Inspired by the Project Reality modification for Battlefield 2, the game will place its players in a realistic environment and encourage them to work together. Doing so tends to be an excellent way to build an immersive and visceral combat atmosphere. To those familiar with PC shooters, the best way to describe this would be as a middle ground between the Battlefield and Arma series.

Built from the ground up in the Unreal Engine 4, Squad pits teams of up to 50 players against each other in white knuckle modern day combined-arms combat scenarios, with both conventional and unconventional forces. The players dictate how the scenarios unfold with base-building and interactive environments, intuitive squad command and management tools and large-scale warfare where strategy and leadership are just as important as a quick trigger finger.

The battlefield of Squad is built around organized teams using both the environment and the assets available within the ga6me to wage a tactical battle against an opposing team. From role organization to base building to vehicle mechanics, teamwork amplifies the effectiveness of the tools at your disposal. Supported by intuitive positional VOIP and navigation systems players will be able to maintain situational awareness and seamlessly interact with others. Dedicated chain of command channels and localized voice will be an effective tool for communication and organization.

Version 5.0 (available 1700 UTC on March 22) comes packed with a number of UI and quality of life improvements to help smooth out the experience in-game, as well as a number of balance and performance tweaks, not to mention a whole slew of additional expanded areas for maps that are currently in rotation.

Maps

As outlined in the last monthly recap, we have a number of map updates and new areas for players to duke it out.  Two of the five released maps have had expansions, and a third map will be expanded later this week, with new villages, train stations, and loads of minor details added across all of the maps over the course of this development sprint.  Alpha version 6 will see expansion of the remaining two released maps, as well as further detailing of the released maps as the mapping team move towards releasing the next two announced maps in production.

Updated UI Map Look

The map and respawn screen has received a huge code and art pass.  The developers have achieved a major performance increase over the previous versions, as well as fixed a large number of small annoyances, porting over parts of the heavy Blueprint code over to C++.  Significant progress has been made toward the look and feel of the Squad experience and some of this new look as debuted in this art pass to improve the readability, look and feel of the in game map.  Expect a full fledged expansion of Squad's UI and art over the coming months.

Optics

Ongoing improvement in the look and feel of optics in game continues, this time with improvements to sight picture, adding a slight blur, as well as differentiation of sway patterns between optics and iron sights, which in effect alter the time to target acquisition of various weapon loadouts.  The third most noticeable improvement is the adjustments to all magnified optics to more accurately represent their realistic values in-game using a magnification to FOV calculation. This fixed Russian AK optics having too much magnification and has shown promising balancing between Russian and US equipped factions in internal testing.

Stamina

Standing around waiting for your stamina to regenerate before you jumped over a knee high wall is not fun, so we've fixed that. We've reduced the stamina cost for the first jump, but added an increasing stamina penalty the more you jump in succession. Preserve your stamina, spread out your jumps!  As the mantra on this team has been to discourage dirty bunnyhopping, this update will go one further in prevention while still providing flexibility in player movement decisions.

Server Licensing

We now have official server licensing system in place for communities and server providers wishing to officially host a server and be officially sanctioned by us to provide the ideal Squad experience to players. We are adding this system in order to quickly direct players to servers that have -

• Quality, dedicated administration
• Have reliable and powerful server hardware
• Promote teamwork and communication in their community and/or clan.
• Provide a positive environment for new players to learn the game and play with more experienced players.
• Use the vanilla Squad gamemode rules so regular players know what to expect (will be important once modding is possible)
• More information about applications and server licensing HERE.

Squad is currently available on Steam Early Access.

Squad seeks to establish a culture of camaraderie that is unparalleled in competitive multiplayer shooters. This is a game where you can work together and coordinate with your team: players from around the world, often that you just met.

Squad will support up to 100 players in competitive multiplayer. This broad scope serves to immerse the player into a rich battle environment filled with challenges and opportunities. With teams of sufficient size, some players can perform supporting roles while leaving enough front-line combatants to provide fun and challenging gameplay across the full expanse of the battlefield.

A wide variety of support vehicles and aircraft will be included. Tanks and close support helicopters will spearhead a team’s assault into enemy lines while transport helicopters and APCs will provide much needed logistics and transportation support.

Commanders and squad leaders will be given the ability to shape the battlefield through construction of defensive and offensive fortifications as well as control of battlefield planning and supplemental combined arms assets. Coupled with this, spawn dynamics will be affected by occupation of territories and level of supply each objective is receiving. Organized control of the battlefield will ensure a properly supported supply structure and pave the way for a strategic victory.

It’s all about teamwork.

Key Features:

• Massive Online 50 vs 50 Squad-Based Combined Arms Warfare
• Large scale maps up to 8km^2. (currently working with 2km and 4km maps)
• Organic and Emergent Gameplay, this won’t be a linear shooter
• Maps based on Geographic Information System satellite data of real world locales
• True First Person (aka ‘body awareness’) character models, there won’t be walking gunheads here. High quality models and complex animations systems.
• Built in Voice Over IP using the best codecs available, with attenuated localized, intra-squad radio, and inter-squad command radio communications.
• Simulated damage models and simulated ballistics
• NO grinding rewards system and no dress up dolls
• Showcase Deployables and Base Building which no other military FPS has.
• Real world current time period armaments using highly accurate modelling
• Teamwork oriented gameplay that doesn't require a clan or private server to fully realize the potential of the gameplay.
• The creation, defense, destruction and resupply of chained spawn positions in an overlapping and always fluid emergent chessboard designed in our maps.
• A very open development team with excellent community communication, and preparations in progress for mod support near retail release.
• Essentially an "everything" game. Infantry/Logistics/Air Combat/CAS/Armor Warfare