Diablo clones

I played through Torchlight and finally finished Titan Quest: Immortal Throne. So which one is better? Eh. Both excel at their own areas, I think that the combat and loot was more fluid in Torchlight but TQ has a more interesting world and a more expandable class system. That said, I don't know if my build was retarded or what in TQ (defense/dream) but the last act was pretty damn annoying. I had to carry at least 100 potions with me and drink them all the time and pretty much use guerrilla tactics to kill normal enemies. For being a legendary titan-killer my guy seemed like a kleptomanic potion addict.

There was a difficulty spike in TL too, but not nearly as drastic. My death count was, I think, somewhere around 20 in TQ by the time I finished and 0 in TL. I think it's because of the difference in the combat and that there's more freedom in character building in TQ (a few points per level to spend between health, mana, strength, agility, intelligence and something I missed, plus a few skill points per level to either level up one of your specializations or improve/purchase invidual skills)

Meanwhile in TL there really only were two worthwhile attributes for me out of melee damage, ranged damage, magic damage and damage reduction. Plus, you get skill points out the ass for use for skills and passive abilities that mostly need only one point to be effective.

Items were much better in TL. It felt like 99% of all magical items in TQ were worthless and they had mostly the same pre/suffixes thorough the game. Uniques were pretty damn rare, too.

And story? If there was one in Torchlight I missed it. As for voice acting, TL was very sparse with it unlike TQ which has it pretty good, if you can stand the overdone accents.

So what are your favorite diablo clones? LOD mods are welcome too, I've played a few. Eastern Sun is okay, pretty much just adds new stuff. Was too easy, I was a zealadin in Hell (difficulty). Tried out Median XL, didn't like it too much. My favorite is Chaos Empire, partly because of the obscurity of basic information due to 80% of the forums and site being German. Mostly because the mod has a lot of stuff to do and can be pretty hard.

I really enjoyed TQ, although I never went far with it and used a bunch of mods (one that makes better items drop a lot more, one that multiplies the enemy count, and I also modified player speed so he'd run 3x faster - I guess I'm too used to Doomguy).

The vanilla balancing was horrible, though - and I don't think you've messed up your build, that's just how the game is ; some builds devastate everything while others struggle.

Torchlight was the most fun.

TL was made by some of the people who made Diablo 1. (designer&musician s for sure, dunno about the others)

i liked it very much, played trough with all 3 characters :D

Torchlight had more Diablo 1/2 people working on it than Diablo 3 does. So that explains why it's so good.

Also, Diablo is technically a roguelike, but it was probably the first one with modern graphics, so other roguelikes with graphics like that get called Diablo clones.

For ASCII-based roguelikes, there is of course Rogue and Nethack. There was also a Doom roguelike called...Doom Roguelike, I believe. There was Castle of the Winds, a mid-90s roguelike distributed by Apogee and sprite-based, though it looked like a primitive Visual Basic game. As for more modern roguelikes, there is Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which is pretty popular these days despite its primitive graphics. There is also, of course, Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode.

As for Diablo clones, the only one I know aside from the Diablo games, Torchlight, and Titan Quest is Nox. It was probably the first Diablo clone, and I have heard some good things about it, but I've never played it myself and know hardly anyone who did.

Oh my god, Nox is by far my favorite of the Diablo clones. Nox FTW. Edit: X D is censored? O.o Hm.

I spent so many eons playing that. Hell, there is NOTHING I haven't discovered in its campaigns by now.

It's a shame that it's so forgotten, though. Outside of the C&C series it was one of Westwood's best works. :(

I still need to play Torchlight.

Haven't played Torchlight yet, looks interesting. Titan Quest is awesome, but there is a slight imbalance between the classes as other have pointed out. The Sprit class in particular, TQ's equivalent of a Necromancer, seemed pretty useless.

Yeah about the roguelike mention, Diablo 1 is clearly based off on one, but Diablo 2 deviated rather a lot. Pretty much all the top-down action RPGs are based on D2 (though some like Torchlight are a mix of features prominent in D1 and D2, a rather succesful blending if I might add), hence the name "diablo clone".

Nox sounds familiar, never played it though. Same with DS2. Have to give them a try sometime. I've played Sacred, but it felt too shallow and cumbersome for me. From what I've heard, Sacred 2 has ridiculously complex character building for a current-gen game, and has an enormous world to boot.

Torchlight 2 or Diablo III? TL2 will probably be released first and has a more lenient stance on multiplayer and modding than the tyrannical BATTLE.NET 2.0, and has ironically more guys from D1 and D2 working on it than D3 like someone said. Though that doesn't necessarily mean much (see HG:L).

I'm fearing that Activision-Blizzard will fuck up the atmosphere (contrary to a popular belief, "gothic fantasy" doesn't mean "blood everywhere") and the story of D3. (oh no, good guy gone bad, look, he got redeemed, what a tweest) What is sure however is the polishing and finesse all Blizzard games have. I've no doubt in that.

Bouncy said:

Edit: X D is censored? O.o Hm.

You can thank deathbringer for that one.

Yes, but which one has co-op?

Titan Quest would have to be the best 'diablo clone' I've played (apart from Diablo 2 of course). Torchlight was awesome too but wasn't quite as expansive as TQ. I'm really looking forward to TL2, can't go wrong with TL+coop+more expansive content.

Apart from that, I really enjoyed the original Sacred. Once you get over the clunkiness of it (and the bugs) it's really addictive. Sacred 2 I haven't had much chance to play because of its ridiculous DRM (yeah I bought the game but can't play it :/), but what I did get to play seemed pretty good too.

BTW the creators of Titan Quest have started up a new company and are currently working on a new arpg Grim Dawn, which should be cool, if it's ever finished.

Oh also, the Dungeon Siege games were pretty good fun if a bit basic. Coop was great in both those too. Oh and DS3 is on the way, not sure how good it'll be but should be worth a try.

Ah, I knew Iron Lore went down under after TQ but I didn't know they're behind Grim Dawn. Should be good stuff but the release schedule looks like it's even more vague than Diablo III's.

I remember there being a Diablo clone (albeit a more watered down, family friendly version[E10+ I think?]) whose trial version was included with some Dell Windows XP (media center) PCs. From what I remember it was actually a pretty fun game, but I can't remember what the name was.

Fate?

Hehe, Torchlight. I have it and love it despite never playing either Diablo before. Word.

Danarchy said:

Rogue and Nethack

don't forget angband

(and it's many variants)

A Diablo clone thread? Yay!

Titan Quest will always have a special place in my gamer's heart. The item system is poor (too little special drops), the enemies are too small in numbers, the enemy groups are always one-sided (it's very rare to see mish-mashes of different enemies at the same time in TQ which would make fights more interesting), the maps are completely static and Egypt is a snooze fest. Yet, it still has a wonderfully engaging character system if you step out of the few best builds and do whatever you want to do. Multi-classing is always one of my favourite features in class-based systems that allow it, and in Titan Quest you're almost forced to multi-class. It's awesome.

Of course TQ gets better once you load it with mods that (slightly) improve drop rates and multiply the monster hordes. The mods still don't add variety to the enemies or add random maps, but they do improve the game a lot.

There's also one huge completely new adventure for TQ, forgot its name though. The beginning of it was pretty boring, but later on it had some awesomely epic moments, like watching from a cliff far away when monster hordes are laying siege to a huge city (and when I say huge, I mean huge, nothing in vanilla TQ compares to that place).


Torchlight was ok, the best thing about is its performance. Ironically, kind of, even though it has random dungeons they have even less variety than TQ's static maps do. It's also disappointing to see all the shared passive skills in Torchlight, instead of having unique skills for the classes. But maybe most importantly, the game is just too damn easy (at least for the most part). The first (and so far only) time I finished it (as a dual-wielding pistol chick) I had no problems at all until the last tier, and even that wasn't really bad at all. The last boss, while not exactly hard, was just ridiculous with its insane health though. There were a couple of times that I killed some midbosses without even realizing that they were there because they were so weak.


I used to play plenty of Eastern Sun (LoD mod), not Perfect Cell's ancient versions but Tsuru's latest before he disappeared. It could have been a little harder (though the new areas in Act 5 are fun), but the improved item system with modded classes made Diablo 2 fresh again. The core game is, of course, the same but I don't mind since it's a good one, and what's most important for me in Diablo clones is the character variety (after that comes cool drops, varied enemy encounters and cool bosses, but building characters is number 1). It's also nice that in Diablo 2 the map generator is actually pretty good: It's very basic, but occasionally it manages to mix up a few different kinds of monsters while throwing in a few uniques for a cool little fight. Nothing special, but a lot better than Torchlight's.


I really dislike Sacred though. It could have been great, but the skills are annoying, it seems bugged as hell, the translation is occasionally really bad, telling you to do one thing and expecting you to do an other, item system sucks, drop-based skills suck and, well, a lot of stuff. Also, it stays boring for way too long until it gets to the more epic parts.


There's a pretty cool Diablo 1 mod called Lord of Terror for Neverwinter Nights. It's literally Diablo 1 + Hellfire + left out parts redone in NWN. The single best coop adventure you can ever find for that game, just load it with the PRC mod for a fuckton of new classes and have a blast. That is, of course, if you happen to like DnD in computer games to begin with (forget the more free combat system of "real" Diablo clones). Also, it's one of the most polished mods for NWN I'd say. If you've got NWN stuck somewhere, it's really worth a try.

magicsofa said:

don't forget angband

(and it's many variants)

Angband and ADOM will always be my favs.

Castle of the Winds was pretty cool too.

Rohit_N said:

Fate?

That name does seem familiar, that might be it. I'll check on youtube to confirm when I'm out of the lab.

EDIT: Yep, that would be the one.

Dungeon Crawl is a great game, a very exciting roguelike, though I hesitate to really compare it with Diablo.

Also for anyone who's interested check out Din's Curse, another Diablo clone with a more roguelike flavor (even more so if you play Hardcore).

I forget the damn name of the game, it came out right on the heels of diablo 2, but it was a japanese themed diablo 2 clone except you controlled 4 or 5 guys. I actually owned it for a while, an maybe even still have the cd somewhere. The ideas in it didn't seem so bad at first, but I played the game for an hour or two but I couldn't even get past the first area in the game, it was just so damn difficult and the skill system was pretty confusing as well.

Here's a subtopic I forgot completely about : handheld diablo clones!

Some damn fine ones are LotR:TTT and LotR:ROTK for the GBA. They're pretty much the same games, but ROTK has some things a little different and has more content. They work really well as both handheld games and diablo clones, the spell system and controls in general are well done. Items have a lot of (good) pre/suffixes to keep it interesting, and there's some rare uniques too. Reportedly charms too (keep in inventory to gain bonus) but I haven't seen them. The different characters have good balance too from what I've seen. Just that Eowyn is underpowered in TTT and overpowered in ROTK.

I've heard the multiplayer is pretty good, but as I only have one of each game (not to mention the D-Pad on my old GBA is completely fucked) I haven't tried it myself. Highly recommend both games, should be pretty cheap nowadays.

Anyone recommend something similar for DS? Haven't got a PSP, getting a non-crippled version cheap is hard as hell.

Jodwin said:

I used to play plenty of Eastern Sun

I wish someone would make a 1.13b compatible version of SG's RuneMod for d2lod. I really loved that mod but it doesn't work with anything but 1.09.

Apparantly Torchlight is getting an XBLA release

http://www.torchlight2game.com

This game should be available in early 2011, which will have a co-op/multiplayer mode in it among many other new things.

Mr. Chris said:

http://www.torchlight2game.com

This game should be available in early 2011, which will have a co-op/multiplayer mode in it among many other new things.

You know, I heard of torchlight when it came out and didn't look into it one bit, because hey, it's just a silly little diablo clone right? I just watched the torchlight 2 trailer in your link and I'm thinking, man the music sounds familiar. Then I looked into it and lo and behold Matt Uelmen did the music for both games. How did I miss this?

That's because some former Diablo devs are on the Torchlight team.

Speaking of Angband, I once found AngDoom while surfing the net, a Doom level generator based on Angband's generator. There is source code and an example level on the site, a pretty simple layout, not as sophisticated as Oblige or maybe Slige:

http://interreality.org/~tetron/technology/angdoom/

Havent played it myself, but Divine Divinity looks "a little bit" like Diablo:

darkreaver said:

Divine Divinity

Divine Divinity is excellent stuff. I'd highly recommend it. Even it's 3d sequel, Divinity II which just had a re-release on Steam recently is quite good.