Prerelease:World of Warcraft/Unknown locations and Test maps

This is a sub-page of Prerelease:World of Warcraft.

Unknown Locations

Malbourn Build

The "Malbourn Build" named after the character being controlled in the images, is the earliest build of WoW (that's not a Warcraft 3 mod) that we currently have screenshots of, it features a very different art style to the final game and none of the assets in the images exist in any known clients. One of these screenshots was released by Blizzard and is discussed on the main article, the other two are documented below.

Looting a Chest

Seen here is Malbourn bending down to loot a chest. The surrounding area is a snowy-textured landmass, with a single tree and some type of wooden building.

• The player is able to equip 4 ring slots and 4 trinkets, unlike the final game's 2 rings and 2 trinkets.
• The character equipment page only shows slots for Weapons, Cloaks, Neck pieces, Rings and Trinkets.
• The Copper Pieces have a weight stat, which is a completely unused stat only ever seen in this build. How this would've worked is unknown, though it most likely would've just limited how much you can carry.
• The name "Yohan Valdmor - Jeweler" with a Shop button is displayed in the top right corner of both screenshots, it is unclear whether this is showing that the player is targeting an NPC named Yohan, but it may suggest that you could originally access an NPC's item trading window from anywhere.
• The chest that Malbourn is looting has a completely different texture from the other chest in the shot.

Looking at a Building

Here we see Malbourn looking at a very strange looking structure.

• The structure of the buildings is compromised of 3 rectangular buildings with one stacked on top of the other two to form a sort of bridge like structure.
• The outer walls are comprised of a 2D texture of a wooden fence with poorly aligned spikes on top. There is also a large gate for the entrance.
• It's possible that this could be the entrance to the town of Valguard, but this is just speculation.

Debug Build

The so-called "Debug Build" due to the window title sometimes saying "World of Warcraft - Debug" in the images.

Unknown Location

An image of a female Dwarf attacking a Ghoul NPC with a very nondescript green and brown wall in the background.

• Remnants of the "Malbourn Build" UI can be seen here.
• The player has 3 different resource bars.
• The Ghoul has "SomeClass2" written below its target frame, it is unclear whether this is a player class name from before they decided on the name's, or if it is just the NPC's title.
• There are debug co-ordinates listed on the right of the screen which confirms that this screenshot takes place in mapID 0 ("Eastern Kingdoms"), however it is impossible to have these co-ordinates in the final game as the map size is limited to +/-17006 (x and y).

Internal Alpha 0.1

The 2001-2002 Build's of WoW with the Warcraft 3-esque interface that was shown off for the first time in the first trailer for WoW in 2001.

Procedural Water

A character named "Virtual Tim" floating above a procedural water test area.

• It is using the 2001 trailer UI.
• The player has 3 different resource bars.
• The zone is named "SubZoneTest".
• Procedural water was shelved until the Cataclysm expansion due to being very resource intensive.

Test Zones

Internal Alpha 0.3 Build

A build of WoW sometime in 2003, sometimes referred to as the E3 build (0.3.4), or by its official version number of 0.3.

Dead Man's Hole

A character named "Kommissar13" floating above a large crater in the ground known as Dead Man's Hole.

• It is using the final UI.
• The minimap seems to be showing a completely different area than the one the character is standing in, it is also slightly glitched and cuts itself off at the bottom.
• The character's name has numbers in it, something not possible in the final game.
• The hole contains an early version of the Goldshire blacksmith.
• This zone still has some remnants in the final game, namely in AreaTables.dbc where you can find its map area information, it was located at the very upper left corner of the Eastern Kingdoms map boundary on a test area known as "Programmer Isle". Sadly the map tile that held it had been deleted by build 0.5.3 with only 3 of the surrounding map tiles remaining.