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Comment by have_faith | Hacker News Reader

It's such a shame there's no modern spiritual successor to Diablo / Diablo 2. The aesthetic and gameplay was great.

David Brevik, the creator of diablo is currently working on an indy game pretty much by himself called It Lurks Below. It's kind of like if terraria merged with diablo. You have to survive by growing crops and you get items by venturing lower and lower into the world using your pickaxe. It's still in pre-release on steam, but even at this stage I played it for quite a number of hours and found that it had a surprising amount of depth.

It's certainly not on the same level as diablo, but it is worth checking out if you are into those kind of games.

I really wish Blizzard would not have shut down Blizzard North and would have let Brevik continue working on his vision for diablo 3. That's life I guess though.

I was never a huge Diablo fan, but I could always appreciate the things people liked about it. I gained new respect for it from watching Brevik's GDC postmortem [0] from a couple of years ago.

I love the idea that it was originally a dungeon crawl inspired by X-COM and would love to play one of the early builds before they changed to real-time combat.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

That sounds really cool! Terraria is an excellent game and I kind of liked that its monsters were in the same vein (i.e. scary, evil. Especially liked when I dug through the ground to find the underworld... ha). The loot system is insane.

Its a little hard to replicate the gore and fear of the original game though; and the fighting does seem a lot more involved in D2 than in Terraria.

I've heard about this game but what exactly is it that makes people say it's a mix of Terraria and Diablo, besides the creator? It looks almost identical to Terraria to me, which also has you building on the surface and descending deeper and deeper into the world.

Isometric ARPGs are niche now, but there's still games being made. Off the top of my head:

- Titan Quest (just got an update and a new expansion!)

- Grim Dawn

- The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

- Victor Vran

- Path of Exile

- Warhammer 40000 Inquisitor - Martyr

- Torchlight 1 & 2 (I wish Runic games hadn't imploded...)

It is unfortunate that most of these don't have the same level of randomness than Diablo has, but they're pretty good games in their own right.

I played path of exile years ago and it was great.

Now it's even better, and even more addicting...

Me too! It was fantastic. Ironically, I stopped playing a few weeks before it came out of closed beta (just didn’t have time and then never went back to it... now its changed so much I feel a bit overwhelmed by the thoughts of going back to it)

I actually heard about PoE on HN too, back in 2012 :)

The latest update has a sort of dungeon building mechanic and its so so good. Highly recommend trying it out again. The art & graphics have improved a lot since closed beta too (I was there ... just never left)

Thanks for the comment! I may give it another look.

(although a big reason behind why I haven’t is that I mainly play on consoles now, will have to see how well it runs on my shitty machine!)

Way too complicated compared to Diablo.

Sadly the complication is "skin deep". Thanks to some odd choices when designing defenses, your best bet for survival is piling on as much life boosters as you can muster.

After that it is all about picking up as much damage boosts as you can (again there is some weirdness there because one type of boost is stronger than another kind, and the only way to tell the two apart is by the wording) for how you want to kill stuff.

Yea it's too bad that the actual complication is more an obfuscation of game mechanics. That and the game is quite grindy compared to Diablo2 even if you know what you're doing. A single player version with support for mods could've been very nice. Sadly it's online only.

It's online, but multiplayer/co-op is optional.

Exactly, so unfortunately no potential for modding.

The latest update (Incursion = large dungeon building) is super good and worth coming back for

> - Torchlight 1 & 2 (I wish Runic games hadn't imploded...)

Runic is dead now? Oh sad. I loved the Torchlight series :( Torchlight 2 is the Diablo 3 the world wanted.

I actually preferred the first one over the second.

/ducks

Yeah, they sold to Perfect World Entertainment which then closed the studio so they could focus on thrice-damned "games-as-a-service" (http://archive.is/yIC0z).

Grim Dawn is incredible. Second expansion comes out this Fall!

Victor Vran was great, def worth picking up. Works well with a controller too.

Blade : Edge of Darknes (aka Severance: Blade of Darkness ), could count as some kind successor on 3d and the grand father of Dark Souls.

That game had _the best_ weapon play ever. I truly feel it never got the recognition it deserved. Unfortunately it came out in close proximity to Rune, which had a much more arcadey feel, and, I think, may have stolen much of the audience.

If you're interested have a look at FromSoftware's actual Dark Souls (spiritual) predecessors. In particular King's Field. The setting is very similar; although the gameplay is very primitive, it has the same feeling of exploration and similar difficulty. Also it's 1st person (quite innovative for the time).

Back in 2009 I put several hundred hours into the diablo 2 mod called Median, which turned into Median XL. Should you ever want a successor to Diablo 2 this was it. The craft that went into this by its original author BrotherLaz was exceptional, who was outstanding at creating content within the games restrictive modding mechanisms. The balance of all the content was just so finely tuned; BrotherLaz really had an instinct for this stuff and the effort really showed. Whenever we complained about anything on the forums BrotherLaz wouldn't just give in to the whining; instead disappearing for a few days and coming back with a complete solution that nobody saw coming, whether that was an overhaul of a whole skill tree or something way out from left field, as if there was a whole room of experienced game designers behind workshopping every idea. But there wasn't. And every time we would all love the mod even more.

BrotherLaz went on to operate under the pseudonym Enai Siaion on Skyrim mods (including the very popular Apolocypse spellmod) but I've no idea what he/she has worked on since then. A content creater to watch out for.

Just browsed their website...this looks massive. Might be tempted to go back to D2 just to try this. Looks like it's still in development all these years later.

From what I can tell of the latest release trailers it looks to me like the bulk of Laz's work is still in there despite it having 10 years more dev since I played it, a majority being after Laz handed it over to the community, so I would be cautiously optimistic that it's still the transformative mod it once was!

I'm also tempted to reinstall it!

It's not modern, but I founded/work on a revival of the 3D ARPG MMO created by the studio founded by the creators of Diablo/Diablo 2 (Flagship Studios), Hellgate: London (https://london2038.com). In almost every sense Hellgate: London was intended to be the direct successor of Diablo 2, created by the same people, but on an even more ambitious scope. Sadly the game failed to stay profitable and the servers shut down in 2008. A few of the team members from Flagship Studios went on to found Runic and create Torchlight, another spiritual successor.

Reading this reverse engineering, I can see a lot of similarities between Diablo and the Hellgate systems.

While I really liked the idea of Hellgate: London the subscription model they attempted to push was a huge turn-off. It was more like Diablo/Diablo 2 than it was an MMO, very few people playing together in an instance. This means that it had comparable costs of Diablo 2 with battle.net.

The subscription model looked more like a cheap way to squeeze extra money out of players. Charging extra for additional content (like Lord of Destruction for Diablo 2) would make a lot more sense.

Path of Exile is a spiritual successor to Diablo / Diablo 2. https://www.pathofexile.com/game

PoE...great game, spent 200+ hours on it, but I wouldn't be able to tell you which class I was or which was the final boss. It's just not as memorable as Diablo. I can remember clearly my Diablo 2 characters and even the items I had. Or it could be just me getting old...

Did you play since 3.2? They finally "finished" the main game and there are 10 acts now (in 2 parts) and I'd say that since the final boss is the only one that gets a cinematic cutscene .... bit more memorable these days!

The lore for PoE is actually super deep and fascinating (as we as dark, even Diablo would be like "damn dude, that's hardcore" about some of the stuff that goes down), but it's much more in the background and you have to pay close attention to pick it up. The game takes on a different feel though when you dig into the lore and start to understand and recognize the stuff that you come across. I kinda like this design actually, makes it feel more satisfying and mysterious, but it is also convenient because you can ignore it if you're not interested (PoE greatly emphasizes many repeated playthroughs for people unfamiliar).

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/History_of_Wraeclast has some of the background story.

edit: Didn't read the the "spiritual" part of the "spiritual successor". Though you could argue diablo 3 is, I would not be so bold. You should still try diablo 3 if you haven't.

Diablo 3 is actually pretty good now if you want a successor. If you just want something similar to diablo 2 I suggest torchlight or titan quest.

Diablo 1 is tricky because it was so much closer to rogue likes (probably because originally it was one). I would love to see a game that has a more subdued and methodical pacing but with less town hacks :)

>Diablo 3 is actually pretty good now if you want a successor.

Diablo 3 is in no way a spiritual successor to D1 and 2. Yes, it's much better than it was at release, but it is still very much a streamlined, mass market friendly ARPG. Modern Diablo gameplay consists of leveling (1-2 hours), finishing your season journey (another 2-3 hours, maybe), getting your free super-powerful six piece handed to you, and then grinding paragon levels and filling in a couple of gear spots here and there.

It in no significant way resembles the Diablo of old. If you want a true sequel try PoE or Grim Dawn.

I guess I didn't read spiritual in the successor part though I am not sure what that means. I can see how they games are different enough that saying diablo 3 is a spirital successor is probably not useful. I don't think arguing about what it means would be fruitful, so I concede the point.

> Yes, it's much better than it was at release, but it is still very much a streamlined, mass market friendly ARPG.

How is this bad? It seems like you are implying it is. Also how is diablo 3 mass-market and diablo 2 not?

> Modern Diablo gameplay consists of leveling (1-2 hours), finishing your season journey (another 2-3 hours, maybe), getting your free super-powerful six piece handed to you, and then grinding paragon levels and filling in a couple of gear spots here and there.

Agree, that is how I play it. This is slightly hyperbolic but not that far off. It took me about 2 days of playing to get to T13 (the hardest difficulty). This could be made more interesting but I kind of enjoy tweaking my build and min-maxing :)

> It in no significant way resembles the Diablo of old. If you want a true sequel try PoE or Grim Dawn.

Which diablo? Diablo 3 is a true sequel, you just don't like it, which is fine.

To be fair, OP was looking for a modern spiritual successor (not sequel) of which D3 is not.

Agreed, which is my bad. Though spiritual successor is kind of squishy idea it's probably obvious they were not considering diablo 3 as being in the running.

> How is this bad? It seems like you are implying it is. Also how is diablo 3 mass-market and diablo 2 not?

It's not, it's just a different approach than what most ARPGs (including D1 & 2) take. ARPGs tend to be information heavy, customization heavy, and hard to get into as a result. That's not the way blizz went, which is fine, but it turns off the hardcore ARPG fans.

>Agree, that is how I play it. This is slightly hyperbolic but not that far off. It took me about 2 days of playing to get to T13 (the hardest difficulty). This could be made more interesting but I kind of enjoy tweaking my build and min-maxing :)

Which is perfectly fine :)

Sure, I was simplifying things a bit, but the fact that you (or anyone else) can get to ROFLSTOMP levels of power in a couple of days is a departure from most ARPGs. Min-maxing in D3 is essentially "Is the tooltip green?" You have a handful of stats you care about, defined by your 6 piece (which you were handed) the vast majority of the time, and all you're doing is making incremental improvements to those few stats as you grind rifts. Not much depth there. Paragon levels are too strong and should just go away IMO.

>Which diablo? Diablo 3 is a true sequel, you just don't like it, which is fine.

We're talking about a "spiritual successor" here. In other words, a game that builds upon the core gameplay concepts introduced by Diablo. Diablo 3 is not that. It does not resemble D1 or 2 in tone, setting, or gameplay (aside from running around and killing stuff obviously.)

I have yet to find a single person who would argue that D3 is an evolution of the original design as opposed to a complete re-imagining of the genre. Hell, it's not even a loot focused grind any longer.

I couldnt get into D3 because there is too much focus on the items, I think the items should compliment the character, not the reverse

Then you simply don't like ARPGs, period. ARPGs are loot games. The entire point of these games is literally grinding for loot. Loot makes you strong, not levels. You want a different genre, which is fine, but change the loot part of an ARPG and you're left with an RPG.

...what, exactly, do you see in PoE that resembles Diablo 1? I can't think of much beyond the camera view angle.

Primarily tone, aesthetic, and depth. Of course they didn't copy the systems 1:1, but it _feels_ more like diablo than diablo 3 ever did. I realize that I'm using vague terminology, but you'd be hard pressed to find fans that don't agree.

We're talking about a "spiritual successor" here, not "add up how many aspects of PoE are identical to D2." I know you said D1, but few people make or care about that comparison. D2 is the most popular and the latest entry in the series that people who were turned off by D3 care about.

I'd describe PoE as more of a spiritual successor to Diablo 2. There's a lot of weird aspects of D1 which were removed in D2 and later games -- for instance, spellbooks, elixirs, and randomly generated quests.

As a concrete example: PoE's schema for items (normal/magic/rare/unique, maximum of 3 prefixes and 3 suffixes) is almost a carbon copy of Diablo 2's item system.

To be fair, the only commonality between Diablo and Diablo 2 was in:

1. The Atmosphere. (Except for most of Act 1, and Acts 2 and 5.)

2. The Name.

Diablo was a slow, tile-based click-and-slash dungeon crawler. Diablo 2 was... Something else entirely. Blast/teleport[1] through everything at top speed to farm bosses. Non-linear power curves. Incredibly high emphasis on gear[2]. Far less tactical, and far more forgiving to mistakes.

In that sense, the gap between Diablo and Diablo 2 was probably bigger then the gap between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. The core gameplay loop of Diablo 3 is the same as Diablo 2 - it's just that getting your first set of end-game gear is a bit faster, and there's less emphasis on farming bosses. And the ham-fisted story is in your face.

[1][2] Enigma... And the rest of the ladder-only rune-words are a game-breaking abomination. They were supposed to be balanced by the rarity of high-end runes, but in practice, those runes are plentiful, because of duping and botting.

Sure. When I (and others) think "spiritual successor to Diablo" we're almost certainly thinking of D2, not so much D1.

I've noticed this in the fandom too, how come? Was D2 just much more popular than D1?

Yes. D1 was groundbreaking, but D2 was/is the most played by far (and was also groundbreaking, maybe moreso.) It's still played by many today, D1 not so much.

Enigma wasn't an abomination by itself, since the runes were incredibly hard to drop. It was the fact that they were easily accessible through trading from people exploiting dupe bugs and botting. These issues aren't fixed to this day in D2.

You mean we have equivalents of the following:

TPPK ggnore Trust drop tests for joining clans? Griefing with no admins with slow? Buying a zephy on eBay for 600$ Team VIP custom imported items? Going legit on east and wtf pwning kids in bugged gear because you understand mechanics? Having a perfect defense Shako Dropping a full inventory on someone that died in cow level to pop them Having a second account to bot on because everyone and I mean everyone is botting A game made playable and enjoyable by map hack MF stacking and having zero resistance as a result and dying cuz lag DCing while muling Rust storm and logging on to find that everything on your zon was duped and she is naked.

I can go on, Diablo 2 was much more than most remember it, and much more than it is today.

Diablo 3 is a fun game for laid back grinder with some fun mechanics. You feel powerful but dear god it’s not diablo 2, it never will be and shouldn’t be compared.

There was (hopefully still is) a thriving community of D2 single player enthusiasts that had a very welcoming crowd and managed to avoid the craziness of battle.net[1] at the Single Player Forum of diabloii.net[2]. To this day, it's maybe my ideal of the internet done right (though its in-page ads seem a little more obnoxious now than I remember).

It had fairly strict rules w.r.t. documenting what mods you play with[3] but most folks used certain baseline tools such as infinite stashes[4] that greatly helped with playability.

The pace in single player is significantly slower without overpowered items, but also significantly more tactical. And there were often seemingly absurd self-imposed constraints imposed to make gameplay harder on yourself (no uniques, etc.). Here's one player who made it through hardcore in all difficulties (Guardian) doing full clears with a naked Amazon[5].

While not as extreme, and maybe it'd be insignificant on battle.net, I had some of my most satisfying D2 moments there[6].

[1] Good luck getting enigma and other overpowered runewords in single player.

[2] https://www.diabloii.net/forums/forums/single-player-forum.3...

[3] There was a vibrant trading scene but this helped discourage cross-contamination between, say, a vanilla player's items and those of a player who enabled ladder-only runewords.

[4] GoMule and ATMA may have been my first exposure to Java programs.

[5] https://www.diabloii.net/forums/threads/how-far-can-superdav...

[6] https://www.diabloii.net/forums/threads/finally-my-first-gua...

There were similar, but in my experience, more vibrant, communities for Diablo I (DSF, LurkerLounge, RBD). Variants (Self-imposed restrictions) were far more prominent in Diablo I [1]. Pretty much everyone in the DSF maintained at least one or two variant characters, even if it was just a naked mage or a SNOB.

Diablo II, especially after LOD, just didn't feel as fun with most self-imposed restrictions. Too much power creep came from gear and patches, enemy health and damage scaled too much, and due to immunities [2], too many strategies for dealing with problematic enemies involved running past or parking them. In Diablo I, with its tile-based movement system, this had to be done incredibly carefully. In Diablo II... It's much more difficult to be boxed in, and if things don't work out well, just save and exit, and reset the level.

[1] https://www.realmsbeyond.net/diablo/variants.html

[2] Immunities worked much better in Diablo I. Every character had a reasonable answer to immune enemies. In Diablo II, with its locked skill trees, there was much less headspace for dealing with them - unless you use overpowered gear!

Agreed. This game gets a lot of hate left over from its rubbish launch state, but the game as it exists now is easily my favorite game in the genre since the original. They've very much done what Blizzard has always done best: take a great game and make it accessible but without losing the depth. It's actually the first game that really got me to even give a shit about the high-level buildcrafting. Best 20€ I've spent on a game in a long time.

You need to look harder. Path of Exile and Grim Dawn are absolutely spiritual successors to Diablo.

Grim Dawn is pretty darn close -- definitely check it out. Torchlight and Torchlight 2, while a bit lighter in atmosphere, have music composed by Matt Uelmen (Diablo & Diablo 2 composer)! Very nice stuff indeed.

You don't feel that Path of Exile is a spiritual successor?

Disclaimer, I'm a big fan of PoE. I've always heard it described as the true sequel to Diablo II. Plus it's free to play, and not pay to win. In my opinion those are huge bonuses to an already great game.

Torchlight? Although it is a few years old.

...and Torchlight 2.

I've played both but they lack the replay value of Diablo II (with/without expansion). There are a number of improvements to mechanical things when compared to the Diablo series but I felt that the Torchlight games were quite repetitive after a while. Though diablo 2 had a lot of grinding, I did not feel that way about it at the time. I've spent countless hours in Diablo 2 and Diablo 2: LOD but I could only play both Torchlight games put together for ~ 2 weeks or so.

Not quite the same, but the D&D bases games scratch the same itch for me. Baldurs Gate (2 is easier to get into), Neverwinter Night (prefer the first), and recently Pillers of Eternity was a fantastic throw back.

Even better: you can get most of those DRM-Free on Gog!

Path of Exile?

Path of Exile (free to play) is surprisingly good and feels more "Diablo" than Diablo 3 did. Highly recommended if you're itching for Diablo 2-style gameplay.

I played and loved both Diablo 1, 2 and 3, SP only. At 37, I still play D3 sometimes (SP).

Can somebody explain why D3 is not the "spiritual successor"?

It dropped a lot of the themes, pacing and mechanics of Diablo 1 and 2.

The classic aesthetic of Diablo is a slow-medium paced dungeon crawler rouge like with brooding death metally horror atmosphere and deep lore.

Diablo 3 is fast paced anime esque disney lore slot machine

Bloodborne on the PS4 is pretty much exactly what I imagined Diablo III could have been. It’s so close but it’s also quite different.

Path of Exile

This game is incredibly good. It's everything Diablo 3 should have been.

Yep. Just started playing it. It's like Diablo 2 with materia from FF7. Perfection.

This is exactly how I describe it to people. I've been playing since closed beta and put more than 1000 hours into it, still can't beat all the end game content (in a good way)

Inability to zoom out more kills it for me. Feels too much like diablo 2 at 800x600

One of biggest downside of that game for me.

Fortunatelly at least few years ago there was publicly available zoom hack that obviously will get your account banned, but it's not something I would care about in F2P game like ever.

If you adjust the aspect radio by playing in windowed mode and keeping it full-width while lowering the height, you gain significantly more visibility. I imagine playing on an ultrawide display would have a similar effect.

Granted, it wasn't built to support a zoomed out camera so some controls behave poorly at the outer edges of visibility.

Grim Dawn

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