Squad Update 10.7: Oskil River Playtest Starts November 6

Offworld Industries has opened a new public playtest for Squad, running from November 6 to November 9, built around a map most of the 100-player tactical shooter's community hasn't touched before: Oskil River. The playtest is also doing double duty as a stress test for the game's ongoing World Partition performance work, and it previews several changes headed for the full Update 10.7 release.

01What's in the Update 10.7 Playtest

The playtest build bundles three separate threads of development into one testing window. The headline item is Oskil River, a brand-new Eastern European map. Alongside it, Offworld is running performance tests on four existing maps that have been converted to the World Partition system, plus early looks at a reworked Identify Friend from Foe (IFF) system and updated player models for the Middle Eastern Insurgent (MEI) faction. None of this is confirmed for the live build in its current form — Offworld is explicit that ranges, opacity, and tuning on the new systems are still work-in-progress and subject to change before Update 10.7 ships.

02Oskil River: A New Eastern European Map

Oskil River is set in a war-torn Eastern European landscape mixing heavily damaged settlements and urban blocks with open terrain and trench lines, aimed at supporting both infantry pushes and armored play. Offworld says it has leaned on more detailed environmental set dressing than usual to sell the setting. The map already runs on World Partition, Unreal Engine's streaming-world system, which is the other half of what this playtest exists to check.

03World Partition Performance Test

Squad has been gradually porting its map roster to World Partition, and performance on the conversion has been a recurring community complaint. This playtest asks server hosts to run four more maps on World Partition layers specifically so Offworld can gather feedback across a wider range of hardware: Gorodok, Yehorivka, Narva, and Mutaha. If you've been holding off on jumping into a World Partition server over stutter or frame-time concerns, this window is the most direct way to tell Offworld whether the optimization work is landing.

04Identify Friend from Foe Overhaul

The playtest also previews a reworked IFF system aimed at making it faster to tell teammates from enemies at range without relying purely on name tags. Without aiming down sights, players will automatically see teammate name tags up close, which fade to a simple icon at medium range and disappear entirely once a teammate is out of sight. Aiming down sights flips the logic: name tags disappear, and a friendly icon appears only while a teammate is inside your sight picture and within range, scaled by your scope's magnification. The practical effect Offworld is going for is less name-tag clutter at long range and a quicker read on whether the silhouette in your sights is one of yours — if there's no icon when you're aiming at someone, Offworld notes it's highly likely an enemy, though every range and opacity value here is still tuned for testing rather than locked in.

05MEI Player Model Update

Update 10.7 also carries updated player models for the Middle Eastern Insurgent faction, one of Squad's longest-running asymmetric factions. Offworld hasn't published a detailed changelog for the model work beyond confirming it's included in this build, so treat the scope of the visual changes as unconfirmed until the full patch notes land.

06How to Join the Playtest

The Oskil River playtest runs on a separate app called Squad - Public Testing, which you can find and install directly through your Steam library search — no beta branch opt-in on the main Squad app is required. The window is open from November 6 through November 9, after which Offworld will fold feedback into the finished Update 10.7 build — the full announcement on Squad's Steam news page has the complete rundown of what's being tested. If you're also chasing a smoother frame rate on the live branch in the meantime, it's worth cross-checking your in-game settings against what each map's current World Partition conversion actually supports before assuming a drop in performance is this playtest's doing.

07What This Means for Update 10.7

None of the systems in this build are final. Offworld has flagged the IFF ranges and opacity curves as explicitly work-in-progress, and a playtest map traditionally goes through further revisions before a full release. Still, the combination of a new map, a dedicated performance pass on four legacy maps, and a faction-wide model refresh points to Update 10.7 being one of the more substantial content drops in Squad's recent update cadence. Expect full patch notes once the playtest window closes and Offworld locks the build for its live release; keep an eye on Squad's official site for the finished changelog.