God of War Ragnarok, Valhalla DLC Both Updated, Here Are the Patch Notes

Santa Monica Studio has just released updates for both God of War Ragnarok and its free DLC, Valhalla. You can download and install them now, and the studio stresses you need to install both patches before you boot the game back up.

The update for Ragnarok comes in at about 376MB, while the patch for Valhalla itself is roughly 94MB. So, what are these updates doing, exactly? Well, it looks to be largely concentrated on the freebie DLC; the patch notes go over various crash and bug fixes, as well as a slew of balance updates.

Note: If you've yet to get started with Valhalla, beware of some very light spoilers below.

Here's the full list of changes and fixes:

CINEMATICS

• Fixed an issue where audio would not play and characters would be out of sync during the first cinematic after death
• Cleared lingering Draupnir Spear particles when cinematic starts

GAMEPLAY

• Reduced difficulty of first Týr fight on the 'Show Me Will' difficulty setting
• Increased difficulty of some arena challenges
• Tuning adjustment to 'The Forum' to make difficulty more appropriate
• Slightly reduced health gain and chance of proc on Spear kill perk while in Valhalla
• Various combat tuning and balance updates
• Fixed an issue where Greek Labyrinth Mastery would not increase in the "Open Greek Chests" value if Kratos forfeited a reward selection after spending Fleeting Echoes to open a chest
• Fixed an exploit when using the Spear against Ormstunga
• Fixed an issue with the encounter not ending when kicking Einherjar outside of the arena
• Fixed an issue where Týr would teleport away and not come back
• Fixed an issue where not all Hunter armor pieces were available
• Fixed an issue where encounter would not end if Nightmare was ejected from a creature near the arena boundary
• Fixed an issue where Kratos could erroneously stay in Spartan Rage when interacting with Shield Maidens

GENERAL STABILITY

• Resolved multiple crashes including when opening certain chests or rifts, non-English language specific crashes, and memory leak on PlayStation 4
• Fixed an issue where Kratos would be falling through the world
• Fixed an issue where Kratos would fall out of the arena when interacting with a rift on the Aegean Ship
• Fixed an issue with Kratos falling through the world after walking through a Mystic Gateway
• Fixed some issues with textures not streaming in properly when entering arenas

UI/UX

• Fixed an issue with the "Time Extended" message displaying in timed challenge trials when it should not
• Fixed an issue with subtitles overlapping UI when in vendor menus
• Fixed some instances of the navigation assist pointing to incorrect locations
• Fixed an issue where the timer would overlap the Warrior Soul health bar
• Fixed instances where the "Elites Killed" counter would remain after timer expired
• Corrected the "Costly Damage" burden to show appropriate duration in description
• Fixed the King of the Hill challenge timer overlapping progress bar
• Fixed an instance when the timer would never reach zero on the Aegean Ship encounter
• Fixed an issue which would cause a screen reader to read the Tablet of Reflection prompt twice in a row
• Fixed instances where subtitles were not formatted properly
• Fixed an issue where "Flawless Kills" and "Flawless Parries" Challenge UI updated any time Kratos was hit
• Added a 'Download in Progress' screen if attempting to launch God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla before God of War Ragnarök is fully installed
• Fixed an issue with the options menu displaying when opening the glyph tutorial for the first time

So, a pretty hefty list of fixes, then. In our time playing Valhalla, we didn't really hit any issues at all, but what about you? Are you pleased to see this patch and everything it addresses? Discuss in the comments section below.