Elden Ring is a behemoth of a video game that might take you over a 100 hours to finish for your first playthrough, so if you’re someone like me who has finished Elden Ring, you might be left wondering “Well is it worth it to start NG+ and abandon my current playthrough?” Well worry not dear viewer, for I have made the sacrifice for you so I can tell you all there is to consider when starting a playthrough in NG+.
There are a few things that a player should consider before they even start an Elden Ring playthrough in NG+. One of the main things to consider is if you’re planning to make a new character build and do a playthrough with an entirely new weapon. If you plan to do that then I highly recommend going to Rennala to respec your character beforehand or else you’ll have to fight up until the Raya Lucaria Academy all over again in NG+ before you’re able to “rebirth” your character. As for NG+, here’s what happens:
Starting NG+ in Elden Ring:
Starting NG+ in Elden Ring is relatively simple and works almost exactly as it did in past Souls titles including Bloodborne and Sekiro. To start NG+ in Elden Ring simply fast travel back to the Table of Lost Grace and rest on the large grace at the center of the table. You can read all the changes in NG+ below:
General Changes:
First of all, to start NG+, you will have to fast travel back to the roundtable and interact with the large grace in the center of the table and select “Start Journey 2”. NG+ brings with a few differences, for starters you’re actually good enough to beat that starting Tutorial boss now. Killing him nets you a sweet new sword called the “Ornamental Straight Sword”, which is a solid weapon particularly as you land into the early game. Another change is that Torrent is now available to you from the get go, you won’t have to rest at the grace near Stormveil Castle Gate to gain access to him anymore. Aside from that all your NPC questlines will be reset so its a great opportunity to do all the quests that you missed out on and hunt for the secret endings.
Aside from that there’s all the usual stuff you would expect from an NG+ playthrough, enemies now scale (relatively) to endgame level stats. While its a little disappointing that NG+ doesn’t work like it did in Dark Souls 2 which still has the best NG+ system in the series, its to be expected that remixing enemies and item drops with higher level versions in a game of this size will almost be damn near impossible.
Difficulty:
Going into NG+ you will also be able to fight most of the early game bosses with little trouble. I went in with a STR build into NG+ while using the Ghiza’s Wheel that I upgraded before starting my NG+ playthrough and was able to beat fights like Crucible Knight, Tree Sentinel and Margit, the Fell Omen without breaking a sweat. Although that might just be because of how often the game makes you fight the former two. As for the normal enemies, I was one-shotting most enemies in the game but I would attribute that to the fact that STR based weapons are usually extremely powerful in the first place.
In conclusion, NG+ in Elden Ring is a great option for players who just want to breeze through the early-mid game and focus on riding around the beautiful lands with their trusty steed and fight through the game using their endgame gear. I obviously can’t comment on the late game experience but considering how endgame scaling worked in the base NG, players should likely expect a similar level of difficulty in those last few areas.
Players looking for a further challenge should either start a new save file or quickly make their way to the endgame and start NG++ and so on. NG+ in From Software games scales for about 8 playthroughs, with NG+7 being the hardest the game can get. Thankfully that’s relatively easy because you have to beat less than a handful of bosses in order to actually finish the game’s main story.
We hope this guide helped you out, for more helpful guides on Elden Ring, keep an eye out for our Guides Section!
Im just happy Elden Ring has NG+