Hello Squaddies,
Howtizer here. We released a few “Letter from the Squad Leader” posts last year but I haven’t done one in a while. It’s also something that I did for the newsletter, I will now make this its own blog post the whole community gets access to instead of it trickling out through the newsletter. It will be semi-regular (once a month or two) to keep you, the community, up to date with everything that’s going on on the Squad team.
Usually I’d split things out into 2 segments, the "Sitrep," focusing on short-term plans, and the "Battlefield Briefing," focusing on medium to long-term plans, but for now I will skip the Battlefield Briefing to cover the Sitrep in more detail.
SQ-SITREP.
Where we are at…
We’re still working on UE5. Surprise!! As most of you already know, we are hard at work upgrading Squad to Unreal Engine 5. A lot of the team have been working on this for a long time, some since the last engine upgrade (4.27) we did 2 years ago, but most of the team shifted focus toward the end of last year, which is why you haven’t seen an update in a while. All the sub teams on Squad have had their hands in this Engine upgrade, as well as many people outside the Squad team at Offworld. It’s been a whole company effort.
4 open playtests have taken place over the last 2 months, and countless other closed tests before then and we are reaching that point where we feel confident in releasing it soon to gather feedback from the entire playerbase and move onto other things we have in our plans (more information on that in a future post). We want to make sure we deliver a solid engine update that improves most peoples experiences, and sets up Squad for another 10 years of development and kick ass content. So in the next section, I’ll talk about what to expect over the next month or so.
What to expect in the next few months…
There will be a few more public tests of Unreal 5 to help us test a few more improvements we’d like to make, as well as the release of the Mod SDK leaving modders some time to update their mods to Unreal 5. Some of this work includes more optimization efforts for PiP scopes, server performance improvements, and some serious testing of Unreal Engine 5.5 (5.5 has a lot of refinements from Epic that will help lower end PC Performance).
That’s all for now… In the next letter, we will cover a bit more about some of the challenges we have faced upgrading to Unreal 5 and talk about some future roadmap items… It’s been a long journey, but we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We are aiming to release v9.0 Summer 2025. We will not be releasing before the Steam Summer Sale. So expect to see v9.0 at some point after that.
Thanks, Squaddies!
- Howitzer