Blizzard Builds Azeroth From a 2D Map First. Five stages, an 18-yard aggro circle, a 35-second run test, and a zone about living in Azeroth, not saving it. Runeterra has the same gaps.

How a Zone Is Built

Two disciplines, five stages, and a 2D map that already knows how big the place is.

Every zone in World of Warcraft starts as a colored rectangle in Photoshop, and Blizzard, the studio that makes the game, has just shown the whole path from that rectangle to a lit forest.

World of Warcraft: Forever is the new version of World of Warcraft, the long-running online role-playing game its players call WoW, built on the original 2004 game and expanded rather than replaced. Its team shortens that to WoW Forever, the name it uses on stage, and the same team runs WoW Classic, Blizzard's re-release of the original game. Blizzard announced Forever at BlizzCon 2026, its annual fan convention, on September 12 and 13, and among the sessions it posted afterwards is a panel called World Building, a 41-minute walkthrough of how its world team makes places. The panel's live demos are from Midnight, the modern game's current expansion, and the hosts say the same tools and techniques were used on Forever. The pipeline is the point, and it has five stages.

Christy Moray, a world-building lead who joined the team in 2017, and Victor Cordes, the associate world-building director, split the team into two disciplines. World design is "really focused on the gameplay space, the size, spatial relationships, how the players move in and between points of interest." World art is "more focused on composition, and really beautifying those areas." Most of the work is shared, and it begins with a drawing.

Stage one is the 2D map. Jester, a senior world builder, drew one for a dungeon in which one troll tribe is dragging another underground. Light green is the highest ground, grey is the descent, and black is chasms: "If you fall into that, your player's dead, so it's bad news." Every discipline reviews it in a kickoff, and the first change was the shape. A straight run became a C, so that "when you defeat boss one, you get a really cool look at the final throne." The squares on the grid are world chunks in the team's editor, "that way we know the scale right off the bat." The map is pasted into the editor and it lines up with the grid exactly.

Stage two is rough 3D, which Cordes described as "making big macro moves to set up your sight lines, the spacing of your points of interest, and making sure you've got a good topography to work from." Jeff Miller, a world designer whose credits include the modern game's housing neighborhoods, pulled up a foothill with a terrain brush, turned on an impassable-terrain view to see where players cannot go, and cut a road with a gradient tool that reshapes the ground under it. His neighborhood was modelled on the zones outside the human capital: rolling hills, rock outcrops, small cliffs.

Stage three is the vertical slice, "where all of our art teams get together and we decide, yes, that's it. That's what I want the whole zone to look like." Esther Love, a senior world artist, showed hers for a remade elven forest, starting from what the original looked like. A tree from a 2007 expansion showed "just how extremely manicured that forest was." The old mountains were "done with just texture painting and a lot of the details were implied," so the remake gave the rocks real geometry and painted light onto them by hand. That last step carries a rule about the world itself.

Stage four is first pass, where the gameplay space gets refined with the encounter and quest designers. Jester's dungeon opens on an establishing shot with a god ray "shining down on that idle exactly where that boss space is," so the player knows where they are going from either of two paths. Circles on the floor are 18 yards across: "18 yards is our aggro radius on mobs," the distance at which a monster notices you, and they are placed to guard the path without sitting on it. A run-distance tool measures both routes, "it says 35 seconds," so neither path is much longer than the other. Boss rooms get a radius of 50 yards, "for any of the mechanics that you normally encounter in a boss." A fence blocks the shortcut believably, and invisible collision blocks it for real, "so you're not getting through that" while the view stays open.

Polish and Fog

Propagation kits fill a map in minutes, then people spend the saved time on a pet shop, a fishing dock and a torch that flickers.

Filling a zone is done with kits, and kits exist because of headcount. Love's vertical slice becomes a cluster kit, "pre-arranged groups of assets that any world builder can use," in large, middle and small sizes so a cluster has directionality and sits in the ground. The ground itself is made tileable so "if we need to spin up a whole new area, well, the ground is already taken care of." Mountains come as a kit too, because sculpting them one by one "would take forever to do. And I don't think we would be done with that expansion." Her reason for all of it is the sentence that defines the studio's approach.

Moray added the number. "There's often four to five people working on a zone," she said, and shared kits are how five people produce one place: "it feels really cohesive. It feels like everybody is creating the same space." Second pass is where the kits pay off. Miller pasted what the team calls the brain, a set of height, color and texture masks for every biome in the neighborhood, across the whole map in one operation, then the rock kit, then trees from a favorites list of clusters, each one snapping to the terrain.

Third pass is polish, "the cherry on top phase." Love's culture kit for the blood elves, the game's high-elf faction, "started off as just like 200 props" from a 2007 expansion and "ended up with over a thousand" for Midnight, over 1,000 props for one faction, including paintings the prop team painted on site inside the game world. Then the detail she was happiest about.

Props tell stories through furniture kits saved as layers: the same building becomes a home, a tailor, a pet shop or a laboratory by switching layers on, and a quest designer's prompt, a shopkeeper who planted mysterious seeds, becomes a room. Miller kitbashed a fishing dock from posts, planks and a leaning rod, then added living-world assets: birds that scatter when the player approaches and return, butterflies that do the same, fireflies keyed to time of day, lightning strikes that only fire in a storm.

The last stage is lighting and fog. The environment team hands over a lighting and atmospheric volume, then every flame gets a point light with an intensity, a start and end to its falloff, a color and a noise setting so it flickers. The fog volume has a size, a color and a density, and the density "is very tricky": the demo value was 0.015, and pushing it to 0.05 changed the whole room. "Our engineers are very kind to us," Moray said. "They know that we're still artists."

Forever's own lighting was rebuilt with the same care and a stricter reference. In a panel called Evolving a Timeless World, the 33-minute rendering session Blizzard posted on September 14, lead environment artist Matt Heyman said the target was "Azeroth as you remember it," with each of the game's roughly 40 zones treated as a character with its own palette and mood, and one rule, "Everything must be authentic." He showed a blue and a green version of an orc desert zone and rejected both: the job was to "push the fantasy that Durotar already has." The reference was not a mood board.

Jason Scott, the panel's lead software engineer for graphics, explained what the original fog had been for: the game "used fog out in the distance for a very particular purpose related to game performance," a wall that hid the draw distance. Forever replaces it with volumetric fog that light shines through, which he called "one of the biggest visual changes in WoW's history," and a custom ray tracer for bounce lighting that "runs completely on our minimum hardware requirements as well." Heyman's last check for any zone was the player's, not the artist's: "it's not playable. It's a little too dark. So, let's bring in a bit more light."

Forever's New Zones

Four regions that were on the map but never became adventures, and a zone whose pitch is living in Azeroth rather than saving it.

Forever's second pillar, in a panel called What's Next, the 47-minute reveal session Blizzard posted on September 13, is "world as the main character." The developer who presented it, whom Clay Stone, the associate production director on the WoW Classic and WoW Forever team, calls Tim in a later interview, drew the line under it.

The new content follows from that. When the team looked at the original world, it saw "regions that existed on the map but never had the chance to become adventures of their own," and it introduced four. Mount Hyjal, the mountain from the original game's most famous battle, becomes an endgame levelling zone, a raid and one of three entrances to another. Shen'dralar is a set of ruins players have flown over for 20 years between two other zones, "a mystery hiding in plain sight." Zephris Isle is a new 1 to 12 starting zone in the sky for the game's new race. And the Riverglades is the one that carries the pillar.

The Riverglades, a new zone on the eastern coast of the original game, sits between four existing zones, and it is big. Human forces once chased retreating orcs there, the settlers were never relieved, and generations later "the descendants still endure." It is "a rugged land of rivers, grasslands, trade routes, struggling communities, old grudges, and new opportunities," with humans, orcs, ogres, gnolls, goblins and murlocs "all competing to survive." It spans the mid-30s to mid-40s, with well over 150 quests, a neutral goblin port and an outdoor ogre stronghold.

The Found Photographs panel, the 34-minute content and narrative session Blizzard posted on September 15, showed the zone's paperwork. Evan, the lead content designer on the Classic team, said "there was this piece of land on the eastern shores of the eastern kingdoms and it had never really been developed. It did exist on the map." It "started as a few different biomes," the team was not sure it should be one zone, and a months-long discussion whittled "about 10 or 12 ideas" down to a handful. The result is "about 30 chunks, which is roughly the size of Stranglethorn," an existing jungle zone, with "nearly 200 new quests" by his count, and it "blends seamlessly between each of the nearby connecting zones."

The two trailers frame the same idea from the outside. The cinematic, called New Horizons, opens on a parchment map of the two continents and ends on a dwarf and a bear in the snow, the image on the collector's edition statue that Stone said marks "where this all began," in November 2004. The gameplay trailer walks through the human capital's gates at sunset and into sunlit forests.

The Rules of the Bubble

Forever's stories live in a separate continuity, are told at ground level, and the truly new is rationed on purpose.

The Found Photographs panel is where Blizzard explained what it is allowed to add. Josh Greenfield, a senior designer who leads Forever's content and narrative direction, took the title from Chris Metzen, the writer who shaped the game's fiction, returned to Blizzard and "coined" it: a found photograph is a story that "could have happened feasibly during the vanilla era of Azeroth's history." The game "begins at the same time original WoW begins," keeps every original quest, and "builds on top of it."

Three rules follow. First, scale: "we also want to maintain original WoW's focus on what we call local stories," because "this ground level view of localized stories is what makes the world of Azeroth feel large and textured."

Second, continuity. "WoW Forever does not exist in the same continuity as modern World of Warcraft," Greenfield said. Metzen "likes to call this our little time bubble." The reason is freedom "without creating problematic situations that require a direct response in the modern game," and the limit is that the team will "paint inside the lines of established foundational lore." Nobody is going to reveal that a beloved character was a villain all along.

Third, restraint. New content sorts into three categories: the anticipated, the "new but familiar," and the unexpected, "a category of content we plan to introduce sparingly." The floating starting zone is the unexpected one, and it is fenced off on purpose: "Zephris is not a major fixture in the world, and it's very self-contained. You aren't going to go here every week to raid or to farm materials." Metzen sketched its island after the first meeting, and the sketch is what the zone became. The reason for all three rules is the loss Greenfield named at the end: the mysteries of the original game have been answered over 20 years, "and so what we're really trying to do with something like Wow Forever is create opportunities for new mysteries for for everyone."

What This Means for the Riot MMO

Runeterra has 13 regions and a codex of 143 named places, most of them never built, and Riot has already lived through a continuity reset of its own.

Our read, and it is speculative. Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends, the five-on-five battle game its whole catalogue grew from, has shown no zone of its MMO, the online role-playing game it confirmed in 2020, reset in 2024 and has not shown since. What it has is Runeterra, the world League of Legends is set in and the one confirmed fact about the MMO, and RuneGrove's codex of that world holds 143 named locations across its 13 regions. Most of them exist as a paragraph and a painting. Blizzard's phrase for its new zones, regions that existed on the map but never became adventures, describes nearly all of Runeterra. Blizzard is filling the gaps on a map it built 22 years ago. Riot's map is almost all gap.

The Riverglades is a test Riot can run on its own map: find a place that was always there, never developed, the size of a zone players already know, and build it about living rather than saving. Runeterra has one ready. The Boundary Markets are "a bustling trading ground at the border between Piltover and Zaun," the city of progress on the map and the undercity beneath it, "where merchants from both cities meet on relatively equal footing. Piltovan luxury goods share stall space with Zaunite chemtech contraband." Couples from the factory district eat there after the shift ends, pickpockets work the crowds, and an elevator called the Rising Howl drops passengers into it. That is humans and orcs and goblins competing to survive, with nobody saving the world.

The frontier boomtown exists too. Kalamanda, a city on the far northern edge of Shurima, the fallen desert empire on the map, grew because "a vast deposit of gold and gems was found near Kalamanda, and the promise of that wealth drew new inhabitants." A gold rush at the edge of an empire is a zone pitch, and it already has a name, a reason and two champions attached. RuneGrove has been cataloguing these gaps for months: a kingdom Riot named but never put on the map, a missing continent hiding in a champion's biography, and a realm behind the map whose doors open onto every region.

The bubble is the part Riot has already lived through. RuneGrove's codex records the Institute of War, the neutral body that once settled the great nations' disputes on the Fields of Justice, as "dissolved, and with its dissolution it was removed from the accepted history of Runeterra," belonging "to an older telling of the world's past rather than its present." Riot rewrote its own continuity once, and every story written before that line had to be re-sorted. Blizzard is forking Forever into a separate bubble precisely so that neither of its games ever has to do that to the other. For an MMO that will be the biggest single statement of what Runeterra is, the lesson is to pick the era and say which stories are canon before the first zone is grey-boxed. RuneGrove has already found one crossing the canon fully specifies and no story has made.

Local stories are the easy match. Riot's Universe is built out of them: a fox spirit selling her worst memory to a grove in Ionia is a found photograph by Greenfield's definition, a story that could have happened, told at ground level, with no capital city in it. The harder match is the pipeline. Blizzard put numbers on the table, 18 yards, 50 yards, 35 seconds, four to five people per zone, and Riot has published none. What it has published are jobs, and none of the ones tagged to its MMO studio is a world builder yet. In June it handed world traversal to a WoW veteran, in August it hired one person to decide how running feels, and on September 9 its careers board added a principal 3D character artist in Los Angeles. The person who will decide the aggro radius is not on the board.

That map is the fiction Riot draws on, not a launch plan. Which regions the MMO opens with, how much of the map it covers, its era, its platform and its price are all unrevealed. Piltover, Zaun and Shurima are here because the Boundary Markets and Kalamanda come up above; the crests illustrate the world, not a starting area. For how another studio is building this kind of world in public, one hand-placed zone at a time, RuneGrove has watched it happen.

Your Take

What to Watch

Three dated Forever beats, then three more RuneGrove reads on the map Riot has to build.

Sep 17

World of Warcraft: Forever beta opens

Zephris Isle is a 1 to 12 zone, so the new starting experience is in the beta band from day one.

Nov 4

World of Warcraft: Forever launches

The Riverglades, Shen'dralar and Mount Hyjal open with the full 1 to 60 journey.

Dec 9

The first new raids unlock

The first dated beat on the roadmap Blizzard showed.

This MMO's New Zone Is 2,000 Meters Tall, From Sunken Ruins to Cities in the Clouds. Riot Just Handed Traversal to a WoW Veteran.

Riot MMO

Nilah Isn't From Bilgewater. She's From a Kingdom Riot Named But Never Put on the Map.

Riot MMO

The Riot MMO's Hub Cities Are Already Built: Piltover Has the Bank, Bilgewater Has the Bounty Board

Riot MMO

Reported from Blizzard's BlizzCon 2026 videos on the World of Warcraft YouTube channel, all embedded above with the clock, and RuneGrove's own codex of Runeterra. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.