The 100 years everybody is quoting

Read five reports of the Diablo V reveal and four of them will tell you the game is set 100 years after Diablo IV. The number is everywhere. It is not, however, in anything Blizzard has published.

We went looking for it. It is not in the announcement post, not in the panel recap, not on the official Diablo V site, and not on any of the eight pages of the panel transcript.

What the panel actually said

One figure was given from the stage, by Tiffany Wat: seven years have passed since Diablo conquered Sanctuary. That is the clock the game starts on. It is a developer statement rather than a Blizzard publication, so that is how it is filed in Everything we know.

So where does 100 come from?

From a developer, on the record, on the day of the reveal. Senior art director John Mueller put it plainly: the game is set in an era 100 years after Mephisto's defeat. Reveal coverage measures the same gap from the other end - over a century after the events of Diablo IV's Age of Hatred saga.

So the two numbers never competed. They measure different stretches: the century runs from Mephisto's fall up to the conquest, and the seven years run from the conquest to where the game begins. Mueller calls that second stretch the "Lost 7 Years", and says working out what went missing in it is a core part of the story.

The trouble is what happens to that distinction in a headline. "100 years after Diablo IV" gets shortened to "100 years after Diablo won", which is wrong by ninety-three years and changes what kind of world you are walking into: not a ruin that has had a century to settle, but a conquest still in progress.

How we file it

Both figures are developer statements: the seven years with the panel transcript named, the hundred years with Mueller named. Neither is confirmed, because that badge means exactly one thing here, and it is not "a developer said it" - it is "Blizzard published it". No Blizzard post carries either number.

This page was wrong about that until 26 September. It filed the hundred years as a rumor because Blizzard had not published them - which is the test for confirmed, not the test for a rumour. The result was a figure a named developer had given on the record, sitting under a badge that reads "unverified information". It has moved up, and what remains on the rumors page is the kind of claim that tier is for: repeated in coverage of the reveal, attributed to nobody.

When Blizzard does put a number in writing, this page gets another revision note and both facts move up. That is the whole point of dating every claim.