DiabloFans

Hi there guys. So I was wondering, what do you think were the best or the worst Diablo clones you have ever played and why? I don't have experience with too many ARPGs beside Diablo, but I'm curious what you think about some of those you have seen. (Yeah, I'm pretty much making a place for myself where I can complain about Sacred :biggrin: )

Wow, looks like it's a good thing I didn't play Torchlight then. I was thinking about getting it when I was looking for a new ARPG but good thing I went for Titan Quest.

I can mostly agree on TQ :thumbsup: The repetitiveness was somewhat annoying as the enemies were rarely dangerous/interesting until, say, Act 3. Non-random maps made for some interesting scenery, but also for much of the repetitiveness. I wouldn't mind if the dungeons were randomised as they will be in D3. Also, the game was overall a little too easy. True, the expansion compensated for that but the first 2 acts were pretty much a snoozefest unless you were fighthing one of the tougher bosses (Hydra, Manticore etc.)

I liked the character system though. You could combine any masteries and there was always a way to play the character. There were always some skills that fit together between the masteries and often even items that gave you the combination of attributes your specific class could take advantage of. The respec system was also great as it presented a lot of freedom. You could try whatever you wanted and if it didn't work, you just changed it. When I was curious what a certain skill looked like, I just put one point in it to see it and then easily respecced later. No need to make test character just to see all skills which was great. Shared stash was also a good feature, something I sorely missed in D2.

Overall I think Titan Quest is a great game and I play it still today from time to time. A little too easy and some areas were somewhat boring but since I really liked the mythic setting of Greece, Egypt and China, it was overall the best D2 Clone I have played.

The worst for me was easily Sacred but I'd rather not get into that now...we can't have such walls of text so early in the thread :biggrin:

I'll have to agree that Titan Quest was the best clone i've ever played too. It's the only one i actually finished (expansion too). There are some balancing issues, though. Some skill tree combos are far stronger than others and it makes the game easier/harder to finish depending on your choices.
I used Dream Magic and Defensive melee as a combo (focused on the melee abilities) and ended up being almost unkillable even at the hardest encounters with lots of area of effect abilities too.

Worst... i'll say Loki. It's trying but it's not succeeding, really. Perhaps the fact that i played it after TQ ruined it for me.

I'm not so much looking for a game to play as just interested in what you guys find as good/bad Diablo clones. As for Sacred 2, I can't imagine what more they could have screwed up that they haven't already screwed up in Sacred 1. It's a baad game. Worst ARPG I've seen.

I'm still surprised people enjoy Titan Quest. Played it, hated it. It just felt horrible. Maybe its just I don't like the era its set into at all, and the lack of blood also gets to me. Its not the first game I can't enjoy because there's no blood. I'm not kidding.

I bought torchlight a month or two ago, it was 20$ so whats the worst that could happen? Decent game, I think I made it to level 20, I just cant get into anything single player for long periods of time.

Nox is not a Diablo clone. It carries absolutely nothing from Diablo whatsoever. It's a PvP game rather than a PvE game, it's skill based not loot based, it doesn't let you do anything with your level and leveling is both nonexistent in multiplayer and serves little purpose but improvement in single player. It has a drastically different character control system. It's built partially around cooldowns and around locational mana regeneration (mana crystals). There's no skill customization of any sort. It's basically a top-down shooter. I'm sorry guys, but just because a game is top down and real time doesn't mean you can suddenly call it a Diablo clone. It's not one.

As for other games that I could call clones (although I prefer not to) I'd list them like this:
Sacred II > Torchlight > Dungeon Siege > Titan Quest > Loki

SII gets most of its hate for being too different from Diablo, which I find highly ironic.
TQ is too direct of a clone for me to care for it too much.
Loki was just bad.
TL has mods which save its ass.

Uh, I don't think I can hold that anti-Sacred rant at bay much longer :biggrin: In my personal opinion from what I've seen of Sacred II, it's not much of an improvement compared to Sacred 1, at least in the shabbiness of the story and feel of the game. (Can anyone confirm?) In that regard, it's hard for me to imagine how Titan Quest could rate below Sacred. Though the story is not really that strong and prominent in TQ, the setting and mythology of it as well as the way character training is handled make for an above-average game at the very least. I guess my love of ancient mythology clouds my judgement a little but I think it's a little far fetched to call TQ a bad game. It's one of the better ones out there as far as DClones are concerned. Then again, each of us is looking for something different in a game I guess.

Downhill from Sacred 1? Is that even possible? :biggrin: No, seriously, though Sacred 1 looks like a "competent" game, hidden underneath that not so ugly surface is just so many things to hate I don't know which one to begin with. Whether the skills shared between most classes, monologue and easter eggs which constantly break the fantasy feel of the game, pathetic plot, next to non-existant boss fights, hundreds of bugs, some of which can prevent you from finishing the game, miserable/non-existant voice acting, the most idiotic skill training system I have ever seen, the transition between difficulties that somehow fails to take increased XP requirements and level differences into consideration (WTF were they thinking????) or the generally weak, stereotypical, yet at times pointlessly annoying enemies (e.g. the Cave Fish). I could write approximately three pages about each of these features and I still wouldn't have enough!!! Curse you Ascaron!

Edit: I noticed not many have mentioned Baldur's Gate. Has any of you ever finished it? Is it worth it? I heard quite a lot of praise and I played like 10 minutes of it in some demo or something but the moment I saw I have the option to train multiple characters in my group, I went hands-off. I prefer to train one character to death rather than try to optimize multiple chars among themselves, sharing items between them and sacrificing quality for quantity in controling the characters.

Best (including consoles): Champions of Norrath. The game is really fun ,i've finished it 3 times. Of course theres a load of broken stuff (many useless skills, terrible item interface, unbeliavable bad story). But the good points compensate it: nice classes, very good monster variety, good level design, cool graphics, fun quests...
6/10

Best (computer only): Titan Quest. It has a very good class system, the non-random scenarius allows the building of good level design and i loved the antiquity settings. But 80% of the monsters are semi equal (even through the 20% different ones are very cool) and the boss fights are utterly lame. Also the lore and dialogs are impossible to tolerate. And the itemisation is not diablo-level.
5/10

Worst: Fate. Rofl thats not even a game. Organizing the desktop icons have better gameplay. The game is basically "click on the monsters and watch then die". It has no story, no item system, no class system, no level design, no boss fights. The game has nothing.
1/10 (one point because i like slimes haha)


Imo this is bad genre overall. There are one game 9/10 game (Diablo 1) and one 8/10 game(Diablo 2). A couple of avarage grade games and a massive amount of crap.

After reading this thread I downloaded Titan Quest last night lol. I got about 1 hour in and its okay... it runs like shit on my laptop though.... but then again touchpads in general suck.

I also at the same time picked up Neverwinter Nights 2. You can argue and say this isn't an action RPG. But i'm pretty sure that these 2 games should be able to tide me over until D3 comes out (i'm hoping for a beta key but i'm realistic... i didn't get a starcraft beta... i won't get a diablo 3...)

Quote from Aever1

At the bottom of the pile I'd probably put Sacred, because of the sorry state in which it was released. It is not a bad game really, but I find it impossible to tolerate a game with huge bugs in the very main quest line ("hey guys, we know there is a bug in the quest line, here, run this console command to get the quest item you need to move forward").

Man, I almost forgot about the whole water bottle shebang :biggrin: There were so many things that irritated me about the game that I honestly forgot about that. Now when a game has a bug that prevents you from finishing it (or rather even getting past a half of it) and you don't even remember it because of other problems the game had...that's just baad.

Weird, never had the issues you guys are describing. Wait, you didn't describe any, you're just complaining about a bug and then about gameplay without mentioning the gameplay you're complaining about.

I had a crash bug with SII, that's pretty much it. I did get it after it was patched for a considerable time, though.

surprisindly enough i didn't have that bug while playing Sacred 1. I also kinda liked Sacred 2 but i stopped playing for some reason. What annoyed me most is that i didn't have the chance to use more than 4 spells unless i combined them in combos.