God of War Ragnarök‘s free Valhalla DLC launches today and Santa Monica Studio has said that it comes with an “expanded” HUD option designed with streamers and video makers in mind.
Dubbed the Difficulty HUD Visualization option, this feature essentially makes it so the game is always displaying what difficulty you’re playing on. That way, players can prove that they really were playing at higher difficulties in any recordings they make of their runs through God of War Ragnarök‘s new roguelike mode.
This feature was included in the base game’s New Game Plus update but game director Mihir Sheth adds on Twitter that it’s been expanded upon for the DLC. In the top right corner of the screenshot shown above, you can see not only the selected difficulty but also a couple of extra icons. It’s not entirely clear what they’re meant to represent, but they’re likely tied to choices made during that particular run. So, they double as info to anyone watching and as a reminder to the player.
Curiously, the difficulty level shown in the screenshot is named Show Me Resolve. That’s not the name of any of the difficulty levels seen in the base game. Those are named, from easiest to hardest:
- Give Me Story
- Give Me Grace
- Give Me Balance
- Give Me No Mercy
- Give Me God of War
Since the Valhalla DLC is a roguelike, Santa Monica has likely tweaked the difficulty options to better suit the new gameplay loop. So, choosing which difficulty level before a run may not simply make enemies easier or harder to beat.
Whether you’re a content creator or a casual player, you don’t have much longer to wait to start playing the DLC since it’s set to go live at 9am PT/11am CT/12pm ET/5pm GMT. You obviously need to own the base game beforehand and while you don’t need to beat the main story to access it, it’s recommended new players do that anyway since Valhalla picks up after God of War Ragnarök‘s ending.
