Skyrim Anniversary Edition is an insubstantial update that I will play for a substantial number of hours

I can't believe Skyrim has got its hooks in me again. How much of my life can I dedicate to playing this one single-player game? A lot more, it turns out. The Anniversary Edition, which appeared last week, has been an excuse rather than a reason. Unlike the Special Edition, this is just some DLC that includes a bunch of premium Creation Club mods, the vast majority of which were available already. It's not this lackluster DLC that's driven me back into Skyrim's arms—it's Skyrim itself. A decade on, nothing else has come around that can topple its place in my heart.

Morrowind is my favorite Elder Scrolls game. This is because I'm cool and have great taste. I love Morrowind. But I can't remember the last time I played. It feels old, and in turn that makes me feel old, and I'd really rather not. Skyrim, on the other hand, can quite easily be made to look just as handsome as a game newly launched today with just a few mods.

So I'm a bit shallow, I guess. But there's more to it than that. Skyrim is a game bursting with potential. It is a platform for adventures and stories and user-created malarkey. Entirely new games have been built inside it. One of the most lauded was recreated and released as a standalone game only this year, and it's brilliant. Skyrim's main story is fine, but these days I'm happy to avoid it for as long as possible—instead of choosing to start as a vampire, a warlock's thrall, or a hunter just hanging out in the woods. And from there, my own adventure begins, one built in collaboration with Bethesda and an army of creative modders.

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The Division 2 Gear Sets Guide: Their Place in the Endgame

The Division 2 received its first major update, bringing the joys of endgame grinding to all. Dubbed Invasion- Battle for D.C., the update unleashes the Black Tusk faction across the city. As one may expect, the Black Tusk are up to your typical shady mercenary stuff, and they will be featured in a selection of missions each week. Beat the missions (or get lucky killing random Black Tusks), and you’ll be rewarded with a piece of Green/Aqua tier gear. This new gear is intended to be used as a full set of six pieces. Equip all six pieces of a single set, and you’ll get a unique Gear Set ability. You can equip a couple of pieces of a single set for smaller bonuses, but the main draw of the Gear Sets are the full Gear Set abilities.

Roughly speaking, the new Gear Sets are intended to push people towards specialized playstyles and character builds. Seeing as how The Division 2 isn’t a traditional RPG, this is a rather clever way to emulate traditional RPG roles. Of course, you can ignore Gear Sets entirely if you prefer a more hybrid approach to things. Or if you have terrible luck. Unfortunately, as you may soon find out, Gear Sets may feel a bit … sub-optimal at times.

Ongoing Directive

+20% Weapon Handling, +25% Burn and Bleed Damage. Automatic collection of ammo, armor kits, and grenades every 30 seconds. Killing an enemy with a weapon grants special ammo (incendiary, shock, or explosive) to one of your other weapons.

This is basically your combo/crowd control set. Anyone who has played a Challenging mission will tell you that crowd control and status effects are incredibly powerful against the AI. Thus being able to ignite or electrocute enemies by just shooting them is an incredibly desirable trait.

The downside to this is that you have to actually kill an enemy to trigger the special ability. Seeing as how there are up to three (or seven in the upcoming Raid) other people shooting at enemies, it can be hard to proc the ability consistently. Plus the special ammo can end up on your pistol. Also, you’re literally only getting a couple of special bullets when the ability does proc.

True Patriot

+10% damage to armor, +10% protection from Elites, +10% total armor. Applies a status effect on an enemy that rotates after four seconds. A Red effect decreases their damage, a White effect allows you to recover armor when you shoot them, and a Blue effect boosts your cooldown speed. If you shoot at an enemy that has all three effects, deal 25% damage to nearby enemies that have any of the effects.

Technically speaking, this is your support/AOE set. Seeing as how traditional RPG buffs and debuffs don’t exist in The Division 2, this is the next best thing. Plus it’s incredibly simple to use. Any mechanic that rewards players for doing what they should be doing anyways (in this case, shooting people) is always going to be powerful. True Patriot does have the distinction of providing bonus armor damage, which may be enticing enough for people to equip two pieces of the set regardless of their build.

Unfortunately, the defensive properties of the set are underwhelming. 10% bonus armor and reducing enemy damage sounds great, but it means little when enemies can drop you in several shots anyways. Vampiric armor sounds good too, but you’re never going to be able to regenerate your armor faster than enemies can shoot it off. When you’re constantly outnumbered by enemies who have plenty of automatic weapons, you quickly realize that the best kind of armor is taking cover.

Hard Wired

+20% Skill Health, Shock Duration, and Skill Power. The Hive, Turret, and Pulse Sensor can electrocute nearby enemies once every 10 seconds. Killing an enemy with a Skill resets the cooldown of your other Skill. Completely repairing a teammate’s armor resets the cooldown of all Skills. These effects can only proc once every 15 seconds. When a cooldown ends, your Skills gain bonus damage and healing for 15 seconds. 

Seeing as how you can’t be a mage in The Division 2, you can kind of emulate the feeling with the Hard Wired set. In theory, you can have a constant barrage of turrets and healing effects. You lose out on weapon damage, but the enemy gets shocked and set on fire by an endless stream of turrets. The fact that you can acquire the Hard Wired set by completing a project (i.e. mostly RNG free) should make this a very solid set. Sounds great right?

In practice, the Hard Wired project is incredibly time consuming. You need a lot of resources to complete a full set too, so that’s not exactly good news. Once you get over that mountain and actually equip the whole set, you’ll realize that there are more hurdles to overcome. Enemies simply have too much health for Skills to get kills. Enemies can merely shoot your turrets to rid themselves of it. Or they’ll just move. Then you have to wait for minutes without any meaningful offensive capability. Teammates will almost always have personal healing Skills equipped. Unless a teammate ran out of healing items, there is never going to be a scenario where you can heal them from the brink of death.

The Division 2 Gear Sets Final Thoughts

The direction that Massive wanted to go in with the new Gear Sets is quite obvious. They wanted to create powerful gear that opens up new ways to play The Division 2 rather than being must-haves that invalidate all other options. In that regard, the Gear Sets excel. However, Gear Sets fall apart when faced with the reality of The Division 2’s endgame. Because Gear Set pieces do not have Talents or Brand bonuses, they cannot boost your damage output by the same amount as a normal piece of gear. In most other RPGs, this wouldn’t be that much of an issue since roles like tank, healer, etc. are actually viable.

But when the most basic enemies have millions of points of health and can shred players in seconds in four player endgame activites regardless of your armor and abilities, the traditional triangle of RPG roles break down. Build diversity is a luxury at that point. Sure, you can do your own thing by throwing everything into Skill power, no one’s stopping you. But at the end of the day the AI only has to land a couple of shots onto you to win.

Meanwhile, you have to chip away at their health bar with weapons that do around 10-20,000 damage per shot by default. Flat damage buffs, like those provided by normal Gear and Brand Talents, can double or triple outgoing damage. By lacking such buffs, it doesn’t matter how fancy Gear Sets are if enemies don’t die. The fact that two of the sets rely on you killing enemies to activate their signature abilities literally neuters them.

It feels as though Massive balanced the Gear Sets around solo play and or low world tiers. There, enemies die like one would expect. But then they seemingly forgot that endgame activities more or less require a full team. Or that the best way to perform crowd control in the game is to kill enemies. One would wish that this is some sensationalized rambling, but it isn’t. The math doesn’t work out. Gear Sets aren’t more accessible, they don’t have better attribute roll possibilities, and you can’t make them work without changing your entire playstyle.

Massive must rein in enemy stats otherwise players will never be willing to give up raw damage. If players didn’t feel like it was necessary to have so much damage, other builds can have room to breathe. With the way things are now, there is a very distinct concern that the upcoming eight-person Raid will just take current enemy health and damage values and double or quadruple them. The first Division proved that most people found this to be unacceptable. It seems unlikely that people will be more receptive this time around.

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Quantum Break

Quantum Break is an action-adventure science fiction third-person shooter video game developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Microsoft Studios, The game was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows and Xbox One on 5 April 2016. Directed by Sam Lake and Mikael Kasurinen, the game features Jack Joyce, the main protagonist, trying to stop Paul Serene, a close friend and Monarch Solutions CEO, from enforcing the End of Time after a failed time-machine experiment, which gives Jack time manipulation powers.

Quantum Break is mostly a third-person shooter, but includes elements of a platform game in less action-oriented segments, and "junction points" that interact with the game's outcome, much like a game book, with episodes of an integrated live-action television show, featuring the actual actors of the characters, interacting with the player's choices, displaying the outcome of the choices made.

Upon release, the Xbox One version received positive reviews; critics praised the game's dramatic yet thrilling story and campaign, visuals, action sequences, characterization, and time manipulation features, but criticized the functionality of the time powers. The PC version received mixed reviews for its technical deficiencies.

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Bulletstorm

Bulletstorm is a 2011 first-person shooter video game made by Polish developer People Can Fly and the American company Epic Games, and is published by Electronic Arts for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows. The game was released on February 22, 2011 in North America and on February 25, 2011 in Europe.

The game is distinguished by its sense of style and crass humor, rewarding players with points for performing increasingly ludicrous and creative kills. Bulletstorm does not have any competitive multiplayer modes, preferring instead to include cooperative online play as well as score attack modes.

Upon release, the game received positive reviews from critics who praised the game's graphics and action, but garnered controversy. Bulletstorm was a commercial failure for both Epic Games and Electronic Arts.

Set in a futuristic utopia, an elite peacekeeping force thwarts the rumblings of civil war. But deception within the ranks has caused two members of the most feared unit to strike out on their own. Now stranded on an abandoned paradise, Grayson Hunt and Ishi Sato find themselves surrounded by hordes of mutants and flesh eating gangs. They survive on two objectives: get off the planet alive and extract revenge on the man who sent them there.

As Grayson Hunt, players wield an arsenal of over-the-top combat moves and outrageously large guns that feed into Bulletstorm's distinct 'skillshot' system producing unprecedented levels of frantic gameplay and yell-inducing satisfaction.

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Assassin's Creed Rogue

Assassin's Creed Rogue is a 2014 action-adventure video game developed by Ubisoft Sofia and published by Ubisoft. It is the seventh major installment in the Assassin's Creed series, and acts as a sequel to 2013's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and a prequel to 2012's Assassin's Creed III with its final mission being the prologue to 2014's Assassin's Creed Unity. It is the last of the Assassin's Creed games to be released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Ubisoft announcing that the company will no longer release games for them, except for its casual rhythm series Just Dance. The game was first released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in November and December 2014, and released on Microsoft Windows on March 10, 2015.

The plot is set in a fictional history of real world events and follows the centuries-old struggle between the Assassins, who fight for peace with free will, and the Templars, who desire peace through control. The story is set in the mid-18th century during the Seven Years' War, and follows Shay Patrick Cormac, an Assassin-turned-Templar. Gameplay in Rogue is very similar to that of Black Flagwith a mixture of ship-based naval exploration and third-person land-based exploration with some new features.

Upon release, Rogue received mixed-to-positive critical reaction; most critics praised the game's twist as playing a Templar, story, protagonist, additions to the franchise's lore and naval warfare game play, whereas others criticized it for lack of new ideas or game play features and similarity to Black Flag.

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Mortal Kombat X

Mortal Kombat X is a fighting video game developed by NetherRealm Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It is the tenth main installment in the Mortal Kombat video game series and was released on April 14, 2015 forMicrosoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. NetherRealm studio's mobile team developed a version for iOS and Android devices. A version for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 was in development but was eventually cancelled because NetherRealm couldn't get the last-gen versions to the quality expected of a Mortal Kombat game.

Like previous Mortal Kombat games, Mortal Kombat X's gameplay consists of two players, or one player and the CPU, fighting against each other with their selected character, using a large, varied array of character specific attacks. The game contains several modes, such as a story mode, which takes place twenty years after the previous Mortal Kombat game, several 'Tower' modes, which feature dynamically changing challenges, numerous online modes, and the 'Krypt', a mode played in a first-person perspective where players explore the areas unlocking a variety of in-game items.

The console versions of Mortal Kombat X received mostly positive reviews from critics upon release. Most praise was directed at the game's controls, overall gameplay, graphics, story, and characters, with some reviewers calling it the best game in the Mortal Kombatseries. However, the PC version of the game was met with mixed reception, with reviewers blaming numerous technical issues (including frequent crashes and slow netcode) for severely hindering the experience. Some critics also particularly disliked the tutorials, microtransactions, and downloadable content. Selling more than 5 million copies, the game was the fastest-selling game in the franchise and the ninth best-selling game in 2015.

An upgraded version of Mortal Kombat X, entitled Mortal Kombat XL was released on March 1, 2016 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The upgrade to the fighting game includes all downloadable content characters from the two released Kombat Packs, almost all current bonus alternate costumes and improved netcode which features a rollback system.

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5 Hardest Bosses in Dark Souls 3

Dark Souls III is packed with an assortment of difficult bosses to defeat. But of these bosses, there are five that stood out to us personally as the hardest. Below we've compiled footage of the boss fights that we had the most difficult time beating.

5. Abyss Watchers

The Abyss Watchers can be tough when you don't understand the battle's flow. During the beginning, you only have to deal with one, but as the fight progresses, two more will spawn in. This is confusing at first since while one tries to attack you, the other focuses its attention on the other Abyss Watchers. You have an ally in this rogue Abyss Watcher, but don't be deceived, its attacks can still hurt you. We learned that the hard way.

4. Pontiff Sulyvahn

Pontiff Sulyvahn is a difficult boss that forces you to implement tricky roll maneuvers to dodge his wide sweeping attacks. And once you think you've wrapped your head around his attack patterns, his second phase has him summoning a clone of himself, doubling the number of attacks you need to worry about.

3. Lothric, Younger Prince

Lothric and Lorian are a tough duo to defeat, mostly because of how Lorian uses teleportation attacks, which can be difficult to dodge. What's worse is when the brothers start attacking you together in the battle's second phase, forcing you to worry about not only melee attacks but magical spells as well. Also, if you kill Lorian before Lothric, he'll revive his brother with half HP.

2. Soul of Cinder

Soul of Cinder isn't the most difficult boss, however, he has a larger variety of attacks than any other boss in the game, sporting an arsenal of powerful weapons that each have their own unique attack patterns. He also has two life bars worth of health; let that sink in for moment.

1. Nameless King

Nameless King is incredibly difficult because of his speed and attack variety. The dragon he rides isn't hard to take down, but once he gets off of it, you're in for a challenge. His attack animations are deceiving in terms of timing, so you often tend to dodge too early or too late. In addition, a couple of his attacks surge electricity on to the floor, causing even more damage. There's a reason why the bonfire near the Nameless King is so close by; this guy is a handful.

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