Posted July 23, 2021
Very mixed on this. It's good in some games, terrible in others. It needs thought. One of the biggest detractors is a lot of games are already too long to benefit from it: By the time I get to the point that I'd use it, I've played the game through enough. And then developers "fix" that by being abject idiots and making new content that's NG+-exclusive.
Where NG+ shines best is when the game scales up to the improved power level; where the early encounters and everything work nicely with you having the stuff you did, and where the tutorials are skipped. You've got the learning curve down, you've practiced the move set and know the powers. I had seen NG+ being a good thing in God of War [in spite of it stupidly having a ton of NG+ exclusive stuff] coming... until the Valkyries completely wrecked me on the game and I gave up without finishing even that one play.
NG+ worked well for Final Fantasy X-2. It was intentionally designed short [as jRPGs go], with impossibility to get everything in one pass. That's the kind of thing where it works best.
Games like Fell Seal that give you options when you select NG+ to build your own experience (you choose what keeps and what goes) are the way it should probably be done most often... Especially in conjunction with that game having awesome difficulty settings available right from the start.
Bloodstained's NG+ worked well. You eventually get so OP in a play, why not just allow a start-over and have it all? It's also the only way to capture multiple copies of boss soul shards to level up those skills. And then you can NG+ into the level-1 challenge that it has built in. You keep your gear and shards, but you're fixed at level 1, don't level up, and enemies are also harder. The game's also paced well for this.
Nioh is designed for this. The first difficulty/play through is training wheels, the 2nd is "the real game" once you've unlocked and learned all the subsystems. And then it overdid it by having too many NG+++++++++++ difficulties that was both excessively repetitious, too punishingly [to the point of unfun] difficult. And at those difficulties the game's more about spending time in the inventory management and blacksmith menu screens than actually playing.
Most open world games do not need or benefit from NG+. Both Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima come to mind. I think both of those also reserved at least a little content that was exclusive to the re-play... which is bad.
idbeholdME mentioned ARPGs. I don't reapply consider the escalation of difficulties in those an NG+ as much as they are just a core part of the experience. I guess Nioh is like that, too, since you can freely go back to the lower difficulty whenever you want to and so on.
Where NG+ shines best is when the game scales up to the improved power level; where the early encounters and everything work nicely with you having the stuff you did, and where the tutorials are skipped. You've got the learning curve down, you've practiced the move set and know the powers. I had seen NG+ being a good thing in God of War [in spite of it stupidly having a ton of NG+ exclusive stuff] coming... until the Valkyries completely wrecked me on the game and I gave up without finishing even that one play.
NG+ worked well for Final Fantasy X-2. It was intentionally designed short [as jRPGs go], with impossibility to get everything in one pass. That's the kind of thing where it works best.
Games like Fell Seal that give you options when you select NG+ to build your own experience (you choose what keeps and what goes) are the way it should probably be done most often... Especially in conjunction with that game having awesome difficulty settings available right from the start.
Bloodstained's NG+ worked well. You eventually get so OP in a play, why not just allow a start-over and have it all? It's also the only way to capture multiple copies of boss soul shards to level up those skills. And then you can NG+ into the level-1 challenge that it has built in. You keep your gear and shards, but you're fixed at level 1, don't level up, and enemies are also harder. The game's also paced well for this.
Nioh is designed for this. The first difficulty/play through is training wheels, the 2nd is "the real game" once you've unlocked and learned all the subsystems. And then it overdid it by having too many NG+++++++++++ difficulties that was both excessively repetitious, too punishingly [to the point of unfun] difficult. And at those difficulties the game's more about spending time in the inventory management and blacksmith menu screens than actually playing.
Most open world games do not need or benefit from NG+. Both Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima come to mind. I think both of those also reserved at least a little content that was exclusive to the re-play... which is bad.
idbeholdME mentioned ARPGs. I don't reapply consider the escalation of difficulties in those an NG+ as much as they are just a core part of the experience. I guess Nioh is like that, too, since you can freely go back to the lower difficulty whenever you want to and so on.
