NG+ or Fresh start. Anyone NOT used ng+

[RexEasily(xGunner)]

Debating if I want to go NG+ or just restart fresh again. I know NG+ adds more challenges and enemies scale . Was the game just as enjoyable to you using the Ng+ as it was vs starting fresh again?

[jss1138]

I restarted.

Twice.

Still having a blast.

[The White Walrus]

Second playthrough of mine was NG+, now my third I am currently doing is fresh start. I think NG+ is actually quite good and the developers did a good job of scaling enemies and whatnot. Also, all the crafted witcher sets become legendary versions of themselves so you can find and collect more powerful variants throughout your NG+.

[RexEasily(xGunner)]

That's where I am at. Just debating if I am going to enjoy it more as a NG+ of just slate clean and start again. I'm leaning toward wiping the slate clean and starting fresh....but I am unsure if I will miss something that NG+ offers. Too bad they only allow 1 profile per account. Then again I could back up my save games and import them in later if I wanted to do a NG+ instead.

[Mark Zuckerslice]

I played through the game and then i did ng+ and it my second playthrough was so much better than my first.

[RexEasily(xGunner)]

Originally posted by grandwizard:

I played through the game and then i did ng+ and it my second playthrough was so much better than my first.

What level did you start NG+ ? if I go this route ill be going in at level 53. I am assuming the enemies level up with me if I turn on the level matching option( or what ever its called). I guess I could go back and use an save and start NG+ at a lower level

[tonypa]

No, enemies will all be leveled up in NG+ anyway. The level you use to start it from is new "level 1" and all enemies and quests and items go up from there.

Upscaling option just makes sure any new enemy is matched to your level, all the time, so even when you go back to "low level" areas the enemies spawning there will be your level and not 20 levels lower.

My experience with NG+ was bad and I abandoned it after stuggling for few days. Started fresh new game on Death March instead, really liked it.

[WolfEisberg]

I didn't like New Game +, I tried it for a while and then stopped. It just didn't feel right and enjoyed the clean slate feel so much better.

[Wintermute]

What is different from fresh start, outside of level scaling? You get to keep gear and build?

[RexEasily(xGunner)]

I've decided to do a fresh start but I'm playing on a higher difficulty. I made a copy of my save game files 1st though just in case I changed the my mind. Just got finished white orchard and logged out at start of been.

[AquaPrime]

Death March is brutal but such fun.

[Mark Zuckerslice]

Originally posted by AquaPrime:

Death March is brutal but such fun.

death march ng+ was pretty easy for me since you get to start with all your gear and potions

[marstinson]

Originally posted by Wintermute:

What is different from fresh start, outside of level scaling? You get to keep gear and build?

Kind of. You start NG+ with the same gear you had when you made the save you imported. If you got rid of the starting gear somewhere in your first playthrough, you'll get a new set of Kaer Morhen armor and the Hunter gear, plus a steel sword and silver sword scaled to your current level. You also get a respec potion if you want to rebuild Geralt differently than your first playthrough.

You keep your potions and bombs, so anything upgraded to Superior stays that way and you won't have to go searching for recipes (or components again). I still have my Pops Mold Antidote in inventory, so it will be interesting to see whether that little quest got borked or not.

You also keep anything in your stash, although its utility will be questionable at best. As tonypa pointed out, your starting level is the new Level 1, so almost anything you pick up will be better than whatever you have stashed. I found it frustrating that after all of the toil and effort I put into upgrading my Witcher gear to Grandmaster quality in my non-NG+ game, the starting gear was better. About the only exception that I've run into is Aerondight (a silver sword obtained in a Blood and Wine quest) as it scales upward with you.

You will lose almost all of the diagrams that you know, so you'll definitely have to go hunt them down again, and this is especially true of Witcher gear, although all of the diagrams are now called "Legendary" to distinguish them from the non-NG+ diagrams.

Your Bestiary, Journal, Characters, etc. also get wiped, so you have to go refill all of that information by finding and reading the books or doing whatever it took to get the entries in the first place.

You do skip the tutorial at Kaer Morhen during the starting dream sequence (not optional - you skip it).

There might be a fiew other minor things that I forgot to include, but that's most of it.

[marstinson]

Sorry to necro a two-week old thread, but needed to make a clarification that I just discovered. As I mentioned above, you keep your potions and bombs. This does not generally include quest-related recipes, though. For example, you reacquire the Chort Lure recipe as part of that quest and the same with the Drowner Pheremones. It looks like you keep the Shaelmaar Bait recipe (B&W), too, so will only need to reacquire the ingredients. But interestingly you DO NOT reacquire Pop's Mold Antidote.

During the mission where you need them, the on-screen prompts says that you get some potions and the recipe, but the recipe does not appear on the Alchemy screen and the potions do not appear in your inventory. So whatever you do, don't drop them from inventory just to clear out old junk. Leaving them in inventory hopefully does not produce a duplication glitch and if you do drop them from inventory, you die on Sigi's little mission through the sewers.

In the meantime, I get to reload an old save and replay from that point since I did drop them from inventory to avoid a duplication glitch.

CDPR devs, I am not having happy thoughts about you at the moment. But fortunately my good save point was only slightly before heading to the bath house, so many hours of replay will not be necessary as they might well be for others.