deathknight1728: Diablo clones have the following-
A list of classes to choose from
Random items with random prefix and suffix stats/skills
Little to no problem solving (Oh Yeah!)
Multiple difficulties that progressively get tougher
Stevedog13: Thanks for the response, however I think I may not have made my question clear. I know what a Diablo-clone is, in terms of gameplay and mechanics. I'm just not sure how to ID them from the game cards. For example, if Diablo were here on GOG it would be found under the genres Action and Role-Playing. This would make sense as games like Torchlight, Nox and Van Helsing are also Action/Role-Playing. However GOG considers games like The Witcher 1+2, Omikron, VTM: Redemption, the Mount & Blade series and most of the D&D Gold Box titles to all fall under the Action/Role-Playing genres as well. Now obviously these are not all Diablo-clones, in fact many of them have no similarity to Diablo whatsoever.
Unfortunately none of these titles are described in any way as Diablo-clones or Diablo-likes. The description on Darkstone, which has been mentioned in this thread as a Diablo-clone, does list one of it's features as "
four difficulty levels that use the well-known Diablo-style formula of each level being the possibility of further progression for you character". I literally have no idea what that means so I wouldn't otherwise know if this were a Diablo-clone or not.
I guess this is more a question to the larger gaming media as a whole and not so much to you or my fellow GOGgers, but if Roguelike can be it's own genre then why can't we have a Diablolike catagory as well? That would make things easier.
Screenshots and videos will give you a major clue. All "
Diablo clones" have another thing in common: a third person isometric perspective (actually "pseudo-isometric", "near-isometric", or "videogame-isometric" would be more correct, but saying "isometric" is quicker) that's not quite top-down, but obviously not side view, either. Many of these games have fixed camera angles, though most of the more modern ones allow zooming; however, I'm sure there are some that allow the camera to not only zoom and rotate freely, but even change pitch. (Frankly, I find it bizarre that you can't rotate the camera in completely 3D games like
Torchlight and
Din's Curse. Maybe this is the "
Diablo clones' " answer to the traditional Rogue-like insistence that if the "graphics" aren't pure ASCII, it's not a Rogue-like. Because
clearly that's the defining feature of the game.)
That's not to say that all ARPGs that use the
Diablos' visual perspective are "
Diablo clones", though. [i]Inquisitor, for example, has been mentioned, but from what I've heard from those who've played it extensively, it wouldn't qualify as a "
Diablo-like", since it has a heavy focus on investigation and story. Likewise, from what little I've played of it to date,
Divine Divinity is about as close to a "real" RPG as it is to the "hack 'n' loot" games we've talked about here, yet it is very similar, in visuals and in general interface, to
Diablo. Still, worth taking into consideration.
Personally, I prefer terms like "hack 'n' loot" to
Diablo clone, as the former is a little more inclusive, while the latter is only truly useful for describing straight-up imitations.