Starting today, you can embark on a New Game Plus journey in God of War Ragnarök. More than just a restart of the story campaign, the update adds new sets of armor that can be equipped to modify your combat experience to make the game more challenging.

New Game Plus starts you off with all your weapons, armors, and enchantments but with a slight catch: you can’t access areas with the Hex or Sonic arrows or the Draupnir spear before reaching the part in the story where those weapons would be unlocked. It’s a bit of a bummer because there was no way in Helheim I could be bothered to go back to any of those areas once I got the necessary equipment. It, therefore, would have been really nice to be able to unlock those areas as I progressed through the game, but I’m sure going out of sequence like that would have resulted in some game-breaking glitch. Too bad.

What’s not too bad is all the new armor Kratos will get, specifically his Spartan armor. With Spartan armor equipped, Kratos gets to #freethenipple. Sure, it’s locked at level one with no perks and no stats, essentially requiring you to run through the game with nothing but your wits and weapons but… hmm, look at those pectorals.

However, Kratos spends a significant amount of time in Ragnarök enduring Fimbulwinter, which can cause quite a lot of problems if any, err… sensitive skin is exposed. In the game’s first cinematic, Kratos is sporting a warm-looking bear cloak that he promptly loses shortly after the game starts. The team at Santa Monica Studio listened to players clamoring for a cloak to be re-added to the game and obliged. Now, Kratos starts NG Plus with Armor of the Black Bear equipped.

Another interesting twist to New Game Plus is the new burden enchantments, which do exactly what you think they do. They’re perks that add some kind of negative effect, making combat that much harder. With challenge runs like no hit or basic weapons only dominating games like Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring, it’s neat to see developers embrace that by adding those features for folks to play around with.