Gilneas is sitting in the WoW Forever client: a 10-player battleground row and a sealed zone

Nobody at Blizzard has mentioned Gilneas in connection with World of Warcraft: Forever. The beta client mentions it three times.

What is in the client

Beta build 1.60.1.70009 carries a battlemaster entry named Battle for Gilneas, and the entry sits under an id that exists only in Forever, not in Classic Era or retail. Its own fields describe a 10-player instance. Retail’s version of that battleground is also a 10-player map, so the size is not a surprise; the surprise is the row being there at all.

Next to it is a screen effect called “1.60.0 - Gilneas - Preternatural Darkness”, again flagged as Forever-only. Screen effects are the client-side filters that tint and darken your view in a specific place, so something in Gilneas is meant to look unnaturally dark.

The zone data is there too. The client lists Ruins of Gilneas with nine sub-areas, among them Gilneas City, The Blackwald, Emberstone Village and Emberstone Mine, and the battleground map with its eight points, from the Lighthouse and the Waterworks to the Mines and Gilnean Coast. These area names are shared with Mists Classic and retail, so on their own they are just map data that ships with a modern client. The Forever-only battlemaster id and the Forever-only screen effect are the parts that are not inherited.

What it does not tell us

Plenty. Blizzard has not named Gilneas in any Forever announcement, panel or patch note, and nothing in the client says whether the row is a real plan or a placeholder a developer left behind while working on something else. A screen effect and a map name are not a quest, a boss or a date.

So treat this as what it is: three entries in a beta client, with no announcement behind them.

Testers keep trying to get there

The interest is not only from dataminers. On September 28, Esfand published Sneaking Into Gilneas Didn’t End Well, in which, by his own account, he was caught by developers while trying to make his way into the closed zone. It is the second time this month that beta testers have gone looking for content behind the wall rather than waiting for a patch note.

Why Gilneas would matter

If Blizzard is building it, it fits the pattern that Forever has followed so far: new content is placed in old Azeroth rather than in a new expansion continent. Gilneas sits behind the Greymane Wall in the Eastern Kingdoms, it was never open in the original game, and its story, a kingdom that walled itself off, is one of the few Azeroth threads the original 1-60 game left completely untouched.

A 10-player battleground would also be a different size to what Forever has shown so far. We covered the 14-rank honor track and the new Darkspear Islands battleground when those appeared, and the arenas at Hyjal Crater soon after.

We will report it properly if Blizzard announces anything. Until then, the beta changes list has what has actually been confirmed.

Sources: the WoW Forever beta client data (build 1.60.1.70009, BattlemasterList and ScreenEffect entries flagged Forever-only), and Sneaking Into Gilneas Didn’t End Well by Esfand.