Listen up, Squaddies!
Unreal Engine 5 Public Playtest #4 is coming this Friday, May 30, 2025 11:00 AM PDT!
Here’s what to expect:
You will need to download a special Playtesting Branch of Squad, that will be released ASAP, with access to Servers on Friday 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!
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 May 30th to June 2nd, and then the UE5 Servers will be taken down.
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.
The Important Stuff
In place of a change log this week, I would simply like to let you know what exactly we are looking for in our test results!
- There is currently an issue where a massive freeze happens during a match, that can seem to affect just one person, or multiple people at the same time. We are calling it the 1FPS issue. We have created a build that has better tracking specifically for this issue, so that we can try to pin down the problem and resolve it.
- We have added more Server performance optimizations that we would like to test, including an interesting tool for Server Hosters that should allow them to Multi-Thread Vehicle animations, significantly reducing the impact that vehicles have on server side performance.
- We have implemented an introductory option for replacing Picture in Picture (PiP) scopes for players with lower end computers, or anyone that feels the significant drop in FPS when using a PiP scope. This setting will be available for anyone to enable in the settings menu.
We did add a bunch of fixes that came in since the last playtest, but the above information is what we would love to focus on for this weekend. So if you have time, please come join us and submit your feedback! We will have a working Feedback Form (confirmed working this time, sorry about last week), and the Testing Discord is still active for those of you wanting to join the discussion over there!