Originally posted by Weaver:

"Grind" has become a meaningless term as someone is bound to apply it to anything ever. "I have to press a button more than once ever to play the game? GRIND!!!!!"

It comes down to the amount of repetition of session- or loop-length chunks. In this case, yes, you will have to repeat certain time-consuming, indistinct tasks many times.

I've been on this forum since Feb 10 and I think this is the first time I've actually seen a seeming majority of people admitting the game is very grindy.

Here are some ways that the game is padded out to feel like a "grind":

1. Resource weight is often very heavy, so you have to make multiple trips, which can take over 20 minutes each sometimes, unless you live out of pocket and carry a cart of stuff with you everywhere (which is like playing Spintires/Mudrunner for the whole game)
2. Several features of the game are designed around forcing you to hover over progress bars - for example, filling a smelter with coal and ore will not complete the smelting of all the ore in the chamber
3. If you die (the game is pretty easy IMO so this wasn't a problem for me, but your mileage may vary) you drop all the equipment you ground for as well as quite a few hours of skill progress, and it's sometimes unrecoverable
4. There is fast travel in the game, but you can't take the most valuable resources (ore mainly) through the portals that serve this function
5. Boats in general are unnecessarily slow seeing as how there are no real features to take in on the ocean (and serpents could just be sped up to compensate)
6. Even discovering the location of some bosses will require you to visit their respective biomes anywhere between 1 and 20 or more times before you finally find them

Originally posted by Naewyng:

Let me put it this way: if not for grinding, you could beat all bosses in like 4 hours, now it takes you like 30.

This is basically right, but I doubt even the upper quartile of players are completing the game in 30 hours. 50-60 hours would be more believable to me. In other words, it's not 26 hours of grind, it's more like 46 or 56.

When I played through the game, I got the impression that the team was very proud of what they've finished (as they well should be), but they were more ashamed of the breadth of what they've finished, which they tried to conceal behind a massive amount of unnecessary padding that wasn't fooling me.