A Blackrock Depths-sized mega dungeon is being teased for WoW Forever, and PAX Aus gets the reveal

The dungeon list for launch is already nine strong, but the one players are talking about today is not on it. Senior game designer Josh Greenfield has teased a mega dungeon for WoW Forever, and named the obvious benchmark: Blackrock Depths.

What a mega dungeon means

It is a five-player instance built at raid length. Blackrock Depths is the one everyone remembers: a sprawling dwarven city with around 20 boss encounters, where the skill was knowing the routes so you could cut straight to the part you actually wanted. Gear from it rivalled some raid loot of the era.

That design does not fit modern WoW, where dungeons are tuned to a consistent length and slotted into a seasonal loop. It fits Forever exactly, because Forever has no seasonal treadmill to protect.

What was actually teased

Two threads point at the same place:

• Greenfield posted an image that looks like a dungeon entrance connected to the Timbermaw, the bear-like furbolg faction;
• at BlizzCon, Blizzard teased a dungeon called Blackmaw Hold for level 55 and up. Nothing said it was oversized, but the name and the level band line up with the tease.

Neither of those is a confirmation that Blackmaw Hold is the mega dungeon, and Blizzard has not published any detail. Treat it as a strong hint rather than an announcement.

The reveal has a date

Blizzard has announced that Holly Longdale and Clay Stone will give keynote presentations at PAX Aus, from Friday 9 to Sunday 11 October AEDT, and that WoW Forever will be there. A new Forever dungeon is part of what is being shown.

That is the first scheduled Forever event since the beta opened, and it lands with about three weeks to go before the November 4 launch.

Why it matters for launch

A mega dungeon changes what the level 55 to 60 stretch looks like. In Classic, Blackrock Depths was where a whole guild’s worth of players spent weeks before raiding, and it carried:

• a long, non-linear layout you learn rather than follow;
• gear good enough to matter after you finished levelling;
• side content, a bar, a prison, an arena, and a lot of reasons to go back.

If Forever builds one of those, it gives the endgame a destination that is not a raid and not a grind, which is exactly the gap in a game whose level cap never moves. Our dungeon list tracks all nine launch dungeons and their level bands, and the raids page covers what is known about Barrow Deeps and Hyjal Summit.

We will cover the PAX Aus keynote when it airs.