How does New Game Plus work in The Last of Us Part II?

Maybe you just finished The Last of Us Part II. Maybe you want to experience all the pain again (on an even more painful difficulty setting). Naughty Dog has got you covered with a New Game + mode that is unlocked as soon as you complete The Last of Us Part II.

Unlike your typical NG+ mode—the kind you’d find in a From Software game, for example, where the difficulty scales to match your level—this doesn’t inherently mean the game will be more difficult. You can play NG+ in The Last of Us Part II on the exact same settings as your first run, if you wish. You can make it harder or easier. Difficulty can always be changed at any time in the game and is entirely up to the player, with no trophies tied to difficulty settings whatsoever.

What do you get in NG+?

The perks of replaying the game on a NG+ setting are you get to keep these things from your first run:

• All weapons
• All weapon upgrades
• All survival skills
• All crafting recipes

Playing NG+ is the only way to max out all of the various skill and weapon trees as there are not enough resources in a single playthrough to do so. NG+ also gives you the opportunity to go to town in your quest for revenge with a more complete arsenal, and to get any of the collectibles or character-building moments you might have missed on your first time around.

Collecting all collectibles

NG+ will repopulate the world, not with people, but with all the trinkets you can possibly pick up. The ones you got in your first playthrough will be back, but you’ll only need to snag the ones you missed in order fully complete the game and earn all the trophies. There’s even an accessibility option that will tweak the user interface to tell you whether you’ve previously picked an item up or not.

You don’t need to play through all of NG+ to do this, though. You don’t even need to do NG+ at all! At any point in the game, you can always go back into chapter select and return to a previous level to pick up anything you missed. Just make sure to keep your save files in order so you can return to where you left of.