Dark Souls 3 - New Game Plus

If the game wasn't tough enough, or if after vanquishing the Big Bad you're still itching for more, don't fret. That was only a warmup, and for the brave (or foolish), Dark Souls 3 is quite happy to up the stakes for you with its New Game Plus mode.

Starting NG+

NG+ becomes available immediately after finishing the game. Once the credits have rolled, the game will ask if you want to restart in NG+. We'd recommend hanging on and getting these few things out of the way first, as NG+ can now be started at any point from your bonfire menu.

• Stock up on limited-number items. Vendors only have a certain number of Embers, Gems, and other useful item types each playthrough, so it's worth clearing out their stock now.
• Upgrade everything you can.
• Clear out the optional areas if you skipped them.
• Kill the NPCs and loot them. They'll all respawn in NG+ and none of them will bear a grudge, so it's worth it for their armour and souls.

What Do You Keep?

• Your weapons, armour, spells, and upgrades.
• Your Estus Flask size and bonfire levels.
• Your Covenant allegiances.
• Your character abilities and stats.
• If you've taken the dark sigil from Yoel, your hollowing state will also be retained.

What Changes?

• The game world resets to its original state, and all the bonfires and shortcuts you unlocked will need to be found again.
• Bosses, giants, and other non-spawning enemies are reset.
• NPCs respawn.
• You'll also lose any keys you've collected (including items that act like keys, such as the small doll to gain access to Irithyll of the Boreal Valley).
• Enemies deal more damage and take more killing, there will be variation in their type and placement, and you'll find some waiting in previously unoccupied areas - but they'll drop more souls and better items when killed.
• You'll find additional item drops, and some will be upgraded - for example, small Titanite shards become large ones.

New New Game Plus

Like previous Souls games, completing New Game Plus gives access to the even tougher NG+2, and onwards. At time of writing it's not known whether there's a limit to the number of new games you can play, but speculatively, based on the hard level cap and the limits found in previous games, it's likely that enemies will stop getting tougher somewhere around NG+7.

- Keep reading for our guide to unlocking all the endings of Dark Souls 3.

- You can find the rest of our Dark Souls 3 guide from the first page of this article.