"Diablo-esque" game that runs on linux (preferably free)
I think the closest games to Diablo are Torchlight 1 (Humble Bundle Store) and its successor Torchlight 2 (Humble Bundle Store or on GoG). In fact, part of the developers of these games, were inside the Diablo development team.
If you have a system with enough muscle (mine is a Core2Quad 2.7 GHz, 4 GB RAM when I played the game regularly ), I've found that the free1 game Path of Exile runs reasonably well (instructions are available for installing with Wine or PlayOnLinux).
Compared to Diablo, it's like moving up from Tic-Tac-Toe to four-player Pente -- it's a MMO isometric, with seven character classes, ten acts, huge numbers of item drops, maps, and it's "live" -- that is, new material is still being added on a regular basis, as one might expect for an MMO.
1 “free” as in “free beer”. It’s not open source software. The game development is (supposedly well) funded through purchasable player and weapon skins, a sales strategy dubbed “pay-to-shine”.
Just to help you find stuff yourself, I'd categorise Diablo as an isometric action RPG.
There are probably a few options here but in the non-free camp:
- Freeablo is an engine reimplementation of Diablo 1
- Wine can be used to play the Windows clients. For example, Diablo 3 does work quite well (with caveats).
- Victor Vran is very similar in gameplay and tone to Diablo. Again, non-free. (I honestly hadn't seen the comment on the head post! Thought this independently when I saw the recommendation for Torchlight)