When it comes to using third-party mods to make your average Dark Souls playthrough even tougher, there are a lot of options to choose from. From enshrouding the entire game world in perpetual darkness to making the game harder with every boss felled, players looking to up the level of challenge can easily do so as long as they’re willing to futz around with each mod’s custom installation process. However, the recently released New Game Plus Infinite mod may be the most challenging Dark Souls mod yet.
Designed by Nexus Mods user notaprofi (the same modder behind the perpetual darkness mod mentioned above), the Dark Souls New Game Plus Infinite mod allows players to work through an endless cycle of New Game Plus playthroughs, and naturally the game gets harder with each subsequent playthrough. How much harder, you ask? Well allow notaprofi to explain directly:
- After NG+6 the Health, Damage and Soul drop of enemies will be increased by 6% per cycle. The increase is exponential, i.e. in 10 cycles you get 80% increase, not 60%, in 50 cycles you will get enemies harder by factor of 18.
- There is a way to progress through NG-cycles much faster, increasing enemies strength by 34% per playthrough.
- Four Kings health is tuned down so they won’t be the bottleneck.
- The mod will put any character to NG+7 when you load it. You can gear up a character with unmodded game and then go to NG+7 with it after installation of the mod. Alternatively, you can create a new character and have the “fresh start” challenge at NG+7. You can even go to NG+12 immediately, if you have an old save file at the end of playthrough.
- The characters, which you create/use with this mod, are usable in the standard (unmodded) game. Thereby you can use this mod to momentarily up the NG counter for your characters and do NG+6 playthrough with unmodded game.
The only downside is that, currently, the New Game Plus Infinite mod is only compatible with the original Dark Souls Prepare to Die edition, not the newer Dark Souls Remastered. Still, if you’re looking to really test your Dark Souls skills and you don’t mind giving up on the Remastered edition perks, the New Game Plus Infinite mod will certainly provide the necessary challenge.