Tom Chilton Reveals WoD Final Boss at Gamescom
by JR Cook - 10 years ago show comments
Speaking with German fansite Vanion.eu, Game Director Tom Chilton (@thekalgan) answered a bunch of questions about the upcoming expansion, including some clarification on who the expansion’s final boss would be. The relevant information there is about 11 minutes into the video below. Of course, if you don’t want to know who that boss is, better to not watch the video.
In the interests of helping people avoid being spoiled about this knowledge, let’s have some space for a spoiler warning.
Everybody here who wants to be? Okay, good.
When it comes down to it, it really shouldn’t be surprising that the final boss will be Grommash Hellscream. He’s showcased in the cinematic trailer we saw yesterday, he’s front and center in all of the key art for the expansion, and he’s on the cover of the box. Quite frankly, if it were anyone other than Grom, you’d see people throwing a fit like they did back in Burning Crusade when Illidan was all over all the publicity materials but ended up getting offed in the first major content patch.
But here’s the thing: even if Grom’s not a surprise, even if he ended up being a bait and switch for someone else, I personally don’t appreciate being told that information now. Grom was a hero in WC3, and he died a hero’s death then. If you’re going to sell me a narrative that the Horde is going to turn on their equivalent to Teddy Roosevelt, then I want to see that process take place, instead of just being told that it’ll all make sense when I get there to kill the guy. (The Alliance wanting to kill him makes plenty of sense, but for Big Blue an orc’s an orc.)
For the sake of full disclosure, I didn’t like knowing that the Siege of Orgrimmar was going to be the last raid of Mists, or that Garrosh was going to be final boss then, either. I appreciate that Blizzard caved to pressure from people who didn’t like having zero concrete indication of what we were doing on Pandaria, but that’s not a problem this time: we’re going to fight Grom and Garrosh and the Iron Horde because they’re building the Dark Portal to come wreck us. That’s implicit, that’s known, and that’s clear from the cinematic.
We didn’t need to know that Grom was going to be the final boss. Chilton casually reveals it to the Vanion crew (and to be fair it’s something that was slipped at BlizzCon too) like it shouldn’t be a surprise, but for some people it was going to be a surprise. Maybe those players who stopped playing after BC, or Wrath. Maybe those RTS players who never got into WoW when it was hot but now, upon hearing that all of these characters and concepts from the RTS games are getting big prominence in the game, they’re coming to try it out. And now the last chapter of the book is essentially known.
I think it’s a misstep and a disappointment, and I’d love to buy into the tinfoil-hattery where some people are suggesting that Chilton is deliberately misleading us, but he’s never been the type to do that before.
So there you have it. I don’t expect Grom’s fight to be a rehash of Garrosh’, just as Deathwing’s fights didn’t have anything to do with Nefarian or Onyxia or Sartharion or Nef+Ony. I’m sure the gameplay will be solid, but the story is now a bit less compelling for me.
This means nothing, more or less. They already said Grom would be the final boss back at Blizzcon. Then, like now, Grom only serves to make us stop speculating about who the real end boss will be. Just like Illidan ensured that we didn’t speculate about Kil’Jaeden.
Like they said at Blizzcon, ‘there is a guy behind the guy’.
I believe we’ll find in 6.x that while Grom was the public face of the Iron Horde, the bigger threat is found somewhere else.
Candidates:
– Burning Legion (Archimonde or Kil’Jaeden), back to punish the orcs for rejecting their ‘blessing’ and killing Mannoroth.
– Wrathion, upset that we destroyed the Iron Horde; Azeroth’s greatest defense against the Legion according to him (he was involved in Garrosh’s escape in War Crimes). This plot makes sense to me, although I don’t think Blizzard want to ‘spend’ this character already.
– Kairoz, directly responsible for Garrosh’s escape in War Crimes.
The thing that gets me about this AU or timeline or whatever is that somewhere out there is an Azeroth where Medivh doesn’t bring the orcs over. Somewhere out there, a Medivh with a Titan in him is still plotting and scheming and snickering and twirling his figurative mustache.
It seems like THAT would be far bigger and more important to the whole of Azeroth than Draenor. That man was pure power, pure madness, and pure evil at the time (pre-purification).
As threats go, that’s the threat to be concerned about. And he’s only a hop, skip, and a portal away from Draenor, which means he’s not really even that far from the future/main timeline Azeroth.
He doesn’t even have to build a huge portal if he’s just bringing himself through. He could just slip through a tiny portal and then sneak through the Iron Horde portal to reach Azeroth proper.
If that happens, a LOT of bad is going to ensue. That said, one has to imagine that if Dark Medivh were to come through and start pulling crap, it might draw Medivh out of retirement to give a fig about the world again.
I also happen to think that all this time travel nonsense tied to the Caverns of Time and now to the alternate universe/timeline/dimension nonsense combined with what happened at Ulduar with Algeaon, the outright murder of Old Gods (an act even the Titans apparently did not do for reasons unclear), the Cataclysm and Deathwing’s total wrecking of the surface of the world, and rampant spread of the Old God influence in general…
How could the Titans not notice? How could they not go, “Hey. Dude. A long range scanner indicates that that planet we futzed with a few millenia ago is going haywire. I think maybe something is a little off.”
So another Titan would stomp up and look at the scanner and nod. “Yes. It would appear that the planet is currently suffering a complete system malfunction. We should return.”
“Yes. We should go and pull the power plug. Wait 30 Titan Seconds (millenia). Then we can plug it in and see if we don’t get all green lights.”
“Sounds good.”
Then again, Blizzard’ll probably snicker and make the Burning Legion invade as a way of calling back to The Burning Crusade because I imagine there are a LOT of old Burning Legion we’ve butchered in the main universe who are still out there like Mannoroth was.
And of course, besides all that, even a small portal to the AU Azeroth threatens to draw into the main universe the one threat against which all have fallen. A threat so horrible and terrible that the very idea of him getting an AU character makes Thrall lie awake at night, terrified.
For if there is an AU of Draenor, then there may be be an AU Hogger out there somewhere.
Beware.