Assassin's Creed Valhalla Update 1.8.0: New Game+ and PSSR 2

Six years after Assassin's Creed Valhalla first shipped, Ubisoft has given it the one feature fans kept asking for. Title Update 1.8.0, nicknamed "The Most Requested Update," went live on November 5 across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, adding a full New Game+ mode alongside a new resource economy and, on PlayStation 5 Pro, an upgraded version of Sony's PSSR upscaler. Ubisoft says Valhalla has now passed 40 million players, and this update is framed as a thank-you to a game the studio has kept supporting well past its original content roadmap.

01What's New in Title Update 1.8.0

The headline feature is New Game+. You unlock it by finishing "Holy Day," the final quest in the Hamtunscire region, and critically, you do not need to reach Valhalla's true ending first. Starting a new cycle lets Eivor carry over most existing progression rather than beginning from zero, and Ubisoft's patch notes are explicit that the mode is built to get harder each time through: "Each iteration of NG+ will get progressively harder."

Alongside NG+, Ubisoft added an Extended Progression Mode as a separate, opt-in option. With it switched on, every gear upgrade and every rune slotted adds 1 Power to Eivor's total, and Masteries now grant Power every five skill points spent, giving min-maxers a more granular way to track their build's strength than the base game's simpler Power curve.

02Mithril, Platinum and the New Divine Gear Ceiling

Update 1.8.0 also introduces Mithril, a resource tied directly to New Game+: once you're in NG+, any duplicate gear piece or book of knowledge you pick up converts into Mithril instead of sitting in your inventory unused. It's also purchasable from the Niflheim, Mastery, and River Raid shops for players who don't want to grind for it.

Mithril matters because Divine gear upgrades now go all the way to level 27, up from a hard cap of 13 before this patch, and every step up that new ladder costs Mithril. Ubisoft also quietly opened the door to Divine upgrades for players without the Dawn of Ragnarok expansion: looting Carbon, Nickel, or Tungsten from a Wealth Chest can now yield Platinum, an ingot that used to be exclusive to that DLC.

03Rune Forge Changes, a New Outfit and Fresh Achievements

The Rune Forge got a meaningful overhaul in this patch. A new upgrade tab lets you convert runes up the rarity chain with silver -- lesser to normal, normal to greater -- while pushing a greater rune up to superior now also requires Mithril. Ubisoft says it added over 300 newly engravable runes, pulling in perks that previously only existed on DLC and Helix Store cosmetics, and players can now engrave an owned armor set or weapon directly into a rune for 450 silver.

Ravensthorpe also gets a new Stash building to hold overflow gear and runes pulled out of your inventory, which should help with the clutter NG+ is likely to generate. Cosmetically, the update adds the Naoe Master Assassin outfit, a nod to Assassin's Creed Shadows' protagonist, and two new achievements: Ivaldi's Heir, for fully upgrading a piece of Divine gear, and Circle of Renewal, for completing a full New Game+ run. On the balance side, Ubisoft also adjusted dual wielding, several stat runes, Skill Mastery bonuses, and a handful of weapon damage and animation speed values.

“The upgraded PSSR is more efficient than the original, and easier to implement in the game source code.”Priscilla Nguyen, Engineering Studio Manager, Ubisoft

04Upgraded PSSR Brings PS5 Pro Up to Speed

The other major piece of Title Update 1.8.0 is exclusive to PlayStation 5 Pro: an upgraded build of PSSR, Sony's AI upscaler, replacing the version Valhalla launched with on Pro hardware. According to Ubisoft engineering studio manager Priscilla Nguyen, the team's goal was narrow but concrete -- plug the newer PSSR implementation into Valhalla's existing rendering pipeline without having to rebuild the game's assets around it. The payoff, per Ubisoft, is a sharper, more visually stable image that holds a 4K output in Quality mode while running at 60FPS on PS5 Pro, something the original PSSR integration in Valhalla couldn't reliably hit. The same upgraded PSSR build previously made its way into Assassin's Creed Shadows and the Black Flag Resynced remaster, so this patch effectively brings Valhalla's visual tech in line with Ubisoft's newer releases.

PlayStation's official look at Title Update 1.8.0's New Game+ mode for Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

05Why Ubisoft Is Still Updating a Six-Year-Old Game

Valhalla's New Game+ was first previewed in Ubisoft's broader Assassin's Creed Fall 2026 Update on October 29, where Head of Content Jean Guesdon tied the feature to the game crossing 40 million players. That same showcase also touched on the franchise's next moves: a darker project under the codename Hexe, continued work on the multiplayer prototype Codename Invictus, and plans around Assassin's Creed's 20th anniversary in 2027. Against that backdrop, Title Update 1.8.0 reads less like a parting gift and more like Ubisoft keeping its highest-selling single entry in active rotation while bigger, unannounced projects take shape behind it.

Patch sizes vary noticeably by platform: Ubisoft Connect players are downloading 12.27GB, Steam users 7.8GB, Xbox Series X|S 15.02GB, PS5 5.26GB, and last-gen PS4 and Xbox One players 13.42GB and 13.8GB respectively. The update rolled out simultaneously at 14:00 UTC / 9:00 AM ET on every platform, with no reported staggered release.