Population Numbers in the Story?

Lore Story Forum
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Blizzard has always played fast and loose with how many people live on Azeroth and how many members of each faction actually exist in the story so pinning down those numbers is a challenge to put it lightly. My question is not what those numbers are, but rather should blizzard include population counts in the story? Would it make the story better or worse to have that information?

For my own opinion, yes, I think it would. It would limit some of the story telling opportunities that is true, but it would also provide a better foundation for storytelling.

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If you fired Blizzard’s entire writing staff and replaced them with different people, then sure. Otherwise, probably not.

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I think it would be good if we had some consistent scale. But if Blizzard has been consistent about anything, it has been that consistency is the enemy of creativity, in their minds. For good or ill.

For example - learning the Forsaken lost much of their fleet in Stormheim would color in why Sylvanas eyed the Zandalari navy.

But if we had some listing of the Forsaken Ships, and which were sunken and which existed… it adds depth but also constricts.

I was recently listening to speculation regarding Lord of the Rings, and the number of Balrogs. Tolkien went back and forth on the numbers. Putting numbers can really color the tale, and can have ramifications for decades of story telling.

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If they tried to be consistent about population numbers then every race on Azeroth would be extinct by now.

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Every race on Azeroth is dying off if you’re counting how many children you see vs how many adults are being cut down and slaughtered in any combat zone.

Like, I know Orcs are full grown adults in like 11 years, but they literally have the same lifespan of the War Boys from Mad Max Fury Road, who deliberately attempt to blow themselves up and die at every opportunity.

Every flavor of Elf has been cut down significantly in population by an invading force, and that goes for their ancestors the Trolls too.

Even the undead who don’t have children no longer have Valkyr to flash-raise more undead so their population renewal is back to Vanilla where the corpses would just wake up in Tirisfal and join up.

Pretty much every race in Warcraft is on the decline. No new towns are being constructed, we only ever come across what’s already built and typically that’s being slowly worn down either by neglect or malicious forces, both foreign and/or domestic.

No, Stromgarde and the new Orc City in Arathi don’t count. Strom has been rebuilt from being a ruin, and the Orcs who moved in next door are all refugees from an entire temporary world who realized that Thrall settling in Durotar was a bad idea and wanted to live anywhere else.

The last time I remember when Blizzard tried to use numbers, they had Jaina crying over how many died in Northrend at a candlelit vigil in the Stormwind Cathedral. Which would be sad if it wasn’t everyone’s story by that point which makes Warcraft one of the worst settings to actually live in.

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This is something I think about a lot. Every now and again I see posts asking people where in Azeroth they’d want to live and my answer is always “nowhere”. Like holy crap even the most peaceful places on Azeroth have something horrible happening somewhere. Life on Azeroth sucks. I unironically think Tamriel might actually be safer.

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Maybe the turtle island.

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Being a real person living on Azeroth is just one existential nightmare after another, from Vanilla onward.

I’m just someone living my best life on Azeroth, just doing my thing. Well, as good of a life as it can be with all the zombies and ghouls and skellingtons, murder wolves, murder wolfmen, horse-sized spiders and the like. But y’know, rent is cheap and eggs don’t cost 10 gold a carton, so it could be worse.

Three years later

It got worse. The demon invasion from the portal down the road and the zombie invasion that followed a year after that sucked, but it didn’t change much for my life. But then an apocalypse dragon flew around, and my cousin in Westfall had her house fall into the ocean, and she was still in it. I still have my zombie and wilflife problems, but now there’s orcs running down the road screaming “blood and thunder, Hellscreams eyes upon you” and they’re murdering everyone. I tried to book passage on a boat to Southshore to get away from the death and chaos, but we saw the blight clouds wafting in the breeze and now we’re turning back to the Wetlands.

Two more years later

Thank uhh… Thank the titans all that chaos is over. For no reason I know of, all the fighting suddenly moved away to some island called Pandamania, so I got some sleep finally. Things have quieted down, asside from a brief invasion by time travelling alien orc invaders. Things are starting to gone together. Life is actually good!!

Two more years later

Not good!! Not good at all!! Life is very, very bad!!!

Suddenly there was a whole demon invasion? Not just regular demons, these guys had space ships and fel lasers!!! Who got the bright idea to give demons space ships and fel lasers??? What is even happening there?!?

But then like… The world got stabbed by a doubled-up skyscraper that caused the entire planet to vomit up magic!! And now because of that, for some reason we were at war with the Horde again!! This is like the third time or something, and this time went much worse because I woke up one day and Genn Greymane was grabbing people from their farms and pressing them into war!! He grabbed me and said “congratulations soldier, welcome to the Grand Army of the Alliance” and I said wolf-guy, I’m barely even a farmer here, I can’t fight!!!

And you know what he did? Genn? Genn looked me dead in the eye, just right dead in the eye and he said “you’ve somehow managed to survive two demon invasions, a zombie invasion, two Horde invasions, an apocalypse dragon and so much more. You’ll find a way to survive this, soldier!!”

Then right as he shoved a spear in my hands and told me to figure it out, Anduin called him on his hearthstone and said “it’s over, she said we’re nothing and flew away” and then Genn left. Before I could even shout “what is even happening,” Randy Nezmith down the road sprouted tentacles and started chanting “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh N’zoth Ny’alotha wgah’nagl fhtagn” and tried to sacrifice me to his dark god!!

But then I blinked, literally blinked, and everything was back to normal.

It cannot get more insane than this.

Next year

IT GOT SO MUCH MORE INSANE!!!

There’s zombies and skellingtons everywhere!! All over the world, it’s just zombies and skellingtons and Mawthornes and I just don’t even know what else!! All the kings and queens got kidnapped, and then something starting sucking out the planets’ soul and my therapist died but a blue angel brought him back and now I’m giving therapy to my therapist!! Everything’s quieting down now, but I think Jaina forgot Anduin was with her because she came back without him.

I swear, those two years of relative quiet just made everything worse. At this point, if things get quiet for just one year, I’m going to pre-emptively freak out.

Six years later

I AM FREAKING OUT!!!

Next year

Oh thank God Titan Azeroth, it’s another void thing. These always blow over pretty quickly and we should be fine.

… Right?

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Infinite orc grunts and stormwind guards spawn from the void

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Thanks for the giggles.
EDIT: This is also why I was so pissed when they squished the timeline in Chronicle when they should have done the opposite.
There’s no way any these things happened that quickly, wars are supposed to be slow as molasses. There’s no way we defeated the Scourge in Northrend in under a year.

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I noticed it when rewriting my characters backstory that the 1st and second war are like a couple of weeks a part at best making them basically the same conflict

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I am going with no. Not only would it be kinda constrictive, ultimately the emotional weight is still there even with a degree of vagues.

Like if I said 80% of the gnomes were wiped out due to Gnomeragan you still get the sense of loss even without having concrete numbers.

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And we see that with Pandaria even if you exclude the faction conflicts. Mogu raids, Mantid swarms, Sha rising from the ground (although on a lesser scale compared to the events of MoP proper). It makes me wonder why anyone would even have a farming village so close to the Serpent’s Spine (Stoneplow)

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I don’t think that they should, no.

Blizzard has always been deliberately vague with that kind of thing for a few reasons. One of which has to be for some narrative freedom.

The faction conflicts, for example, don’t really make a lot of sense if we go too much by the actual numbers. The Horde is comprised of orcs, trolls, tauren, blood elves, and the forsaken (there are more, but bear with me for a moment).

The orcs would be the ones left over from the initial invasions, the ones who survived. The Darkspear were nearly wiped out by raids (I…think it was murlocs, but don’t hold me to that). The Tauren were nearly wiped out by centaur raids. The blood elves are the survivors of a Scourge genocide before they had to endure the rigors of Outland (and before the exodus of the void elves). The Forsaken cannot procreate, and their numbers dwindled down enough so that Sylvanas was looking for ways to bolster their forces.

On the surface, how is a group of survivors supposed to be a military threat for the humans, dwarves, gnomes, draenei, and night elves? The latter two are small in number, but no major calamity had befallen the first three (I don’t know the numbers from Gnomeregan).

If there were actual numbers published, it would get kind of strange defending any kind of conflict as evenly matched. In a similar vein, you wouldn’t be able to as easily say ‘X sent these forces’ without people wondering ‘Hey, wait a minute, why do they have forces to spare?’

It works a lot better if everything is kind of handwavey. The answer to 'where are all these Defias/Burning Blade/Twilight Council/Cult of The Damned coming from?

Oh, you know. Around.

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“What? It’s…how did we end this in just a few mont–”
“CAN’T STOP WON’T STOP” [Queue massive electric guitar riff from atop the back of a dragon heading into the maelstrom]

This is, by the way, why I hesitate to give my human characters actual ages. I can’t deal with the whiplash.

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The factions were never evenly matched and that was the main problem from the whole setting after Warcraft 3. Horde losing the second war was the main reason for this. No one wants to be a loser.

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Unless it’s actually relevant, it’s dead text.

When Greymane tells Anduin that they’ll have to start conscripting farmers, we don’t need the numbers to tell us that they’ve been having major casualties on the front lines of the Fourth War.

Numbers generally are a form of Telling when Showing is more important.

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Numbers can also show how little the writers know about something, like having a battle take place with only a couple of hundred people cause the writer thought that was a big enough number

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The Spartans seemed to think so.

Custer’s Last Stand is pretty famous despite only involving numbers that small.

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Yea but they both specifically lost cause of their small numbers