Diablo III !!!

For all you fans of the Diablo series, Blizzard has officially announced Diablo 3 today!

www.blizzard.com

 Its hard to compare an MMORPG to a normal RPG. you will of course get more social interaction within WOW, but there is more story within Diablo. I personally feel the gameplay in Diablo is much faster paced at times, and rarely do need to spend time leveling, which is something I don't find particularly appealing.

The best way to answer your question is to see the gameplay of Diablo via a online video. Check out some Diablo II vids on youtube, or even check out the newly released gameplay vid for Diablo III. I must say, it looks pretty cool. 

Well, for starters, Diablo and Diablo 2 were isometric view games, which meant that your view was above your character, looking down, but at an angle.  There were 3D environments, but your camera direction never changed, so you could often not see into rooms, and sometimes got nasty surprises.  This added a lot to the tension of the series, which had you fighting epic battles against hordes of monsters at times.

Diablo 1 was very primitive by today's standards.  Your character could only move at a walk, and it sometimes took a very long time to go anywhere.  Since multi-player games were joined over Battlenet, but required one player's computer to be the server, duplication and hacking of items and characters was rampant.  It also has a sort-of "worky" feeling to it, since the mouse button speed movement determines your attack speed.

Diablo 2 allowed characters to run, move and attack quickly, added 4 new character classes, and was by-and-large very dynamic compared to D1.  Combat is really dramatic at times.  There was still a great deal of hacking and duping, but Blizzard policed games that were run on their servers to cut down it's effect.  Many players became obsessed with the search for rare and powerful items on this game, which made it even more fun and introduced a whole economy, which many other MMORPG's have copied.  It is still the "gold standard" for adventure games.

Blizzard borrowed and expanded on many of the ideas in the Diablo series for World of Warcraft, and many people erroneously felt that WoW was the only Diablo 3 we would ever get.  Some things that are noticeably different in WoW are the way items stack in inventory, which is like putting a puzzle together in Diablo, and while you often run out of bag space in D2,  WoW has virtually unlimited bag space, for a price.  PvP in Diablo is strictly dueling, and there are no organized battlegrounds or PvP rewards.  WoW's whole concept is based on the PvP, Horde vs. Alliance.

You lose gold and experience when you die in Diablo, and can actually lose your character permanently if you are playing "hardcore" setting.  Monsters do not respawn in Diablo.  If you want to kill the same ones, or a boss that you just killed (say for a certain item drop), you'll need to exit the game and create a new one (like resetting an instance in WoW, except the entire world resets).  There is no auction house in Diablo!  Buying and selling requires chatting with other players!  But it is all trade-based - Gold is virtually worthless, since you are severly limited to how much you can ever have, it drops like water, and there are almost no items to spend gold on from NPC's. There is a limit to 8 players in a world (game, instance) at a time (which is horrible).  Drops are not assigned - you can ninja everything that drops.  If you are worried that someone will steal loot, you'll have to put a password on your instance so the public can't join freely.  Diablo's quests are linear and somewhat like a continuous attunement, whereas WoW's quests can often be completed in any order.

By far the biggest difference is that World of Warcraft is a "WORLD", but Diablo very much feels like a "GAME".  You can "beat" Diablo, but they will always add new challenges to WoW.  Of course, you also have to pay the subscription fee to play WoW (Diablo 2 has always offered free, unlimited play over B-Net after you buy the game).

Despite all the various shortcomings in Diablo 2, it is still an amazing game and thousands of people are still playing it.  The current ladder season just reset last month (June '08) and there are many people fighting to be level 99 (the highest level attainable in Diablo) first.

If Diablo 3 is truely a hybrid of all the best things that Diablo 2 offered, with the inclusion of WoW's PvP, auction house, assigned drops, and large groupings, it could prove to be the best online RPG ever.

WOW is much better.... do you all play real WOW or private servers?

One of the reasons that Diablo 2 was so popular was that it could be played on legacy systems.  WoW doesn't work well on older computers.

Yes, I play "real" WoW...  I'm on the Korgath server.

My 12 year-old son just soloed Kil'jaeden (currently hardest boss in the game; normally takes a 25-man, well-coordinated team to bring down) on a private server, which should give you some insight as to why I don't play on private servers.