Six years after it launched, Assassin's Creed Valhalla has finally got the feature its players have asked for longer than any other. Ubisoft's free patch, officially titled The Most Requested Update, went live today on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, and its centrepiece is New Game+: a way to start Eivor's saga over from the beginning while carrying your endgame character into it. Alongside it come a higher gear level cap, a new upgrade resource, a stash in Ravensthorpe, hundreds of new rune perks and, for PS5 Pro owners, an upgraded PSSR upscaler that lets the Quality mode run at 60fps.
New Game+, and why it took this long
New Game+ unlocks once you have completed the Holy Day quest. Each time you start a fresh cycle, the game scales its difficulty upward, so a character that steamrolled England on the first pass will meet tougher resistance on the second, third and beyond. Ubisoft's Lead Game Designer David Larouche told Xbox Wire that the mode was the single most requested feature from the community, and that the team did not want it to be a simple replay: the goal was to let dedicated players keep climbing in power and keep improving their build across repeat runs.
Valhalla's last content drop landed years ago, and an update of this size arriving now is unusual for a game in its sixth year. Larouche framed it as a response to players who never stopped playing, and said the team put together developers experienced in retrofitting New Game+ into existing games, which made the production smoother than expected. Whatever the reasoning, it gives a very large install base a concrete reason to reinstall a 2020 game that many players finished long ago.
Mithril, level 27 gear and Extended Progression
To give repeat runs something to chase, the update introduces Mithril, a new resource used to upgrade divine gear. You earn it in New Game+ whenever the game hands you a piece of equipment or a book of knowledge you already own, and it can also be bought from the shops in Niflheim, the Mastery Challenge and River Raids. The cap on gear upgrades has doubled as well, from level 13 to level 27 for every piece.
A new Extended Progression mode changes how your overall power level is calculated: with it switched on, gear upgrades, runes and masteries all feed into that number, instead of skill points alone. PlayStation's announcement describes the same change as an enhanced progression option with a new power calculation. Importantly, Larouche said the extended progression mode, the higher upgrade ceiling, the new rune tier and the extra rune perks are all available without starting New Game+, so players who simply want to keep pushing an existing save can use them too.
A few housekeeping changes round it out. Ravensthorpe gains a stash where you can store any piece of gear or any rune from your inventory, which should ease the clutter that builds up over a hundred-plus hour playthrough. In New Game+, looting Carbon, Nickel or Tungsten from a Wealth Chest now yields Platinum instead.
Over 300 new rune perks and a Superior tier
The Rune Forge has been reworked too. Runes can now be upgraded for silver directly from the menu and pushed to a new Superior tier, and more than 300 engravable runes have been added. According to Larouche, the team turned essentially every perk that ever appeared on an item into a rune you can engrave, whether it originally came from the base game, an expansion, the extended content or the store. That opens up build combinations that were previously locked to specific gear pieces, and Larouche openly expects players to find some overpowered synergies.
PlayStation's post also lists a Master Assassin Naoe outfit, a nod to the protagonist of Assassin's Creed Shadows, and an update to Animus Hub synchronisation among the patch contents.
Upgraded PSSR on PS5 Pro: Quality mode at 60fps
PS5 Pro owners get an extra improvement. The update integrates Sony's upgraded PSSR upscaler, which Ubisoft has already shipped in Assassin's Creed Shadows and Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced. Engineering Studio Manager Priscilla Nguyen explained on the PlayStation Blog that the new upscaler is slightly more efficient than the game's existing temporal upscaler and noticeably crisper and more stable, and that it allows Valhalla's Quality mode to deliver sharper 4K image quality at 60fps on the Pro.
Nguyen said no game assets or content had to be reworked: the gains come from slotting the upgraded PSSR into the existing engine and rendering pipeline. The main challenge was balancing image quality and performance in a game built years before the PS5 Pro existed.
How to get it
The Most Requested Update is free and live now on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One; simply update the game. New Game+ requires a save that has finished the Holy Day quest, while the progression, stash and Rune Forge changes are available to any save. Ubisoft's announcements today covered the console versions, and the PSSR improvements apply only to the PS5 Pro.
