iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

If it were up to me, I'd restrict things even more. If you wanted to go run Dire Maul you'd need to find a group in the city and plan a long, overland adventure with multiple stops to even get there. I think there's too little friction in finding dungeon groups even without Dungeon Finder.

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Yes, and it is good, and there is a ton of drama over it from people who have gotten used to simply chain queueing for dungeons as their main way of playing retail.

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They cannot just turn Forever into another game where you AFK in the hub city and queue for short-form dungeon content. That would invalidate the foundational goals of the project. That's not really an MMO anymore, anyway. It's a PvE team game with a really fancy lobby.

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But if just running the same dungeons over and over is your jam... dang, retail is gonna be your jam. I know you want to be excited about the new, shiny thing. But this is never going to be that kind of game. So I hate to join the chorus of, "Go back to retail," but... in this case they're right.

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The intended play pattern seems to be that you do each dungeon once per character, for the most part, during the levelling journey. This falls apart again at endgame because you have to repeat raids to get geared, so I'm curious how they'll tackle that.

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And I think that's not even necessarily a misguided goal to reach for. If you want to appeal the most strongly to people who are disillusioned with retail, reaching even further back than 1.0 is a way to do that. Most WoW players have never played Everquest.

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In a lot of ways, they're trying to not just go back to 2004, but to imagine a sort of hypothetical, Antediluvian WoW that never committed the original sin of turning dungeons into instances. They're kind of trying to be Everquest, but in a game that started as a major divergence from it.

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The whole idea of an instanced dungeon or raid runs in completely the opposite direction of fostering player encounters in the outdoor world, but they can't simply get rid of them. The compromise they've gone with is making the best of an already not ideal situation.

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The debate over dungeon xp in WoW: Forever seems to miss the main reason they did it, which is to keep you in the outdoor world. That's a huge focus of Forever and WoW being the MMO that kind of popularized instances puts them in a tricky spot there. It's a Pandora's Box they can't close.

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There are articles I've written from 10+ years ago where not only do I not remember playing the game, I don't remember writing the article.

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I have loads of review games I played for between 40 and 80 hours, but after that it's pretty much the same.

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CK3 has the potential to do it, I suppose. EU5 might one day. Victoria 3 has come a long way but it's not in that upper echelon. It's more of a HoI4 or a Stellaris for me.

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I don't want to say never but I don't think anything will ever dethrone EU4 and CK2 in terms of playtime. People change, circumstances change, and I don't think I'll ever put 2000+ into a single game again because there are just too many to play. Maybe if the world ends.

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Most-played shooter is Helldivers 2 at #43 overall, behind Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2, and Red Dead 2.

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Victoria 3 is at #25 behind Civ 6, Stardew Valley, and Skyrim. (Stardew, notably, would be much higher if I counted my additional hundred or more hours on Switch)

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Funny enough, I currently have more hours (not by a lot) in Imperator: Rome than I do in EU5.

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EU5 is currently chilling at #19 behind Cyberpunk, Skylines 1, and KCD2.

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Valheim has made it into my top 10 most-played games on Steam. The list is now: 1. EU4 2. CK2 3. Elden Ring 4. CK3 5. Stellaris 6. HoI4 7. Total Warhammer (Trilogy cumulative - WH3 by itself would be #10) 8. Baldur's Gate 3 9. Valheim 10. Project Zomboid

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It sounds like 4 is mostly based on Dragonwilds, which I've heard at least mildly good things about?

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how did we get runescape 4 before gta 6?

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This will shock you, but the other subreddit this user is active on is Tarkov

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Imagine lecturing someone on hot sauce and insisting that they look at the scoville chart before opening their "ignorant lips." Imagine the kind of life you'd need to have lived to be that person.

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These are real comments with high upvote to downvote ratios

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I can't tell if they're doing a bit, but I was looking up info on hot sauces and I discovered that the r/spicy subreddit is the most aggro community I've ever seen. You can say you think Pepper A is hotter than Pepper B and the top comment is like, "Fuck you, I hope your whole family dies, idiot."

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I bet they're already doing some version of this, but the fact that they were able to do it *better* in 2003 than in any of their future games remains puzzling to me. And if they're not... I would think they have the ability to hire better programmers.

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bsky.app/profile/len....

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Reposted by Len

I swear to Talos if TES6 makes me go through a loading screen to enter a major city, in this 416th Year of the Fourth Era, I'm going to tear the Towers down myself.

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I swear to Talos if TES6 makes me go through a loading screen to enter a major city, in this 416th Year of the Fourth Era, I'm going to tear the Towers down myself.

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Len @len.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Except Oblivion was also just an unambiguous downgrade in so many ways (making cities instanced instead of part of the open world being the biggest one)

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I think I said before that if you'd asked me what I wanted to see in a sequel to Control, "open world, combat-focused action game" wouldn't have been anywhere on that list. And I think they've made a good one of those, sure. But it's hard not to pine for what might have been.

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Len @len.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

And then they got the chance to do a much better (worth giving points to them here, all things considered) version of the thing they were trying to do before. But in so doing they make something that is, to me, simply not as good. The flawed first draft was improved by what they saw as its failings.

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Len @len.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The best way I can sum up my very complicated thoughts on Control Resonant is that it's one of those sequels that forces you to face the fact that the things you loved about the original were kind of peripheral to the creative vision of it. It was accidentally a better game than it was trying to be.

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Yeah it really does seem to me like 40K if you just stripped out anything interesting about 40K

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Matthew Dowd @matthewjdowd.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Gears is definitely in that category of mega-franchises that are like, from the very first moments of the very first trailer I saw for this it did absolutely nothing to make itself intriguing to me in any way.

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Reposted by Len

Latest WSJ poll: "63% want to pause AI development 61% want a billionaire wealth tax 59% want Medicare for All 57% want a $20 minimum wage 58% want to end U.S. military aid to Israel" This is the center of the country politically. it is time all adjust to this political spectrum, esp. media.

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So in possibly the funniest outcome: we didn't get a single drop of rain.

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I guess I wouldn't mind it as much if we had Pepsi or Dr. Pepper. You know, if I could go roleplay in a *different* billion-dollar sandbox dripping with fine detail, but which didn't have GTA's sophomoric sense of humor. Sadly, we do not. So it has to try and be multiple things to multiple people.

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I know there are people who say it wouldn't feel like GTA if it didn't feel performatively transgressive in that very specific, "I drew dicks on my math test" kind of way. I would counter that if that's what makes something feel like GTA to you, I think it could be improved by feeling less like GTA

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see the joke is they took a bunch of brands from the real world and replaced them with no-no naughty boy words

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It's so stupid it almost crosses the line into anti-humor and becomes funny again due to a stack underflow

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We could watch the sunset over this stunning recreation of a real-world boardwalk that must have taken dedicated artists hundreds of hours to perfect, and then go get some Ass Nuggets at the Fart Chicken. Hey, did you catch the latest episode of Doo Doo Stinky Man on HBOrgasm?

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The thing that always bugs me about GTA RP is that no matter how much work they put into making an immersive world, you can never fully escape the Jr. High boys' locker room sense of humor. Here's this amazing old town main street built with so much care. Let me look up real estate listings on FuckR

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Yeah it seems very normal to me having grown up here but it's one of those things it never occurred to me might be regional.

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(I'll be fine. Give to important causes in your community.)

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It's a holiday I like to call Freelancegiving, when I have $100 left in my bank account on the last day of the month and more than $5000 in unpaid invoices.

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I think this is probably my favorite character arc of 2026.

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I appreciate that! I tend to be quite a bit more positive on Paradox DLC than the general community is, but I think this is definitely near the top of the list for CK3.

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Nah, no one pays for DLC reviews anymore.

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