Ever since the release of Void 3.0 in Destiny 2, invisibility has become a major part of any Hunter’s capabilities. Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk, the new Hunter Exotic chest armor released with Season of Plunder, takes advantage of the nearly endless invisibility possible with Void 3.0 to provide a number of extra advantages to both you and your teammates. Here’s how you can earn Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk and how best to make use of it with your invisibility builds.

Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk perks

Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk gives invisible Hunters and their teammates a few nice buffs.

There’s a lot to parse through for Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk, but it has everything to do with what you do while invisible, and when you come out of being invisible. The See Me, Feel Me perk conveys a bunch of benefits based on your actions while invisible. Most of the time, you’re going to be activating bonus damage for weapons by using them after you “emerge from being invisible”–which means when the invisibility effect wears off, you get a momentary boost for your guns. Firing weapons cancels invisibility, which means that you can gain this boost anytime you start firing while you’re invisible.

Weapon boosts are nice, but you’re going to want to pay more attention to the perk’s second buff, which is activated by killing enemies with finishers while invisible. Finish an enemy while they can’t see you, and you’ll get a boost to your class ability regeneration, as will any nearby allies. You and your nearby allies also gain a “reserve overshield,” which is a new concept. Usually, when an ability or Exotic activates an overshield, it’s just an additional shield over your usual one, effectively giving you a small amount of additional hit points. Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk gives you a reserve overshield which does not automatically get added to your existing shield. Instead, you activate it with your class ability, meaning you can wait and deploy that shield whenever you want, and the same is true of your teammates.

Hunters can activate invisibility in a number of ways with Void 3.0 depending on their builds, including by using their class ability, throwing smoke grenades, or scoring Stylish Executioner kills by taking out enemies who are Volatile and by using finishers or powered ability kills. Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk probably works best with builds that focus on invisibility activated with your class ability, since it offers improved class regeneration, but any invisibility build can make use of its perks.

See Me, Feel Me

Weapons gain bonus damage briefly after you emerge from being invisibleDefeating an enemy with a finisher while you’re invisible gives you and nearby allies a reserve overshield and improved class ability regen Reserve overshields are deployed by using your class ability

Where To Get Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk

Like other seasonal Exotics, Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk isn’t available from just any random Exotic engram drop. Instead, you’ll have to seek out the chest armor by earning it from solo Legendary or Master Lost Sector clears. Once you’ve added the Exotic to your Collections tab, you’ll find it in engram drops, but the only way to unlock it is in Lost Sectors.

Legendary and Master Lost Sectors are special versions of Lost Sector activities that are significantly more difficult than normal runs. Only one Lost Sector in the game is Legendary each day, and is marked with a special icon on the Director screen. Legendary Lost Sectors have a heightened chance of dropping Exotic items upon completion, however, which is why you want to complete them–that chance is even higher on Master Lost Sectors. Though Legendary Lost Sectors say an Exotic drop is a “rare” occurrence, it’s uncommon to run one more than, say, 10 times without getting a drop, and even on these tougher difficulties, you can do them in a matter of minutes.

The Legendary Lost Sector icon denotes the rewards you can receive from completion, which rotate daily–one day will award Exotic helmets, for instance, while the next will award Exotic chest armor. Make sure to check the icon before you embark to make sure you’re getting the rewards you want. It’s also worth noting that, while you aren’t guaranteed an Exotic drop on every run, you’re also not guaranteed to get exactly the drop you want. Exotic drops in Destiny 2 are geared toward awarding you Exotics you don’t have, but if you’re missing more than one Exotic chest piece from your collection when you clear a Legendary Lost Sector, there’s a chance you’ll get something other than Gyrfalcon’s Hauberk.

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How To Complete A Legendary Lost Sector

Legendary Lost Sectors sound difficult, but they aren’t necessarily too bad, provided you go in prepared. These Lost Sectors differ from their normal counterparts in a few ways: First, they usually have high Power level ratings, meaning that enemies are tougher to kill and hit harder if your level is below the recommended mark; second, they include several Champion enemies, and you’ll earn the best rewards if you kill them all; and third, they have a host of modifiers, like Arc Singe or Blackout, that can make them tougher to finish. Instead of just running into a Lost Sector like normal, Legendary and Master Lost Sectors are activated by interacting with a banner you’ll find outside their entrances.

Legendary and Master Lost Sectors also limit your number of revives and come with a completion timer. You’ll have only a few revive tokens when you play through the Lost Sector, and every time you die, you’ll use one. When you run out of tokens, you’ll be kicked out of the Lost Sector and forced to start over again. However, killing Champions earns you additional tokens. When the completion timer for the Lost Sector runs out, you won’t be able to revive anymore–same as if you ran out of tokens–so it’s important to finish fast, but being a little slow won’t necessarily kill your run.

The info screen for a Legendary Lost Sector.

Finishing Legendary and Master Lost Sectors can be tough, but if you go in prepared, it’s very possible–and in fact, once you know the ins and outs of a particular sector, you’ll be able to do runs in some of the easier ones in just a few minutes, allowing you to quickly farm them. First, you need to make sure you have the Champion mods noted on the Lost Sector icon, which you can get from the Seasonal Artifact. A number of Exotics, such as Arbalest, Divinity, and Wish-Ender, also come with Intrinsic Champion mods, so even if you’re not far on your Season Pass, you can find the right tool for the job.

Legendary Lost Sector icons will also tell you what enemy shields you’ll be dealing with, and it can be tough to destroy enemies with the wrong elemental weapon type. But by and large, weapons such as Arblest, which can punch through any shield, or which carry the Adaptive Munitions perk and can adapt to any shield you face, can help carr you through.

The trick with any Legendary Lost Sector is to go slowly and carefully to learn the best places to use cover, where enemies spawn, and which ones to prioritize as you move forward. Don’t be afraid to do a couple of runs to get a feel for the space and what loadout you need to use–in some Lost Sectors, long-range guns make encounters trivial, while in others, you’ll want a rocket or grenade launcher in order to clear out densely packed enemies quickly. You’re likely to want to farm a Legendary Lost Sector several times in a row in order to get the Exotics you want with rolls you like, so take the time to get familiar with one before you commit yourself. Threats will always be in the same place in a given Lost Sector, so once you know what to expect, you should be able to lower the time it takes you to complete one until you can run it reliably over and over.

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BioShock recently celebrated its 15-year anniversary. Below, we take a closer look at how the iconic setting of Rapture reflects real-world libertarian philosophies.

BioShock’s Rapture always felt like someone else’s dream, right from the start, and that’s because it always has been. There may not always be a lighthouse, but there’s almost always been a man wishing for his own city to serve his interests and needs.

Libertarians have been misunderstanding problems with society and trying to apply their top-down thinking to new settlements in remote places, far away from government rules and regulations, for practically as long as people have been telling stories of running off and starting somewhere new. It’s easy to understand the temptation to just leave and make a new city, but the compromises that come with individual freedoms being limited are often part of what makes a society a place where people want to be.

The opening lighthouse from 2007’s BioShock

After all, if people are completely free, left to nothing but their own decisions and desires, they’re beholden or responsible to no one, so are you really part of anything at that point? Can you really make something detached from everything without leaving everything? Or would that simply leave you with less than what you started with? A man with ideas and visions that’s more likely to harm groups of people not represented in the room.

15 years ago, BioShock flooded the world with the magic, wonder, and terror of what an isolated city built with absolute freedom in mind for individuals could look like. Everything from the art they create to the science they explore was subject to this freedom, for better or worse. And in the process, Andrew Ryan’s Rapture also came further than any real attempt to start a successful city under or on the water.

Irrational Games wasn’t shy about exploring the horrors of men left to nothing but their own ideas and devices, but the studio also had to embellish some parts to make a good video game.

BioShock ran further and instead pressed for what might happen if a remote settlement, influenced and driven by objectivism and the ideals of individuals like Ayn Rand, were to get off the ground and find full isolation away from the rest of the world. BioShock explored how citizens may act when their political and/or philosophical ideas or dreams were repressed and how business tycoons would act when only encouraged and never really regulated.

It’s a big-budget video game, and so it doesn’t take too long for people being able to shoot bursts of lightning, swaths of fire, or swarms of bees out of their hands, but Irrational Games also pulled back the corners of the more realistic ramifications of holding a system of beliefs over what’s actually happening and the people affected by it. The city of Rapture allowed the ideas and motivations of landlords and shareholders to prevail over the everyday person. (Can you even imagine?!)

BioShock gameplay, which shows the player character with a plasmid power equipped

And yet, the fictional, fascist fishtank has more in common with most attempts at sea settlements than I would have thought, and I’m not talking about working plumbing or good music.

Irrational Games showed us a glimpse of minarchism, a form of libertarianism that works for a while in Rapture, but the player’s experience starts in the middle of the ocean. From there, they walk into an isolated lighthouse and discovering an underwater city in ruin, tattered and torn apart by civil war and a man that now essentially holds the title of both god and king, two of the very things that drove him to the sea, but were now taking him beyond the sea.

Rapture’s most foundational text is absolutely Andrew Ryan’s monologue, which is used to sell the idea of Rapture as a city to people that think and see the world like Ryan, the city’s founder and, ultimately, ruler.

The player character hears a recording of Ryan’s now-famous quote as they make their way below the lighthouse, via a small bathysphere pod, unaware that what waits for them below could be more treacherous than the ocean waves of the surface.

“I am Andrew Ryan, and I’m here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? ‘No!’ says the man in Washington, ‘It belongs to the poor.’ ‘No!’ says the man in the Vatican, ‘It belongs to God.’ ‘No!’ says the man in Moscow, ‘It belongs to everyone.’ I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose… Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.”

Andrew Ryan is the founder of Rapture and his ideas and influences, and even reasons for growing disillusioned with the world really weren’t that different from some of the most notable, real-life, libertarian seasteaders.

Ryan fled to the United States as a boy after being forced to flee his home country of Russia to escape political violence. He amassed a fortune in several ventures, most notably in oil, but his devotion to America turned to disillusionment after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, among other political directives, began taking direct aim at helping poor people.

The Big Daddy and Little Sister, two important types of characters found in Andrew Ryan’s totally normal city

Ryan believed socialism and collectivism to be a great evil overtaking the country. America’s use of atomic bombs against Japan during World War II provied to be too much–but not for the reasons you might think. The senseless murder of Japanese citizens at America’s hands inspired Ryan to start work on his underwater utopia, though it was mostly because he took issue with a country using science and technology as a weapon in a war and less about taking issue with war crimes.

The real-life Republic of Minerva’s start isn’t too far from Rapture’s, nor is its chief founder all that dissimilar from Ryan. Michael Oliver was saved by allied forces while on a death march from Dachau, one of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. He immigrated to the United States and accumulated wealth in various business ventures, including a land development company and selling gold and silver coins.

Like Ryan, Oliver was upset with the direction of the US. He also shared the belief with Ryan that America was doing too much to help poor people with social welfare programs and took issue with what he saw as a war against the free enterprise system.

By 1968, Oliver had self-published a book, titled A New Constitution for a New Country, with his own constitution and ideas on how his libertarian society would function, were it free from an overreaching government. Like Ryan, his beliefs echoed the objectivism and property rights of Ayn Rand and other prominent libertarians of his time.

The Minerva Reef

His book earned him more attention and made it easier to form the Ocean Life Research Foundation, thanks to additional help and investments from several other wealthy people who shared his beliefs and vision. The purpose of the organization is easier said than done: to create a self-governing country, separate from the United States and every single other country. A free and autonomous nation.

The open ocean felt like the best place to him because it felt like an unclaimed frontier. He just needed to find a way to make it happen.

By 1971, he and other investors were in the process of having massive amounts of sand poured over the top of the shallow waters of the Minerva Reef. Their plan, too, was to fill a new utopia with like-minded people. In fact, groups they disagreed with, such as the collectivists so despised by Andrew Ryan, weren’t even allowed to invest in the Republic of Minerva.

Republic of Minerva currency

Less than a year later, the settlers had been pushed out by Tonga, a nearby Polynesian island, which actually had enough legal claim to the area to do so. With their plan to create 2,500 acres of land in the middle of the ocean, eight feet above sea level, down the drain, Oliver began minting and selling currency for his fake country. It could be purchased with real money, and was all to help raise funds. However, raising money wouldn’t fix one key problem in Minerva’s failure, which was that the area belonged to an existing country.

There were a few small attempts at trying to recapture the failed dream of the Republic of Minerva but all hope has been washed back into the ocean. At this point, the only tangible proof that there was ever something even called the Republic of Minerva are the last pieces of remaining currency, which can often be found for sale on eBay for much more than it was ever worth.

The Seasteading Institute has followed in the footsteps of the Republic of Minerva, though with a few differences. The organization was founded by Patri Friedman, a software engineer and political and economic theorist, and has been financially supported by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The organization’s website states that it believes in creating floating cities, “which will allow the next generation of pioneers to peacefully test new ideas for how to live together.”

The website also goes on to say, “Enrich the poor. Cure the Sick. Feed the Hungry. Clean the atmosphere. Restore the oceans. Live in balance with nature. Power the world sustainably. Stop fighting.”

A concept picture from the Seasteader’s Institute, which shows the organization’s vision

The organization’s ultimate goal currently seems to be experimenting with floating cities that bubble out from above and next to other cities, which almost feels like life imitating art a little too much, given that a sequel to BioShock, 2013’s BioShock Infinite, took place in a floating city, far up in the clouds.

Though the Seasteading Institute hasn’t quite reached the above-the-clouds heights of BioShock Infinite and is instead aiming more for resorts and settlements that lie off the coast. Friedman has stated the goal is to both build new settlements that can exist alongside and above other cities and to disrupt and influence existing governments.

It’s been difficult, and progress has been slow, since the goals of the Seasteading Institute don’t really align with existing governments and countries. This is making it difficult since the organization greatly needs the support of another country to make it off of the ground, giving it somewhat of a parasitic dynamic with existing society and governments.

Lighthouses showing different realities in the Bioshock universe

It’s probably not a bad thing, though, considering how it went for everyone in BioShock Infinite’s floating city of Columbia. In fact, we’ve seen how all that went. Multiple times. Again and again. And we’ve also now seen Bread Boy. I love Bread Boy.

As the climate crisis worsens and rich people continue to look for solutions that only they can think of and benefit from, it’s become increasingly clear that the quest to colonize the ocean will only continue. Let us all hope we get something in between sand being poured on a coral reef and people screaming and shooting fire at each other through a never ending civil war.

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Microsoft has released a statement in response to Sony’s decision to raise the price of the PlayStation 5. Following Sony’s announcement, some wondered if Microsoft might follow suit and raises prices to mitigate the supply chain and logistical issues that have driven up production costs. That’s not happening.

Microsoft said in a statement to GameSpot, “We are constantly evaluating our business to offer our fans great gaming options.” However, the company is not planning to raise prices, at least not right now.

The company’s statement went on to say that the existing US MSRPs for the Series S ($300 USD) and Series X ($400) will remain in place. Whether or not this could change in the future is anyone’s guess.

PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said the PS5 price increase was a “necessity given the current global economic environment and its impact on SIE’s business.” The console is getting about 10% more expensive in around 45 global markets, but not the United States, due in part to the value of the US dollar.

The PS5 price increase is effective immediately, but whether or not it’s a permanent or temporary measure is unclear. Historically, prices come down over time as component prices fall and logistical factors are made more efficient. That’s not the case in the current environment, however.

Sony’s decision to raise the price of the PS5 outside of the US will not have a significant impact on sales, one analyst believes.

For its part, Nintendo has said it will not raise the price of the Switch, though it is reducing the size of Switch packaging to help matters.

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Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers are fairly expensive at $80 for a pair, and they very rarely go on sale. That’s not the case today, however, as you can pick up a pair of Joy-Con controllers for $60, down from $80. The price cut is only available until tomorrow, August 26 at 7 AM PT / 10 AM ET, so head over to Adorama and check out the sale while you can. Keep in mind that Adorama could sell out before the discount expires.

Although it’s only effective for the Neon Pink/Neon Green Joy-Con, this is still the best deal we’ve seen throughout 2022. Nintendo’s first-party controllers are almost always full-price, and any price cuts that crop up are often only for a few bucks. So, if you need a stylish pair of Joy-Con for player two (or need to replace your aging daily driver), be sure to give this a closer look.

Not sold on this Joy-Con deal but still in need of a new Switch controller? Our roundup of the best Switch controllers of 2022 should help you narrow down the options and find the right gamepad for your needs. It includes everything from affordable retro gamepads to high-end pro controllers, making it easy to pinpoint exactly what you’re looking for.

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Just because the week is beginning to wind down doesn’t mean we stop this Wordle train. We’re back for another edition of our Wordle guides, this time for puzzle #432 on Aug. 25. The answer to today’s Wordle is quite ironic, especially for those unfortunate players that don’t end up getting the answer correct. However, we’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen by giving you a list of starting words and offering a couple of hints about the Wordle.

These hints will be just enough to give some players the answer and give others some groundwork to start formulating guesses. If players want to see the full answer to the Aug. 25 Wordle, they should read the paragraph after the hints. If players don’t want to be spoiled, they need to avoid reading past the hints.

Today’s Wordle Answer – August 25, 2022

We’ll begin with a couple of hints that directly relate to the Wordle answer, but don’t fully give it away. If you want that, you’ll have to keep reading below the hints.

Hint 1: This word is the character depiction of one of author Stephen King’s most famous villains.Hint 2: This word often gets thrown around in multiplayer games by players who want to mock another player who did something foolish in a game.

If those hints weren’t quite enough to get you to the answer, then fear not, as we have the full answer to the Aug. 25 Wordle right here. The full answer is… “clown.” Hopefully, no player was left feeling like a clown because they didn’t get the answer within six guesses. Check back tomorrow for another edition of our Wordle guides.

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