Waltorious: Diablo changed enough things that I think it can be seen as having invented a new type of gameplay. It borrowed a randomized dungeon and combat-heavy gameplay from Rogue and its ilk, but the real-time gameplay was a huge change that sets Diablo apart from those games. Roguelikes are generally very strategic affairs that require careful planning, and they're also known for being extremely difficult to finish and for featuring permanent death. By moving to a real-time system, Diablo shifted its focus to fast-paced action and considerably lowered the difficulty, resulting in a game that plays very differently from a roguelike. I wouldn't call Diablo a roguelike although I will admit it was inspired by them.

amccour: Um... Couple of things.

- Diablo was a real-time roguelike planted pretty firmly in more combat-heavy Moria/Angband style. M&M cannot really be considered as a predecessor in anything more than a really minor, by-proxy way.

- The Bard's Tale, Wizardry, and Ultima all actually predate M&M as a series. Wizardry and Ultima both by about five years, at that. All of these had a pretty big effect on how RPGs stared shaping up down the line. You can't really single Might and Magic out here. See point above.

- Diablo also came out two years before M&M6, so you DEFINITELY can't say that 6 had any influence on Diablo.

- The phrase 'Diablo-clone' is sort of meaningless because Diablo did not invent that style of gameplay. Rogue did, in 1983.

amccour: At the risk of being needlessly controversial, that's sort of why I said Diablo was more in the Angband branch. Moria/*band has always tended to be more focused on combat, getting high levels, and... generally the kind of stuff you see in Diablo. It's also reasonable to assume that if you took the permadeath out of Angband, it'd have a similar level of difficulty to Diablo, whereas Hacks tend to derive their difficulty from their more... puzzley? nature.

amccour: Also let me qualify this by saying that I only really played Diablo 2 extensively and have much less experience with D1 and I keep for getting that D1 lacked some of the more interesting features that D2 and its expansion had.