Squad News

Hello Squaddies,

With this week's release of v2.12 yesterday, we’ve seen some players report concerns surrounding performance. We’d like to take a moment to thank everyone that has submitted their feedback via this form (LINK URL), and encourage you to continue to do so. This drop in performance is leading either to a poorer experience in the game, or in many cases with players finding Squad unplayable.

We understand the frustration any player experiencing a drop in performance is facing, and wanted to ensure you all know our team is actively investigating this matter.

At this point we are continuing to delve into the underlying problems that may be causing this. The information that we have received from a large number of players who have taken the time to share their system specifications and performance experience with us has gone a long way to giving us a starting point for the work ahead, and we are thankful for their support and patience.

On that note, as we continue to dig into the technical underpinnings of this downgraded performance, additional information from the community would be appreciated. The best way players can help us is to continue to use the reporting form above. For those with more technical know-how and the time to assist even further, we’ve got an additional ask:

Please continue to leave your feedback on our forums and as well as continuing to share your v2.12 performance via our this form (Link URL).

Thank you for your continued support,

- Offworld Industries

Attention Squaddies,

Squad's v2.12 update is now live for players to download.

For details on what's in this latest update visit our Release Notes which we posted yesterday (LINK URL).

For more information about the intentions and goals of v2.12 take a look at our Release Blog (Link URL).

To report any technical issues you might experience after updating to v2.12 please share them on our forums (LINK URL).

Thank you for your attention.

At ease,

- Offworld Industries

Hello Squaddies,

Tomorrow we will be launching Squad’s newest update - v2.12. You can read the Release Notes here (LINK URL) to get a preview of the hundreds of changes, improvements, bug fixes, and gameplay features that will soon refine your Squad experience.

This release has been Squad’s most thoroughly tested release, with initial playtests starting in August of 2021, and culminating in a two week playtest over the holidays at the end of the year. We would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every person who participated in these playtests, as your feedback, experiences, and participation helped us identify issues with the release, improve the final update and make Squad an all-around better game. Throughout the process player feedback and participation has been vital.

The Release Notes talk more about the design intention of v2.12, and how we felt that updating the game’s Lightning and Shadows would not only provide significant visual improvements to how Squad looks, but also would provide new dimensions for how it plays offering a more real world experience. We’ve also focused on adding gameplay features that we feel will allow players to expand their tactical options, and play Squad with new strategies in mind.

As we’ve previously indicated we understand that our community has high expectations for Squad, and that your love of the game makes it so you’re anxious for more updates, more content, and more communication.

We are excited to finally be releasing 2.12 and know that you’ve been waiting for it awhile now. Since the Lighting and Shadows overhaul touched on so many core parts of Squad, testing, and finaling this update took longer than we had expected. Further there were performance concerns raised with systems that are below Squad’s minimum specifications, and while we develop to ensure that the game is workable at the min spec we understand that many players are in fact playing on systems below this. 

All of this meant that we needed to take some extra time with this update, hoping to minimize issues created. 

It is still possible that we will need to do further updates to address issues that are discovered post release, and we already have a list of Known Issues that are included in the Release Notes. No update is ever perfect, and having our large and active community all playing the update live will reveal things that no amount of playtesting or QA will have been able to catch. However thanks to your assistance in our playtests, we hope that we have minimized any potential issues.

As always please provide your feedback after playing Squad’s 2.12 Update on our forums (Link URL). If you experience any issues with the latest update please post on our forums (LINK URL) or contact our Support Team (Link URL).Everyone on the Squad team would like to thank our players for their continued support. We can’t wait to share more details on what else we’re working on in the coming weeks.

Sincerely,

- Offworld Industries

Greetings Squaddies,

Squad’s v2.12 Update has been in development for a considerable amount of time here at Offworld Industries and the entire development team is excited for you to get your hands on it and finally experience it in the live game! For more on the development and challenges we faced with this update see our pre-launch blog post (LINK URL). As was noted earlier today we have discovered an exploit in Squad and while we believe we have it fixed in v2.12 there is a small chance that it might slightly delay the update's release. We will keep you informed if this happens.



V2.12’s primary focus was on bringing improvements to Squad’s visuals, making for an all around better looking game, as well as adding new gameplay and tactical opportunities for our players based only on the higher quality visuals alone. We have completely reworked the game’s handling of dynamic shadows. Standard and Far Shadows have been replaced with more optimized Cascade Shadow Maps. We have managed to make the new system up to ten times more efficient than the old Far Shadows system. This work can have a significant effect on gameplay as Tallil shadows now render out to 1km at all graphics settings which ensures that Low settings no longer give a significant competitive advantage for spotting targets.

The update also brings an overhaul of how the game handles lighting. The development team focused on creating more physically accurate parameters for outdoor lighting, achieving brighter highlights, deeper shadows, greater contrast, and providing more accurate colour.

With improved shadows and lighting also comes updates to the Graphics Settings Menu. We have overhauled the graphics scalability settings for Shadows and Ambient Occlusion. Please note that the associated quality and performance tradeoffs have similarly changed. Players may want to try adjusting their Shadows and Ambient Occlusion Graphics settings for this update. We also added a “Shaders” Graphics Settings section which currently will primarily affect the complexity of the Landscape allowing lower-end hardware more performance options.

The final graphical update to pay particular attention to in v2.12 is that the team has worked to improve the visibility of muzzle flashes which will help make spotting enemies less difficult. We felt that this was necessary to offset the lighting and foliage changes, which can make spotting enemies more difficult. Our design intent is to allow for camouflage and cautious movement to be effective, but without excessively inhibiting other players' situational awareness once a firefight begins.



Squad’s v2.12 update also brings a host of additions, improvements, and changes to the game’s gameplay experience. We have updated the capture speed to scale with the number of players. Capture speed will be shortened if one team has significantly more players in the point than the other team. Here the intention is to encourage more strategic options, especially during the early stages in a round and during "Double Neutral'' scenarios.

Also updated is the "Buddy Boost" feature, with a focus on making it easier to use. Allowing a soldier to climb on top of another soldier to boost over a wall, we removed the force which previously prevented players from standing on each other's heads. The system is limited to only one player being able to stand on another at a time, to prevent giant towers of players The Squad team's focus here was to reward players who move and work together to overcome obstacles, encouraging and rewarding players who move in closer proximity and work as a squad rather than as individuals. 

Another gameplay change to note is that soldier stamina will no longer regenerate while vaulting and climbing, with stamina regeneration paused during these activities.



V2.12 also features extensive overhauls to some existing maps with Yehorivka and Gorodok getting significant updates including lighting updates and new geographic features.

The full Release Notes for v2.12 are below, and we encourage that you take the time to look for them, to get the full scope of what the Squad development team has been working on.

As always please provide your feedback after playing Squad’s v2.12 Update on our forums (Link URL). If you experience any issues with the latest update please contact our Support Team (Link URL).




For the complete Changelog for Squad v2.12 please visit our blog [LINK URL].

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Attention Squaddies!

Recently it was brought to our attention that the lossless FLAC files for the Squad Original Soundtrack Vol. 1 & 2 had been removed from the Steam Store [URL Link]. This was preventing owners of the soundtrack from downloading the highest quality version of their music. These files have now been restored!

We would like to thank ‘Smugsie’ on the Squad Community Discord [URL Link] for bringing this to our attention.

For those not familiar with the game’s soundtrack it was composed by Scott Tobin and has received a lot of acclaim from our player base – we definitely suggest you check it out! At the time of the soundtrack’s initial release [URL Link] Scott spoke a bit about his inspiration for the music:

“I knew from the beginning that Squad was going to be something very special. The team’s philosophy on creating Squad’s gameplay is very unique and specific from any other games in its field. This soundtrack is very much inspired by my love for ambient music, video game soundtracks, and modern film soundtracks. This was a personal choice but also a creative choice in order to capture the emotion and feeling behind Squad.”

If you’ve already purchased the Squad Soundtrack you can download the lossless FLAC version now. If you haven’t picked it up yet it’s on Steam [URL Link].