It's still alpha. Of course it's grindy. There's no NPC quests yet or anything else to gain XP except killing wildlife.
Assumign the quests aren't just grind quests... which there is nothing to say they won't be.
While many of the more fanatical of the fans suggest this game is only 5% done, my estimates is that the game is a lot closer to completion in terms of outright content then it would appear on the surface. It is likely going to go to Beta within a year and full release shortly after that.
"I haven't gotten a WoW vibe at all"
It is still far more similar to WoW then it is to Minecraft. What with the grinding out percentiles of a percentiles in equipment and endless mindless grinding and a skill bar that you watch like a hawk to cool down so you can use it like a piano.
The crafting recipes you buy in stores and the raid bosses.
Which is kind of the thing. It is closer to WoW then Legend of Zelda and many of the other games you mentioned.
more like zelda/monster hunter/dark souls/arcade mashup thrown in random cubed endless adventure
Yeah because in Monster Hunter you fight big monsters! and in Dark Souls you fight monsters... and in Legend of Zelda you fight monsters... and in Arcades you fight monsters.
I look at the game in a purely mechanical sense in how the game is played. While aesthetically it might have a lot more similarities to other games, as well as certain themes, yet those are of low importance of validity in my eyes.
However there is no level cap or skill cap at all, so you can go on forever if you like
Let me correct this for some people. There is no level limit as in you can keep leveling up forever if you desired and you can always put a skill point into a skill.
However the game is designed with two things in mind
1) Each level costs more and more exp
and
2) Each skill point is worth less and less
Eventually you will hit the game's soft limit where it either takes too long to gain anymore exp and/or the increase in any skill point is too little. As well the items cap out very early.
This is a lot like Boarderland's Badass ranks. Eventually it will take entire runs through a single character doing everything just to get a single token, yet each token is worth less and less. Making the soft cap somewhere around 20% (I forgot exactly what it was).
In other words it isn't unlimited progression.
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Yes there is no games that can hype me enough to pierce my wall of impenetrable negativity.
As the game is right now it is a 5/10. Which I don't have to justify, I just have to wait a single month.
Then it will be a 6/10 a few months after that because of a few features. Now whether or not it can boost itself to a 7/10 is another question.
I'll leave why I purchased this a mystery given that review.