most popular tactical shooter in the land today, is
finally moving to consoles. To help understand the hows and whys of this move, I sat down with
Peter Maurice, the charismatic executive producer at Offworld Industries,
and the man currently leading Squad through its biggest challenge yet:
turning the biggest name in the business into a successful console port.
Troopers: Extermination within OWI (read our interview with him here), and previously worked on major titles like EA Sports’ NHL and FIFA
(directing the iconic The Journey mode in FIFA 17), and United Front
Games’ Hong Kong adventure
Sleeping Dogs. It’s quite the resume, and one I’d love to bother him about further,
but in this interview, we’re going to talk Squad.
racked up a modest 620 hours in Squad since December 2019, a Christmas
gift that briefly tanked my university performance, though Peter “won’t
take credit for that”.
Getting Technical with Squad
Q: When did the idea to bring Squad to consoles first come up, as a
concept and as a concrete goal? Squad isn’t the kind of game that comes
to mind when you boot up your PlayStation, on the surface.
at all. That’s something the studio has been looking at for the last 2 or
3 years in general because it is like a foundational game for Offworld and
a game in which we’re always looking to expand our audiences across
whatever platform is out there. Console is one of the prominent platforms
out there right now that we are not on with Squad.
another first-person shooter game. That game was brought to console, so we
built that while learning and gained more confidence.
bring Squad to console, including how we would need to improve the
performance across all areas to hit our goal of 4K resolution with
upscaling at 60 frames per second as a PVP game. That’s super important
for us. Early results from the console tech alpha have been extremely
promising and have shown that we were already there for the most
part.
want to go. We want to grow Squad, the community, and we want as many
players as possible to experience what I call ‘the magic of Squad.’ Once
you get in and play it, there’s this soul that you don’t find in
comparable titles, and that sticks with you. The console market’s ripe for
that type of gameplay because tactical milsims are so underserviced there.
Q: Squad does sit in an interesting space because it has enough
coordination assists compared to, say, ARMA Reforger. I like ARMA
Reforger, but it drops you in there all alone, whereas Squad still has
some tools to help the squad lead herd the cats a little bit, so to
speak.
market. There’s not a built-in community of veterans that have been with
us for years like on PC.
party system, for example, lets you stick with your friends and go server
to server to server. You’ll also be able to join companies in our clan
system that’ll be coming online in the next update on PC. Building
communities is key, especially when you’re growing a brand new community
on console in a new ecosystem. For us, it was a win-win. We’re making the
game more approachable and accessible without changing the soul of Squad.
We want to help get people there quicker and understand it faster, and
that works across all of our platforms.
Q: You mentioned the performance being a big thing early. Squad has been
relatively candid about the Unreal Engine 5 transition, and your team
made a very good series of videos explaining the engine upgrade. How
does the Unreal Engine 5 toolkit allow for such a big change from PC to
consoles, where you have standardized hardware?
[Tech Lead] Norby on our team;
go check those out.
transition from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5
was necessary, and not just to go to console. It meant modernizing the
entire game for all audiences because it gave us technology that wasn’t
available.
and scale. In order to get those performant, we needed new technology. It
was very challenging, but the team came out the other side, and you’re
starting to see that now in how smoothly the game is running on PC and the
PlayStation 5 tech alpha.
system, and transitioning over to enhanced input and common UI on the back
end allowed us to go to console, but it also gave us huge performance
improvements on PC. We’re putting out another big update in December for
the PC, targeting massive memory savings across all of our maps, with
performance improvements across the board.
studio like us, but it was needed to benefit the PC players and also allow
us to go to consoles. I talked to the team a lot about us turning that
corner where a lot of the major tech investment is done, and the question
is, what do we have? How do we work with it? How do we get it to our
players so that they benefit from all these savings? That’s really what
our vision was from the studio and the game team right along the way. The
end-point was to level up performance and optimization across the board.
perspective, and in many ways it’s very easy to develop because you don’t
have to worry about min, medium, and high-spec machines across a myriad of
PCs that could have tons of applications running besides your game that’s
fighting for CPU and memory resources. However, it comes with other
complications.
Q: Besides the memory savings that you mentioned, what improvements that
were necessary for the console version do you think will be kind of more
felt on PC?
being tanked by the UI. It was running in the background during gameplay,
which is not conducive to a good experience. That was one of the things
that we’ve just introduced in our
10.6 update on PC. Then there’s also the virtual texture system and how we stream in our
maps. Those are the two big areas for performance.
might not seem to have a big impact, but when you have a lot of these
small things, it improves performance significantly, like audio, VFX, and
gameplay optimization.
live in Blueprints, and what lives in code should live in code. We’re
working on deep-dive technical videos because our community just eats
those up. They love it when Roger, Norby, and the team get in front of the
camera. I love listening to them because I could probably understand a
small sample of it.
on these gigantic maps with tons of mechanized units and 50 other people
on your team. We focus on keeping that gameplay momentum going through
performance and optimization improvements.
Command and Controllers
you balance that out, both in terms of infantry, land vehicles, and
aircraft? Has that helped HOTAS implementation for the helicopters?
controller support is at around 95% ready. Having the ability on a PC
player to plug in a controller and have analog control over the gas, the
brakes, the flight stick, the steering wheel, it’s a game changer.
have on PC. Now players can grab the controller when they want to do a
logi run, or get to the lines quickly in a jeep or on a quadbike, and it
just feels amazing. Helicopters are the same way.
helicopters. The first thing I tell passengers when I play on PC Squad is
that I’m not really good at landing, so prepare to jump off 10 feet above
the ground and bandage, right? But playing with the sticks on the
controller, especially during the PlayStation 5 alpha, I still give that
warning to anybody who’s jumping in with me, but I land more successfully
now than ever, which is a really good feeling.
improved some of the HOTAS controls. Players are really giving us a lot of
feedback there, and we’re looking to expand it in the future, potentially
also adding wheel support on PC for vehicles. I shouldn’t say too much
because my team will probably read this interview and go, “Oh, Pete’s
signing us up for something else.”
already complex on mouse and keyboard over to controller. We did that in
phases. We got in and play-tested with a lot of the people brought over to
work on the console version of Squad. I should say the console port; it’s
not really a version. It’s Squad. It’s the same game.
understood what it means to have good controller feel in a first-person
shooter. We’re continuously taking feedback through our tech alpha and
internally, but we’ve also looked at what our PC community was doing with
community controls on Steam.
input interface already, and we’re using that as guidance. The designers
would play on PC using a controller, see all these community inputs, and
look at it and say, “Oh my gosh, this is really good. This is smooth.”
We’d use that as more feedback to infer the decisions we made on
controller.
you’re not fighting your memory on what button combination to get your
tools out as a medic or as an engineer or as you know, or something simple
like dropping your ammo bag as a rifleman. It should not require finger
gymnastics. The tech alpha is giving us some really, really good insights
on that, and it’s only going to get better through our feedback process.
different vehicles, helicopters, infantry controls, and all of our roles
have specific things they want. We want to get it right and put our best
foot forward there with the controller.
tell you so far about how console players ‘think’ differently from their
PC counterparts, when looking at match data?
feedback. But by playing, the one thing I noticed is “who killed me?”
You’ve played Squad. A lot of people have played Squad. That’s a common
thing until you understand the silhouette of the enemy and really look at
that. It didn’t really surprise me, but I heard that feedback in gameplay
sessions that have included a lot of team killing. Things like that will
happen in games like this until you’re comfortable.
the job is learning the other faction, learning what their helmets look
like, what their silhouettes look like, coordinating with your team,
things like that.
mil-sim on a platform that doesn’t have a lot of those games. We have to
make sure we’re caring for and respecting the people who come into our
game, and giving them more information. For example, rally points, right?
What the role of a squad lead is, how important that role is, and how
spawning works, why building a FOB is super important, burying your radio;
that’s knowledge that good squad leads will impart to people. However,
when you’re starting from scratch, you need to kind of get some hints and
breadcrumbing to help figure that out.
benefit too. We always have intakes of new players just coming to Squad
across the board. They’re just coming, and they want to play where they
play, which could be PC, could be XBOX, could be PlayStation. They weren’t
major surprises because we’ve noticed them as a team that we want to look
at for Squad in general, and that’s the beauty of being one Squad, one
community.
simulators in particular, a big debate is how to balance that out for
big screens, small screens, and VR. Did you have to change things as far
as the visuals and rendering go to make the experience feel the same?
Many console players will be playing on a TV and sitting quite far away,
while on the computer you tend to be more buried in the monitor.
looked at was how to spot players, especially at a distance. It was
important for us to go for the 4K with resolution upscaling, but outside
of just specific rendering techniques available on consoles that are not
necessarily available on PC, we’ve done really nothing in that realm.
Through our feedback process so far, players are having just the same
success and challenges that they’re having in the regular game on spotting
enemies and things like that.
part of it is that it’s not run-and-gun. There are moments in the game
where it is, like when you’re trying to clear a room, or you’re defending
a HAB, or anything like that, but that’s it.
like the PC version, except on a big 60-inch screen with a controller,
which we’re really happy with.
groan about, but let’s talk suppression. I’m a big defender of it. I
think Squad does better than most games. Did you have to adjust the
suppression on the game as a whole for better controller playability, or
does everything work sort of the same?
one platform or the other. We did a suppression update based on community
feedback in the summer, and it went over amazingly well across the
community. This made it less, in my words, nauseating. Sometimes when
getting suppressed by a .50 cal, I had to turn away. It was really bad, so
we changed it, and it’s gone over extremely well.
minus a number of maps and factions at launch, is Squad. That’s our golden
rule. It’s always Squad no matter where you play.
Of Platforms and Factions
like the Switch 2, for example, or further handheld optimization?
Project Marketing Manager] Matthew [Beckett]. I do what Matthew tells me.
PlayStation. We’re looking at another alpha or maybe even a beta down the
line more than we were before, which is good. I’m not going to say
definitely yes, but I’m certainly not going to say no.
announced, which is PlayStation 5 and XBOX Series X|S. Secret Mode has had
a successful run with other games that have come out first on PlayStation
and XBOX; then we’ve gone on to make other platform versions, including
the Nintendo Switch 2, but at the minute, our main focus is those two
platforms.
the corner with the tech improvements. Many months ago, it was said that
the focus was on getting the tech part sorted and then you could think
about factions, so I have to ask: France faction, are there immediate
plans that you can talk about or not yet?
Discord sometimes. I’m notorious for that; I get in, and I just talk.
Matthew and his team are probably going to hate that, but I’m a gamer. I
play a lot of games, and I love the games I produce, so that’s huge for
me.
the game in 2027. That’s been something that the team and the communities
have wanted for a long while. We did a big modernization of our PLA
[People’s Liberation Army, the People’s Republic of China’s land arm]
faction in the early part of this year. Our goal is to look at as many
factions as possible and bring them up to modern standards, with new
weapons, new vehicles, and stuff like that.
lot of new cool stuff. The faction realm is super important to our
community and our player base, so we are actively doing that. But on top
of that, we’re working on modernization of our infantry gameplay.
quality-of-life improvements and community asks. There are other things
that I’m not going to get into right now, but there’s a lot of cool stuff
coming. That’s our goal now that we’ve turned that tech corner.
optimization, and performance improvements. The job’s never done in those
areas, but the big major pieces that we wanted are a little bit behind us
right now, so we’re getting up to speed and using that tech to our
advantage.
details because I don’t want to step on one of my designers; then people
will take it as a promise later, and then it becomes a whole thing.
Anything I say, internally, is like, “Oh, Peter said that, so he must want
it done,” and I don’t operate that way. It’s been fun, thank you, and I
appreciate the time.
Q: Thank you very much for the insights, Peter, and thanks to Matthew
and Zac as well for setting this up!
X/S port coming in 2027.
You can sign up for news on the console port here.
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