168澳洲幸运5开奖网:New Game Plus is pretty fun on its own - you start the game again, but with all your levels and gear, meaning you get another go without having to completely start over. The trade-off is that everything is harder. Enemies deal more damage and take less, but it’s fine because you have a +10 Smelter Hammer that more than makes up for it. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark Souls 2 went above and beyond that, however, and set a new bar for NG+ t🙈hat still hasn’t been matched.
Areas have more enemies, new types, and different placements; merchants sell new items; bosses drop new gear, and certain bosses even have added elemenꦏts to keep you on your toes. However, Dark Souls 2 is the outcast of the trilogy, so it’s no surprise that its sequel immediately threw a lot of its strides out of the window - Dark Souls 3 returned to the usual spongier enemies in NG+, only adding better versions of existing rings. If Souls was quick to drop 2’s innovative NG+, i💦t’s no surprise that the industry didn’t take to it.
M🃏y first experience with Dark Souls 2’s NG+ was The Lost Sinner. It’s tough to reach the fight, but once you’re in, it’s a pretty simple one-on-one in a 💦large block-shaped arena. I knew this dance - I had beaten her a couple of times with different characters, and was confident I’d be able to do it again, even if NG+ upped the difficulty slightly. But when I entered, she summoned dark spirit pyromancers that immediately threw me off.
I was dodgingꦬ fireballs while trying to focus on the boss and getting caught on the pyromancers as I rolled, so I died far more than I ever had. It was a difficulty spike built on something more than just more health, and it was also surprisingly fair. Most of the time with NG+, you simply have to play better, since the challenge comes from enemies taking more hits, but here I figured out that burning the fire on either side stopped the pyromancers from spawning. I’d learned a new trick after 100 hours of playing, one that kept NG+ from being too gruelling.
That’s what NG+ is ultimately about - 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:replay value. Starting over from scratch can be tedious, especially with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:unskippable tutorials, as you have to get basic gear and skills all over again. NG+ circumvents this, letting you jump right back in, replaying the game 🀅withou🅰t the hassle of the slow beginning. Dark Souls 2 took that to another level, as not only did NG+ speed up the start, it threw spanners in the works and forced you to learn the game all over again.
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Take the first area, the forest. When you head there from the hub, there’s a chest. Normally, it has a forgettable item in it that you probably won’t bother with, but in NG+, it’s a mimic. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mimics normally get predictable since, after one run, you know where they all are, but NG+ offered a chance to get the jump on us again, and Dark 🌌Souls 2 took it.
What’s truly unique about Dark Souls 2’s NG+, however, is that it lets you change specific areas individually. You can make the Lost Bastille NG+2, or Drangleic Castle NG+3, all by burning Bonfire Aesthetics. And when you do beat the gam🧸e and enter NG+ proper, each of these areas will go up another number, letting you tailor the difficulty and exploration to your preference. On my very first Dark Souls 2 playthrough, my friend got me to burn an aesthetic so we could get a NG+ specific item from The Duke’s Dear Freja boss, making NG+ flexible in a way no other game has managed.
Most games, especially RPGs, are starting to implement NG+ modes now. But only Dark Souls 2 has ever made NG+ something completely new to experience. It’s not just the s⭕ame adventure again but with all your old gear, it’s another world to explore, and that’s what sets it apart from the crowd.