Squad Playtest Brings Oskil River Map and World Partition Performance Tests
Offworld Industries is running an open playtest for Squad from November 6th to November 9th, with the test window starting and ending at 11 AM PT (UTC-7). The focus is a new map called Oskil River, along with a round of performance testing for the World Partition system and a preview of some changes coming in Update 10.7.
Oskil River is set in an Eastern European war zone, mixing damaged settlements and urban blocks with open fields and trench networks. The idea is to give both infantry and armored gameplay room to work, and the team has added more environmental detail to make the setting feel lived in. Offworld is upfront that the map is still a work in progress, with unfinished textures and prop placement in places, and trenches that can be awkward to climb out of.
World Partition Gets Put Through Its Paces
Oskil already runs on World Partition, but during the playtest hosts will also spin up Gorodok, Yehorivka, Narva, and Mutaha using the same system. Performance has come up a lot in community discussion, so this test is specifically meant to gather data from different hardware setups. If you want to help, Offworld is asking for feedback through the Squad Community Playtesting Discord, especially on frame rates and stability across these maps.
Other Changes in the Mix
The build also includes updated player models for the Middle Eastern Insurgent faction, and a reworked friend-or-foe identification system. Outside of aiming down sights, nearby teammates show name tags at close range and switch to a simple icon at medium range, with opacity shifting based on distance and whether a teammate is actually in your field of view. Icons disappear if a teammate is fully blocked from sight.
When you aim down sights, the system changes again: name tags are replaced by a single friendly icon that only shows up within a tuned range, and scopes adjust that range depending on magnification. If no icon shows up in your sights, the idea is you can reasonably assume it is not a friendly. Offworld notes that all these ranges and opacity values are still being tuned and may change before anything ships for real.
Known issues so far include the mouse pointer disappearing on map change (pressing Tab or Enter a few times fixes it), the identification icons not reacting fast enough when someone ducks behind cover or has their hip blocked by geometry, occasional rubber-banding, and names or icons showing up on players who are incapacitated.
What This Means If You Run Mods
This test lives entirely on the separate Squad – Public Testing app on Steam, not on the main branch, and you may need to enable Hidden Apps in your Steam library to see it. Community hosts are running the test servers, and the general public does not get access to the server hosting branch itself.
Because this is isolated from the live game, anything you have installed for the regular Squad branch should be unaffected for now. As a general rule, separate test branches like this don’t usually require changes to existing mods until the tested build actually becomes part of the live update, so there is no need to touch your setup yet. Just keep in mind that everything shown here, from Oskil River’s layout to the identification system’s ranges, is explicitly described as subject to change before it reaches Update 10.7 in its final form.
Based on the developer's announcement on Steam, 3 November 2026.
