Wow ... how come I didn't think of this ...

Hmmm, that's a pity. I've been looking for a proper heir apparent for that game, with gritty, grimy, color de-saturated gothic dungeon-crawling mood-pieces and cartoony polygons kept to a minimum, or absent entirely.

I looked at Torchlight 2 screenshots on orcishgamer's suggestion and it looked really bad. It made Darkstone's graphics look sinister.

Maybe there isn't one. I know Nox is on here and I haven't tried it yet (it passed me by on original release), but... meh.

How did you get to that conclusion?

The original concept developed by Condor was a dark game (Diablo I) that was supposed to be a turn based RPG. Later when they were bought by Blizzard it was converted to a hack n slash concept we know today.

Torchlight has a cartoony vibe going on influenced by Fate and it's lead designer.
I was actually concerned about D3 after they closed North, but Leonard Boyarsky turned out the right man for the job.

Well, judging by a video I've seen, I think it was one related to Blizzard's anniversary last year, the creatures in the game would have been made out of {I don't know the English word for it} material. A kind of material little children use to make some objects from in primary school. Turn based, yes, but the several seconds of its gameplay I've seen don't really honor the word 'Diablo', more like 'here kids is a tiny evil creature that you need to click this button to save the princess from'.

Of course, it could have turned out to be a different thing, maybe even darker than the released game, but we'll never know.

Interesting, will try to find that video.

The word you are looking for I think is "clay" and I love claymation effects in old movies, wonder if it was anything like that?

YES. That's one thing I wanted to made fun of as well but got ninja'd ;P.
Timecoded for your convenience...

You've linked to the same video and didn't even bother to add a timecode ;P.

I'm pumped. I wonder if many people will actually buy things for cash or if it'll just be a mass amount of people trying to sell stuff like I expect. It would make sense for blizzard to promote it more given the possible revenue from their cut of it, could end up being their version of the TF2 hat money printing machine (if you don't already count the cosmetic WoW stuff.)

Two of the lead devs for Diablo helped found Runic. TL2 may not look "moody" like Diablo but if you believe in "heritage" over IP ownership there's an argument to be had that TL2 is more like Diablo 3 would have been had the whole Blizzard North massive exodus never occured. No one working on D3 ever worked on Diablo and I'm not positive but I don't even think anyone who had a real hand in D2 worked on D3.

Now whether you happen to "like" D3 more than TL2 is nearly irrelevant to the above. You mentioned caring about the original members of the Diablo team working on D3 being what excited you about it. Well, here's some of the original devs working on a fantasy themed ARPG.