The first patch for God of War Ragnarok's new Valhalla DLC is in, and the result is an overall difficulty bump for the already cutthroat roguelike mode.
The full patch notes went up earlier this week, and developer Sony Santa Monica advises players to update both the game and the DLC before continuing their playthrough.
The first big gameplay change is actually a difficulty reduction for Valhalla's easiest difficulty setting, "Show Me Will." The fight against Tyr has been toned down to be even easier. Oppositely, the difficulty of "some arena challenges" has been increased. The spear's ability to regain health has also been slightly nerfed and will proc less frequently.
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In a tweet, Valhalla director Mihir Sheth explained that "we've adjusted the difficulty of the final [critical] path boss fights to be reduced on Show Me Will (the lowest difficulty setting) based on early observations. Optional challenges have had their difficulty increased however across all difficulty settings."
When Valhalla was first revealed as one of the many surprises at The Game Awards, Sheth claimed that the mode contains an endgame challenge so brutal that nobody on the dev team had actually cleared it on the highest difficulty setting, "Show Me Mastery." That's an extreme that most players won't bother with, but it's interesting to see the first patch actually increasing the mode's difficulty overall, even if boss fights and other critical path encounters are untouched. The optional arenas that were tuned up are a valuable source of buffs, after all, so they're still an important part of each run.
"Trolling aside, we've tuned the game for every difficulty," Sheth said in another recent comment. "Your enjoyment is what matters - should you wish to try different ones feel free to adjust it in between runs."
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