Horizon Forbidden West finally added a New Game Plus mode with its latest update, meaning you can go back to Aloy's adventure and play through it on the hardest difficulty with almost all of your endgame gear.
Aloy and Varl
If you want to start Forbidden West's NG+ mode, make sure that you've already finished the main campaign first, writes Twinfinite (as with every other NG+ mode out there). By this, we mean you should have already beaten the final boss and rolled the endgame credits. So no half-finished games allowed here.
Once you're absolutely sure you're done with the story, load up your last save and go to the Base. Go to the middle of the room where a beacon-like tower is placed. Press the triangle button to interact and start a NG+ run. The way developer Guerilla Games makes this work is a bit different from other games, wherein all you need to do is click "New Game" on the main menu and pick NG+ in the options. Here, they baked it in-game - which can be seen as a refreshing approach.
What Carries On Into Your Horizon Forbidden West NG+ Run?
To cut a long story short - everything. All of the weapons, armor, skills, and trinkets you collected will remain with Aloy. As such, Guerilla Games also added a new difficulty level called Ultra Hard, as reported by Kotaku. This is likely going to be far more approachable now given that Aloy's endgame abilities are mostly overpowered at this point.
horizon forbidden west screen
However, if you want to change to Ultra Hard difficulty on your old save, you can't. It seems that Guerilla has locked in the new difficulty level on the NG+ or regular New Game modes. So if you want to truly challenge yourself and still Forbidden West's vanilla difficulty settings too easy, then you need to really start a new game.
Read Also: 'Horizon Forbidden West' Review: An Absolute Cross-Gen Marvel
More Additions And Changes/Fixes
To cap things off, Horizon Forbidden West's NG+ update also brings with it the ability to reset your skill trees. Redistributing your skill points is as easy as going into the Skills tab, clicking any skill tree, and clicking Options. But that's not all: the game has also added transmog, which gives you the ability to keep the stats of your equipped gear as you swap its look.
To use transmog, all you need to do is go to Inventory, scroll to the Outfits option and press the triangle button on the outfit that you want Aloy to wear. As soon as you see the eye icon on the outfit you picked, you'll know that Aloy is wearing it.
On the subject of changes and fixes, Horizon Forbidden West's latest update didn't go into much detail when it was revealed during the recently concluded State Of Play stream. According to GameInformer, the team worked to fix several graphical issues like shimmering on plants and everything else in the game, but that's about it.
Maybe the update finally fixed that annoying pop-in that sometimes still persisted even when running the game on an SSD. Or maybe it fixed up even more visual issues - or none at all. However, the only way to see which things got fixed is to boot the game up and see for yourself.
Related Article: This Horizon Forbidden West Trick Can Instantly Kill Almost Any Enemy
Story posted on GameNGuide
Written by RJ Pierce