EA Motive has revealed the progression, unlocks and rewards for the upcoming Star Wars Squadrons in a new blog post.

The core pillars of Squadrons’ online experience (outside of the game modes themselves) are Challenges, Operations, and your Level.

Within each of these are ways for you to be rewarded with Glory, a currency only earned by playing that’s used to unlock cosmetics.

You’ll also get Experience (XP) while playing from just about everything, allowing you to level up and earn Requisition, the currency used to unlock ship components.

Challenges

Your main forms of reward beyond post-match earnings will be through Challenges. Daily and Operation Challenges; they’re timed, rotating objectives you can complete to get rewards while playing.

You’ll want to regularly complete your Daily Challenges to keep getting rewarded while playing Squadrons. They’re often simple objectives that provide you with Glory to unlock cosmetics for your starfighters and pilots and encourage you to try different ships and components to achieve completion. 

Glory is also earned based on how you perform in a match. Operation Challenges, however, are different. They can reward you with unique cosmetics and are tied to the game’s ongoing Operations.

Operations And Ranks

Operations are 8-week cycles that happen in Star Wars Squadrons, and each Operation brings with it a set of unique cosmetic rewards that can only be earned by completing its Challenges.

Certain Challenges also offer unique rewards, too, so once they’re gone, you won’t be able to get the cosmetic unless the Operation Challenges return one day. Seeing which pilots are showing off their unique flair will be a good way to tell if you’re up against a dedicated ace.

Also tied into these 8-week resets is your Fleet Battles rank. With every Operation’s conclusion and the start of a new one, your competitive rank tied to Fleet Battles will reset, allowing for a regular reassessment of your skills. To get your first rank, you’ll need to play in ten placement matches.

The ranks are as follows from lowest to highest:

Maverick – Hotshot – Hero – Valiant – Legend – Galactic Ace

The system is built to encourage players to improvement their skills without being overly punishing if you run into some bad luck:

• Players are protected from demotion into lower divisions for the length of an active Operation. What this means is that you cannot drop from Legend to Valiant but you can drop from Legend III to Legend II.
• At the end of the Operation, players receive Glory based on the maximum Rank achieved rather than their current Rank.

Players also get exclusive helmets upon reaching the Valiant, Legend, and Galactic Ace Ranks for the first time. These are the same across all Operations, so if you didn’t manage to get the ones you wanted during your first Operation, you can still get them in the upcoming ones.

Levels

Players also have their own personal level. Your level is a linear progression path that does not reset, unlike your competitive rank. For the first forty levels, you’ll unlock Requisition points that can be used to unlock ship components.

If you’re one of our more dedicated pilots and you hit level 40, you’ll have enough points to unlock all components, allowing you to try out every potential starfighter build. Our goal with levelling isn’t that you’ll get more powerful as you level up, but rather that you’ll have more options available to you (via components) as you play.

As mentioned before, there will also be occasional bonus events that play out over time, including ones that provide additional Glory. Beyond that, completing parts of the game will also provide you with cosmetic bundles.

Players will get a bundle of cosmetics for completing the single-player story mode and another for completing the Fleet Battles tutorial.

Recently, the developer also announced that the game has gone gold. Star Wars: Squadrons will launch for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC (Steam, Origin, and Epic Games Store) on 2 October 2020.