Need Help Concerning Visual Basic Project

Forgive my ignorance and bad English!
Me and three of my friend's decided to work on a new RPG in Visual Basic (we are using 2010) and decided in the past week or so to have it feature isometric 2D pseudo 3D graphics (hopefully as similar to Diablo II as possible), unlike our last two projects which were text based and had no animations. None of us has had any experience when it comes to making a 2.5D world in VB with DirectX or openGL and have not the slightest clue what we should use or how we should go about creating the world. Two of us have a book that has DirectX tutorials in it but it seems very user un friendly coding it all out in VB from scratch or even with a program like mappy, it also does not look like what we are hoping for (with mappy). We can code, and our main focus is the depth of the games content, not the graphical presentation, so something like the old fallouts and diablos would work perfectly. So basically I am asking: What is the easiest way to create and implement a world in VB using either raw code/libs or using some sort of external program like mappy with or without things similar to DirectX and openGL, or a combinaton of the group?

Pictures of games with similar worlds to that we wish to create:

http://www.rpgamer.c...ns/fallout2.gif

http://www.cheats.ru...ablo2-02325.jpg

http://www.game-over...oe2/Screen1.JPG

http://users.tkk.fi/...creen_big05.jpg

http://i.d.com.com/i/dl/media/dlimage/18/17/39/181739_large.jpeg


ALL HELP IS WELCOME AND WILL BE MUCH MUCH MUCH APPRECIATED!