familiar, such that any content should feel like it "could have potentially launched back in 2004-2005"; the world as the protagonist; the journey before the destination; and preserving communication between players, which is the soil the Camping system grew from.
- What it is not. Not a WoW remake and not rebuilt from scratch; not a drastic reinterpretation of the art style. And the "time bubble" framing is here too: Forever lives in roughly Year One so that new stories can be told without forcing the modern game to explain them.
- What it promised. New and expanded zones, new dungeons and raids, a new race, class updates, new reputations, professions content, new items and rewards, new legendaries, and a persistent level 60 cap at launch. Every one of those is now either shipped in beta or dated.
- Where it sits. A "brand-new third pillar" beside Classic and the modern game, and, in the slide's own words, "all available for one subscription."
What the panel tells you, and what it does not
Three things stand out. First, the dungeon count went up, not down, and the reason given is idea volume, which is a genuine signal about the launch content budget. Second, Blizzard is willing to ship a deliberate rough edge and say so in advance; that is a very different posture from the polished-silence approach most launches take. Third, the pitch slides make the ambition legible: this began as an experimental season inside Classic and became a third pillar.
What it does not give you: no launch dates, no raid detail, no other dungeons, and no boss names. Stone's segment was one dungeon and one history lesson, and any recap that claims more than that is inventing it.
SOURCES: The panel transcript of the official PAX Aus stream, published by Blizzplanet on October 11 2026, read October 18 2026, covering the Longdale keynote and Stone dungeon segment. All quotes above are transcribed from that community transcript of the official broadcast, which is our source for the finer detail here; the dungeon name, level range and the Riverglades are separately confirmed by Blizzard's own posts. Related: the PAX Aus preview, the Krol'dok level clarification, the Forever hub, and the launch calendar.