I tried playing Diablo I earlier this year, but stopped because I concluded it was much the same as Diablo II, only not as good.

So do I (much more than Diablo 2, to be honest). I don't deny that Diablo is amazing and that it was in some ways groundbreaking. I'm just honestly not sure if so many people would still be referring to all ARPGs in its style as "Diablo clones" if it weren't a Blizzard game.

What you can do is, you know, forget the stupid ideologies and just play the next game in the Diablo series. Because you play the game for, you know, the game itself and not some other things.

Am I the only one who read the topic as "Best Diablo CLOWN"?

We still refer to most FPS games as "Doom clones", and Doom wasn't even impressive when it came out.

Using a map editor, it was so easy to make more impressive maps for multiplayer death matches... Now i'm tempted to pull out my old wad files and get some screen captures of places that only exist on my backups :P

Trying to think up older such games and couldnt quickly come up with anything else except The Summoning and Veil of Darkness which came out couple years before Diablo 1 ...but they are very different game really, despite the similar isometric look and the fact that both have combat + magic.

They are actually proper adventure/rpg's unlike more streamlined and action oriented diablo's after all.

Does someone else remember better? Was Diablo 1 really the first game to do "graphical Nethack with focus on random loot"? It certainly made to genre strictly its own.

I want to say no, but i can't give any examples. I'm not really sure how random the loot is for Diablo 1, either things were all hand crafted and it just had a few tables based on difficulty for getting the item. That seems more likely. Although there are cases where stats of an item can change, i remember my brother finding a thinking cap, then holding onto it until he found the one shrine that added 10 to one of your items and took 10 away from another. Succeeding he had a thinking cap that would at least warn him before breaking (since in Diablo 1, broken equipment just vanished...)

Diablo 2 and a few other games are considerably different, Diablo 2 took base items and then appended keywords which modified it. This was not only for quality level, but if it added stats or abilities, which could take a simple roster of like 30 items and turn that into 700 variations. What was fun was after certain versions (1.07?) there was new additional words which made some crazy combinations. I remember finding a crystal sword that was etheral, but had self repair on it, so although it was an unrepairable weapon, it was equal to being indestructible.

At the moment, the best game in this genre is Path of Exile
It's better than the diablo series and all of the other games mentioned so far in this thread (don't know about grim dawn yet, we'll see about it when it'll be released).

The only downside of this game is that it is always online (it doesn't cost anything because it's free. and it is not a mmo). If you can get over this then you'll have a lot of enjoyment from this game.

Good luck and Have fun.

PS. get it directly from their official site, as playing it thru that digital platform only adds an unnecessary extra layer and with it potential problems gameplay/patching wise.

There have been a lot of mentions of Titan Quest in this thread. I agree with this suggestion. There were murmurs that it would make its way to GOG this year. Anyone know anything further?

I would say as well, that Titan Quest is amongst the best Diablo clones available. Torchlight and Path of Exile were for me little bit boring compared to Diablo, but I would still recommend them to try.

I presume those dreams were put to hold for now, as Nordic Games left GOG due to disagreements with pricing. Let's get back to that if and when Nordic Games comes back.

I was looking forward to buy the game from GOG, even though I have it + the expansion pack from Steam.

One game not mentioned here, and it is for sure not the best one (but OK), is R.A.W. Realms of Ancient War (http://www.raw-thegame.com/)

I only hear it being used to refer to the bland and inferior competitors from Doom's own time which - let's face it - often actually were just crude clones without any notable contributions of their own. Frankly I don't remember people using the term to refer to shooters in true 3D or even to the better and rather original 2.5D ones like Duke Nukem 3D as Doom clones.

And as for "wasn't even impressive when it came out" - speak for yourself. It certainly was to me and especially Doom 2 remains an absolut masterpiece in my eyes twenty years after its original release.