Grim Dawn Preview

Forbes is offering a brief look at Crate Entertainment's action-RPG Grim Dawn, which has been the subject of a successful Kickstarter fundraising campaign, and comes away pretty impressed, though I'm under the impression that they couldn't go hands-on with the title. Here's a snippet:
I decided it was going to be amazing when I read that (the levels in Grim Dawn are actually stitched together to form a giant, continuous playable world, reflective of natural geography) on its Kickstarter page.

First, the concept of (levels) in an open-world game is a very good thing. Second of all, the concept of stitching them together into a continuous playable world reminds me a lot of Dark Souls.

From what I've seen so far, Grim Dawn takes all the good things from traditional top-down action-RPGs like Diablo and combines them with open-world gameplay, in-depth role-playing, crafting, and looting elements, and then takes some of the level-design and gameplay lessons from Dark Souls to create a truly ambitious, exciting looking game.

Set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, the developers say they will avoid the gray wastelands of similar titles, opting instead for varied environments ranging from typically gritty graveyards to lovely wheatfields and more.