New York, NY -Saturday, August 27, 2016 -(TerraUS, mhUSA)-
World of Warcraft’s next expansion, Legion, was initially unveiled just over a year ago at Gamescom 2015. Now, finally, the 11-year-old MMO’s sixth expansion is due out next week, and players are bracing for its host of sweeping changes.

Legion will introduce a brand new world-scaling leveling system exclusive to the new continent, Broken Isles, as well as a new means of story progression through Class Order Halls. It’ll also grants players uniquely powerful, class-specific Artifact Weapons and, perhaps most importantly, introduce Demon Hunters--a new class of fighters that function more like the hero of an action game than another avatar in an MMO.

Now that Legion’s nearly upon us, we sat down with lead game designer Luis Garraga, technical game designer Chad Nervig, and character designer Genevieve St-Michel to discuss the long-in-development expansion in greater detail, digging into some specifics surrounding Legion’s ambitious changes and exploring the team’s post-launch plans.

GameSpot: Just starting out, can you give us a quick overview of how Legion fits into the existing lore?

Garraga: The theme of the expansion is the third coming of the Burning Legion to Azeroth. These guys have tried to invade us twice, and we ' ve beat them back before. That kind of leads us into the first big feature that I ' m super excited about, which is Demon Hunters. The Special Forces branch of the elves, if you will, they were the Demon Hunters. The most elite. All they trained for was hunting down and defeating demons.

Unfortunately, some of their means were misunderstood by their brethren. They were outlawed and thrown into prison. You play as one of these disciples of Illidan. When the Legion comes back it ' s like, "Well, do we want to take our chances with these renegade Demon Hunters or do we want to just admit defeat?" The good guys decide to bite the bullet and let the so-called outlaws out, and that ' s where Demon Hunters come in.