Unreal Engine 5 - Playtest #2

Listen up, Squaddies!

Unreal Engine 5 Public Playtest 2 is coming this Friday, May 02, 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 later this week, with access on Friday.

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! Join the Discord HERE!

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 2nd to May 5th, 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.

Here is the changelog from last playtest!

Changelog:

• Significant changes were included that should increase Server Performance overall. We identified a couple of things that were causing issues, including excess animations, that have been adjusted!

• Smoke grenades no longer continuously exploding when walked over

• Hands no longer disappear when vaulting

• Scout drones are no longer infinite in quantity

• Vehicles no longer instantly reload when near Repair Stations

• Buildings no longer have bullet-proof glass

• Technicals are no longer aggressively loud

• Weapons (general) several LOD issues have been fixed with infantry weapons

Some more changes:

Scalability:

• Updated to latest version of DLSS, offering greatly improved clarity in most scenes using the new Preset

• Tweaks to volumetric clouds settings, giving better performance for low presets

Worlds:

• Fixed landscape materials being broken on Tallil and Mestia

• Further attempts at optimization across our worst performing maps, still more to come

• Work is being done to the southeast corner of Al Basrah to address feedback from the first playtest, still WIP

These are just some of the changes made, that were the most popular bugs and feedback from the last playtest. We have resolved many more smaller issues.

Known Issues:

• 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 has been an initial pass on the vehicles since the first playtest.

• 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