Arkane Software wants to keep gamers busy throughout the holidays and the end-of-the-year Christmas celebrations by giving them a few reasons to dip back into Dishonored 2. This includes the all new modes for the game, such as New Game+ and a few other bug fixes and optimization improvements that will go live on December 19th next week.

The new update will be one of two free updates for Dishonored 2, the second of which will go live in January. The first update is currently available in beta form on the PC, but will be widely available for Xbox One and PS4 owners come Monday.

The addition of New Game+ doesn’t just let you run through the streets of Karnaca or the alleyways of Dunwall as Emily or Corvo, it allows you to carryover all of your progress and then gain access to new talents and abilities by opening up crossover Void powers. The crossover powers means that whether you played as Emily or Corvo in the previous run, you can gain access to the other character’s skill traits. So if you played stealthily as Emily the first time around in order to get the best ending possible, you can play as Emily a second time around, causing all sorts of chaos by accessing Corvo’s abilities in addition to Emily’s abilities.

The new crossover traits will later be accompanied by the update in January that features Custom Difficulty Settings. This feature will allow players to customize Dishonored 2 to play out in ways that best suit their desired expectations when it comes to challenge and AI difficulty.

It’s not a bad combination to open up New Game+ and the Custom Difficulty Settings because it means that after you get done playing through the game a second time, you can head back into Dishonored 2 for a third time and play through the game using custom settings to make the game as hard or as easy as you please. I’m curious to see what the settings will look like when they go live in January.