World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor may have received its last major update with Patch 6.2. In a new interview, lead game designer Corey Stockton said that Hellfire Citadel is "currently planned" to be the last raid of the expansion.
Stock said in the interview that Hellfire Citadel is a "pinnacle" for players. It also ends the storyline of the expansion:
[Hellfire Citadel] is kind of like the wrap-up. It's hard to beat someone like Archimonde for a boss. As players know, he's a pretty amazing guy to be able to fight. And I think it's clear to people who played the storyline that they saw the Tanaan Jungle at the beginning of the experience and they're wrapping back around to it.
In Warlords of Draenor, the players' main adversaries were an alliance of orcs called the Iron Horde. By Patch 6.2, the Iron Horde has been corrupted by the warlock Gul'dan. They had spurned his offer of help beforehand so now he turned them into his thralls by force.
Players face Gul'dan's forces in Hellfire Citadel. The raid closes with them fighting Archimonde, a general in the demonic army known as the Burning Legion that supports Gul'dan. In this fight they're actually aided by Grommash Hellscream, the leader of the Iron Horde.
This seems like a fitting end to the expansion. It mirrors the conclusion of Warcraft 3, in which orcs realized that the Burning Legion was their real enemy and teamed up with night elves and humans to defeat them. The last boss of that game was also Archimonde. It's kind of cool how the established series history and Warlords of Draenor's alternate timeline ultimately converge like that in spite of their huge differences.
Still, if Hellfire Citadel is the last raid of Warlords of Draenor, we're left with big questions: When is the next expansion pack coming out? And what activities, if any, will Blizzard release between now and then to keep players' attention. Stockton reiterated that a small, upcoming update will add flying to Draenor. He declined to share any other specifics about future patches, though.
There's often a long lull between the last update of a WoW expansion pack and the release of a new expansion. For example, Warlords of Draenor launched 14 months after Siege of Orgrimmar patch for Mists of Pandaria. Stockton said in the interview that they want to avoid these long delays but he can't promise that they won't:
We're not happy when players have to wait a year for new content, either. It's definitely not something we want to do but we've found ourselves in situations where we're working on an expansion and, as Blizzard does, we're not going to release it until we feels it's at the quality level where it's going to be great.
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