Ubisoft has shipped the free “Most Requested Update” for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, a patch built around New Game Plus, the feature players have requested most since the Viking epic launched in 2020. The update is live now on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 5 Pro, and it reworks the endgame with a new resource, a higher gear cap, a reworked rune system, and a PS5 Pro-only visual boost.
Ubisoft walked through the feature list in a post on Xbox Wire, where lead game designer David Larouche said New Game Plus was “definitely the most requested feature from fans.” PlayStation owners get the same content plus the visual upgrade, which Ubisoft detailed in a separate PlayStation Blog post.
New Game Plus unlocks after the Holy Day quest
New Game Plus becomes available after you complete the Holy Day quest, and every replay scales the difficulty so a second run does not turn into a one-sided stomp. Larouche said the team built progression on top of the campaign so players keep climbing in power between runs.
The gear cap rises from 13 to 27, a jump that gives endgame characters fourteen more upgrade steps to chase. A new resource called Mithril now upgrades divine gear, and it comes from a few places: you earn it when a loot drop or a Book of Knowledge hands you a duplicate you already own while in New Game Plus, and it can also be bought in the Nilfheim, Mastery, and River Raid shops.
Wealth Chests change in New Game Plus too. The Carbon, Nickel, and Tungsten you used to loot from them is replaced with Platinum, so the resource loop on a replay feeds the higher cap.
Difficulty scales again on every repeat playthrough, so a third or fourth run stays demanding. The patch keeps cross-generation support intact, shipping on Xbox One and base PlayStation 5 alongside the current consoles so the update reaches players who have not moved to newer hardware.
Stash, a new power calculation, and a Rune Forge rework
A Stash in the Ravensthorpe settlement lets you store gear and runes you are not using. An optional Extended Progression Mode folds gear upgrades, runes, and masteries into your total power level, and the patch ships with a new power calculation that reflects those contributions. A high-level character now shows a higher power number that keeps climbing as you keep spending upgrades.
Runes can now be upgraded for silver straight from the menu, and they climb to a new Superior tier. Ubisoft also added more than 300 engravable runes, which Larouche says covers “basically every single perk that was on an item,” including perks that originally shipped with expansions or the in-game store. Players can now engrave those perks onto gear and combine them in ways that were not possible before.
Two new achievements, a Master Assassin Naoe outfit that crosses over from Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and an Animus Hub synchronization update round out the patch.
PS5 Pro gets upgraded PSSR, Xbox does not
The visual upgrade is exclusive to PS5 Pro. Engineering studio manager Priscilla Nguyen said Ubisoft integrated the upgraded version of PSSR, Sony’s upscaler, and it now runs the game’s Quality mode at 4K and 60 frames per second, which she described as “much crisper and more visually stable” than the Temporal Upscaler Valhalla used before.
The upgraded PSSR is more efficient than the original version, and the team did not need to overhaul the game’s content or visual assets. The challenge, Nguyen said, was balancing image quality, performance, and integration inside an engine that predates the PS5 Pro. Ubisoft already shipped the same PSSR work in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced and Assassin’s Creed Shadows, so Valhalla is the third Assassin’s Creed game to get it.
New Game Plus, Mithril, the raised cap, and the runes all work the same on PlayStation and Xbox. The sharper upscaling is PS5 Pro only, so players on a base PS5 or an Xbox console get the same new endgame systems with the game’s existing rendering.
Why a 2020 game got this update
Valhalla turned six years old this fall, and Ubisoft has spent the past year modernizing its Assassin’s Creed back catalog. Nguyen said the PSSR work was easy to apply because the engine integration was already done for Resynced and Shadows, so the Valhalla patch became a chance to bring the same technology to an older open world without reworking its content.
If you have not finished the game, complete the Holy Day quest and New Game Plus opens up on every platform. The mode carries your endgame character into a harder replay with a higher gear cap, a Mithril economy, and more than 300 engravable runes to experiment with, all free.
