It’s a new week and we have got a big announcement!

For those that havent been hankering on every bit of news to come out via our other channels (Facebook, Twitter, the JoinSquad Reddit or the Forums), we are ending our Closed Pre-Alpha this week and moving right into our Closed Alpha phase of play-testing and development beginning this Saturday, 26th September at 6AM UTC / Friday 25th September at 11PM PST.

Closed Alpha means that people who have pledged during our Kickstarter at the Squad Leader tier will get access to the game in its Alpha form. Bear in mind that the game will continue to be in development, and we will be moving to a more relaxed Monthly cycle with builds, allowing for greater time between builds and more time for feature development and bug-squashing before it goes to public. Fear not, we will endeavor to put out more regular art and feature related updates during this period.

Squad Leaders should be getting their keys and access to the pre-alpha portal over the course of the week, so please keep an eye on your email inbox. We will also be shortly rolling out proper Founder and Backer tags on the forums.

Unlike the Closed Pre-Alpha, the Closed Alpha servers will be running 24/7.

Changelog – Closed Alpha V1

Audio

Heavy breathing now stops when you go into incapacitated state

Added bleeding heartbeat sounds.

Breathing from stamina no longer plays when in incapacitated state

Added Main menu music by Alkali.

New M4, M249, AK-74 and RPK fire sounds.

Added more deploy and reload sounds.

More footstep sounds and bullet impact sounds.

Added Rocket flyby sounds.

Added Radio filter for Squad and Command VOIP with transfer sounds.

Effects

Modified the scene tint for the incap state to blend smoothly from the low health state.

Fixed water hit effects not rendering correctly

Fixed vfx materials from going pitch black inside shadows and on dark maps.

Gameplay

When you get incapacitated your stamina is now set to 0

Fixed stamina being consumed when sprinting and going incap

Fixed dry load animation not playing issue

Fixed auto spawning when going straight to dead state

Fixed voice comms not working when incapacitated

Changes to rallypoints now mean that they will disappear after 9 players have spawned, as well as the squad leader being limited to placing a new one for 2 min after placing the last, unless the SL respawns at a FOB

FOB capture time increased

Flags now require 3 players to cap and 60 seconds of cap time to capture

Changed inventory system, weapons can now have a much more complex mag/ammo layout and button presses can be empty (pressing #2 on rifleman kits now no longer does anything)

Fixed various issues with revive and incapacitated state. Capsule no longer falls through the ground.

Fixed issues discovered when a person becomes incapacitated soon after revive.

Moved the point system to float instead of int, allowing finer grained control of points

Medic now heals 1% of health every 0.1s instead of 10% of health every 1 sec, making the ui and healing more fluent.

Fixed RPG7 and M27 LAW not having sway and properly aligned sights.

Fixed allow round in chamber handling for magazine reloading and fixed M249 to be open bolt

New Ammo / Magazine functionality. Ammo is now saved and sorted on reload.

Increased bandages for soldiers to 2, medic now has 6.

Fixed ability to bandage enemies

Changed bleeding rate from 1hp/sec to .5hp/sec

Maps

Added new Kohat Toi map layer and new area along south river

Update all maps to new AAS system, with flag names and ticket loss penalties

Updated Kohat Toi and Logar Valley with Foliage 2.0

Updated Logar Night lights to temp fix AMD card issues and low frames

Updated all Logar Valley map layers so flags take 60 seconds to neutralize and 120 to cap updated flag caps to 3 to cap and 60 seconds.

UI/HUD

Updated loading screen quick guide with new icons and info about Field Dressings

Fixed hard-to-see black font on the login screen

Added HUD icon to indicate whether or not chamber is loaded and fixed magazine counter

Allowed the M203 and GP25 to have a round in the chamber to show round chambered indicator on the HUD

Changed Incapacitated HUD icon to be displayed out to 50m instead of 5m, it should help in finding fallen comrades.

Added a scrollable Squads-list and the ability to collapse/expand Squads on the Squad list

Stamina now hides when full and linearly changes color depending on percentage

The map now shows the correct position of players

The map now shows markers correctly from player to player

Rally point tooltip now displays the number of spawns left

Fixed voice comms not being available when map is open

Fixed an issue where a FOB would be selected on the UI when it wasn’t

Fixed player duplication in the squad player lists

Fixed blur effect persisting after closing map.

Fixed not taking bleeding effect if > 100 damage taken

Added kills and deaths to the final score tally, as well as an indicator for when the next game will start

Added a map legend

FOBs will go red when overrun and become unselectable when spawning is unavailable

We hope that those that have played enjoyed themselves take as much pride in participating as we ourselves have been with bringing a game of this scale and ambition to you all.

BRING ON THE WEEKEND!

Offworld out.