In this talk I will briefly review the status and roadmap of the six focal-plane instruments foreseen by ESO for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). Among these instruments is HIRES, the high resolution spectrograph. I will summarize the main scientific drivers for this instrument and describe its fundamental technical characteristics, which include complete optical-IR (0.37-2.4 microns) wavelength coverage in a single exposure. HIRES is not only an optimized high resolution spectrograph, but also a medium-resolution (R~10,000) MOS spectrograph which can simultaneously obtain complete spectra of 10 objects, with a patrol field of view of up to 10 arcmin. It can also perform high spectral (R~1e5) and spatial (~10 mas) resolution IFU observations over tiny fields of views at the NIR wavelengths (where adaptive optics correction is effective). This remarkable flexibility does not require any modification or extra complication in the spectrograph. I will finally describe the on-going work to build an international consortium for the construction of HIRES.