Free track highlights
Iron Will exotic chest · Fafnir exotic shotgun · Beaufort outfit · 2 named weapons · 4 named gear pieces · 2 exotic caches · 18 Red Horizon caches · 3 named item caches · Red Horizon drone skill VFX
Year 8 Season 3 · live since Aug 27, 2026
Red Horizon
How Under Pressure works, what the season added, the event dates, and what Ubisoft has said about Season 4 and beyond.
The season at a glance
Year 8 Season 3, Red Horizon, went live on August 27, 2026. After Battle for Brooklyn the Cleaners lost their supply of purple flame, and they've come to Washington, D.C. looking for a new one. They're the main Retaliation threat this season, backed by the 95 Company Elite Squad, and their presence grows across the city as the season goes on.
- A new global modifier, Under Pressure, built around a Pressure Gauge (below).
- Blackout, a Dark Zone with no stat normalization, joins the PvP rotation, and the Toxic PvE Dark Zone stays for good. See Activities.
- New gear: the Fafnir exotic shotgun, the Iron Will exotic chest, the Ember Engine gear set and several named items. Determined was nerfed. See Gear.
- A rebalance of red-core gear sets and a reshuffle of brand set bonuses. See what that means for builds.
- The current title update is TU Y8S3.1 (September 22), which added the Red Moon Rising event and another round of PvP balance.
Under Pressure
The Pressure Gauge fills as you fight. Kills, headshots, multikills, skill kills, status-effect kills, fire kills, and kills by other players in your group all add to it, and the fuller it is, the bigger your bonus. By default the bonus is Status Effects. Two passive modifiers change that: New Formula: Beta and New Formula: Gamma swap it for Signature Weapon Damage or Hazard Protection.
Active modifiers
You spend the gauge to fire one of three active modifiers. Unlike earlier seasons there's no shared cooldown; once you have enough Pressure you can use one, and the gauge resets when it ends.
| Modifier | Secondary attribute | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Fiery Aura | Armor Regen | More armor regen and damage resistance (extra while sprinting). Enemies that come close catch fire the first time they enter range. At higher levels, burning unique enemies also restore bonus armor. |
| Vicarious Combustion | Headshot Damage | A headshot on a burning enemy spreads Burn to enemies nearby, over a wider area as it levels. At max level, headshots apply Burn directly. |
| Signed, Shield, Delivered | Skill Efficiency | Boosts your Signature Weapon, shield health and shield regen. Kills with the Signature Weapon, or while using a shield, refill your magazine without using reserve ammo. Since TU Y8S3.1, activating it also refills your current magazine. At max level, those kills extend it. |
Passive and hostile modifiers
There are 20 passive modifiers. Some build Pressure faster or let you hold it longer; others add interactions with fire, skills, grenades, shields and Signature Weapons. In TU Y8S3.1, Modular Plates was reworked to give a large amount of active and passive shield regeneration instead of an instant refill.
Three hostile modifiers work against your gauge. Setting the affected enemy on fire is the only way to remove or reverse them:
- Draining Presence: drains your magazine and your Pressure while the enemy is near you.
- Achilles' Heal: breaking the enemy's weak points or armor heals it and its allies, and lowers your Pressure.
- Thousand Cuts: each hit it lands lowers your Pressure and stacks a damage-reduction debuff on you.
Season calendar
Dates are from Ubisoft's posts. Items without a date haven't been scheduled publicly yet.
- Loading the event calendar…
Classified Assignments
Two paid story missions come with the season. They unlock at level 30 and you start them from the Assignments tab on the map.
- The District Mall Inferno (August 27): Agent Felix McNally is attacked while recovering broad-spectrum antivirals, with the Cleaners closing in and an unknown attacker tied to an SHD anomaly still at large.
- The Georgetown Dead Zone (October 15): a JTF engineer team sent to install new tech in a part of Georgetown with no SHD network coverage has gone missing.
Season pass
The season pass is optional and costs 1,000 Premium Credits ($9.99). It's available from level 1, though some rewards can only be used at level 40.
Premium track highlights
A second copy of Fafnir · Hot-Rigged exotic weapon skin · Richardson and Kernwell outfits · 3 exotic caches · 9 optimization and 9 crafting material caches · 400 Premium Credits back · seeker mine skill VFX
The Red Horizon Bundle ($29.99) adds both Classified Assignments, a 15% season pass XP boost, a Cleaners-themed outfit and 20 tier skips. The Supply Drop ($49.99) adds 5,000 Premium Credits on top.
Retaliation's first year
For Retaliation's anniversary, a special Project Chain ran from September 8 to 22, ending in an Outfit Token you can spend on an eligible store outfit. After progress bugs, TU Y8S3.1 brought the chain back for one more week from September 24, with projects unlocking every hour instead of every day. Everyone can earn the materials again, but the Outfit Token only once per account.
What comes next
- Echoes of Central Park, a paid DLC, releases November 3. It covers the Upper West Side and Central Park, is told as a flashback, and adds three companions (Brayleigh Callahan, a sniper; Elwood Franklin, a protector; Morse Feeney, an assault veteran), six skill variants such as the Corrosive Trap and Gas Bomber, the Ratel exotic and a new gear set. Characters under level 40 get a boost to start it.
- Crossplay arrives in November: on by default, can be turned off at character selection, clans grow from 50 to 100 members, and leaderboards reset.
- Year 8 Season 4: Ubisoft has teased the Black Tusk's return (and hinted at a "White Tusk"), a rework of Prototype Gear with less reliance on RNG, and more control over Escalation difficulty and rewards.
- The Division 2: Survivors, a winter survival expansion, is heading into closed tests. Sign-ups opened on September 24.
- Year 9 is confirmed. Ubisoft plans to say more on Division Day in March.
Sources: Echoes of Central Park (Sep 24) · Gamescom panel 1 (Aug 26) · Gamescom panel 2 (Aug 27)