Hello Squaddies!
The time has come! Open playtesting for Unreal Engine 5 is arriving this Friday!
Here’s what to expect:
- You will need to download a special Playtesting Branch of Squad, that will be released later this week, with access on Friday Apr 11, 2025, around 11am PDT.
- There will be multiple servers being hosted by Community names that you will know and recognize! Feel free to play wherever you like, but servers will open and close to accommodate the population needs! The general public will not be given access to the Server hosting branch for testing.
- There is a special Squad Testing Discord that has now been opened to the public. Please be aware that all the normal Squad Community server rules apply in this server as well. Please refer to the onboarding channels for help if you need it! https://discord.gg/testsquad
We want to also mention that this is a WORK IN PROGRESS build of Unreal Engine 5, and is still in active development. That means you are likely to come up against bugs, or features that don’t work/feel the same way as the current 8.2 version of Squad. We have included some known issues in this post, but anything that you come up against can be reported in the previously mentioned Discord Server for testing.
Testing will run over the weekend from April 11th to April 14th, and then the UE5 builds will be taken down. Our goal is to run these tests every 2 weeks, with iterations to try each weekend of Public playtesting!
We are also hoping you can take the time to fill out a survey for us, answering some questions about your experience during testing. This will be available IN GAME, in the News Box on the main menu. We will send out a reminder of this later on as well.
Known Issues:
- We are aware of an issue that causes the player's FPS to drop to 1 for an amount of time. We are tracking this issue and would appreciate any and all reports of this.
- We have yet to add the final pass on many of the Vehicles across the Factions. Paired with the new Vehicle physics, many of the vehicles may feel foreign or behave differently than you expect. Some Vehicles can get stuck on objects easier than in UE4 as well. Please leave us feedback on this in Discord.
- There are some issues with PiP scopes that we are still working on.
- Some areas of the map may be too dark or too light when looking into or out of buildings.
- There are some known client crashes. Using the Unreal Engine crash report tool that pops up once Squad crashes, is a good way for us to receive a client crash.If you crash WITHOUT seeing the crash reporter, please let us know through the Testing Discord Server.
- There are some texture streaming related issues, which can cause microstutters especially when a VFX is starting to play.
- There are some visual artifacts relating to lighting and upscalers. There may be reduced sharpness, smearing, shadows or water surface shimmering or flickering may occur. This is something we are working to adjust for the next public playtest.
- For other issues, please report bugs in a bug report channel with as much information as possible.
Stay tuned for more information in the coming days!