Squad News

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].

Hello Squaddies!

At the end of 2021 our focus had been on improving our communication with our players, and we want to continue that into 2022. Now that is a two way street, and it requires us to listen as much as talk, and so we’ve been listening to your concerns. Out of everything you’ve said the most commonly raised issue is our out-of-date Roadmap!

It is fair to say that the current public Roadmaps that we have provided, and yes there are two of them, have long ago ceased to be useful. While they were well intentioned, they were at best overly optimistic in their target dates. This resulted in us “breaking off more than we could chew”, or overpromising and underdelivering to you our players.

It’s just as clear to us as it is to you that something needs to be done and we wanted to let you know that it's one of our main priorities. There are essentially two main things we need to finalize before we’re able to present you with a new Roadmap.

• Create a new visual format: We’ve done a static illustrated Roadmap in the past, which looks slick and is the kind of thing that marketing departments get really excited about. The problem is that it was hard to update and when things changed, as they are likely to do during development, it was cumbersome to make manual changes. We want us to update a Roadmap to take away from actual development, and so whatever we decide on has to be something that is easy to keep up-to-date.
  
• Confirm what we can first share as part of the new roadmap: The intention is that all of our outstanding announced content (V2.12, US Marines, Australian Faction, Pan Asia Faction) will be released, and our wider development team is currently deep in planning to determine updated and realistic timelines for this content. Part of this process will be informed by the experience our new CEO Vlad Ceraldi brings to the table. If you missed our announcement about Vlad joining us, you can find that post here (URL LINK). Part of this timeline is also impacted by a few unexpected technical challenges that arose with the upcoming 2.12 release. While we wish this update would have had a much smoother release, we are grateful to all of our playtesters who have helped to identify bugs that can only be established via mass gameplay.
  

Now we have decided a few things about the Roadmap so far, and wanted to share those with you at this stage before it’s introduced to help set expectations.

Update Frequency: We are aiming to update the Roadmap once every two months. Even if nothing significant has happened in the interim, we at least want to share that everything that we have laid out on it remains accurate.

• No Dates: One of the lessons from the previous attempts at a Roadmap is that we have not been great at hitting our own estimated dates.  When we first launched the Roadmap, we made a point to emphasize that dates can and likely would shift - yet we still found ourselves getting too specific, and even with this warning we witnessed too much frustration with changes. Going forward, the Roadmap will focus more on presenting a Release Order and a set of priorities. Release dates for content will be communicated much closer to their actual release, so don’t worry we’re not going to sneakily update the game with a new faction without you noticing. Ultimately though experience has shown us that communicating dates too early in the development process only leads to broken promises.
  
• Other Communication Touchpoints: We will continue to engage through our social channels, and elsewhere within our community. We are also looking at other methods to keep communication flowing between Roadmap updates, so that you’re kept better informed of what’s happening behind the scenes at Offworld Industries. These will include our Developer Q&As which we started last year, a planned resumption of the Squad Chat Streams later this year, Server Spotlights, monthly Wrench Mod Features, and other ideas. Our goal here is to avoid long periods of radio silence while we’re developing the game. Some of these initiatives are on hold until we can hire a new Community Manager to replace Krispy.
  

We understand that with the precedent of the previous Roadmap attempts you might have expected our next Roadmap to include the dates, and be updated on a more frequent basis. However, given that both previous Roadmaps ended with missed deadlines, and were not updated as frequently as promised we think that this time a more conservative approach is needed. While we will make mistakes we can also try our best to avoid repeating the same ones again, and again. Our aim is to not return to the complete lack of transparency that predated the first iteration of our Roadmap, and to instead iterate further and shift our approach in a manner that makes the most amount of sense for our team.

We know that you’re all anxious for the new Roadmap, and we’re anxious to be able to share with you our priorities and what we’re working on! For now all we can ask is for your patience, as we work towards getting that to you.

Best,

- The Offworld Industries Team

Greetings Squaddies!

Today is an exciting day here at Offworld Industries as we’re introducing our new CEO to the world! We’d like everyone in the Squad community to give a warm welcome to game industry veteran Vlad Ceraldi who is joining the team and bringing with him a wealth of knowledge and experience from Canadian studios like Radical Entertainment, Hothead Games, and Silicon Knights to help us level up here at OWI.

Since the departure of our previous CEO Offworld has been led by a committee of our executive team and we are looking forward to Vlad helping to guide the studio’s strategic vision and improve our efforts across the board.

While we could wax on about Vlad’s qualities, trying to butter up the new boss, it’s probably best to let him say a few things to our players about what he’s excited about as he joins OWI!

“Offworld’s independent origins mirrors my own in so many ways that I felt an immediate kinship with the studio and I am already having a ton of fun. The studio is filled with a lot of great talent and we have some exciting things in the works for our players. We have a lot of work to do but we have a great year ahead. I look forward to helping the company deliver fun new experiences for our Squad community, and overcoming some of the challenges the team faced last year.”

Now things aren’t going to change overnight here at OWI. Squad is not going to suddenly become an open world sports management simulator or a 2D platformer. With Vlad at the helm OWI is going to continue to grow, as our new CEO helps to guide strategic vision, and improve our processes across the board as we continue to develop new content for Squad, new titles, and beyond!

The future of Squad, and Offworld is looking bright, as we move forward in 2022 with purpose and passion!

We hope to see you on the front lines!

- Offworld Industries