The Cycle: Frontier was a good idea executed poorly
Co-op Multiplayer.
PvP Multiplayer.
One major problem that Yarger never managed to address was the feeling of loneliness while exploring Fortuna III due to the small player count of each lobby, which saw as little as 12 players being allowed on the surface before a new instance was created.
While this allowed new players room to breathe, it also made finding others to interact with difficult. It was not uncommon to go without seeing another player for multiple hours at a time, despite The Cycle: Frontier’s at the time fairly large concurrent user count of around 5k players during off-peak times and around 12k during peak NA/EU hours.
I must preface this by saying there were a few locations on Fortuna III that occasionally spawn interesting items; however, most players extracted only with a selection of crafting components and quest items that, while admittedly aided in the acquisition of better quality loot, did not have the thrill of instant gratification that finding a rare weapon or piece of armour would have offered.
This situation was made worse due to how rare player encounters are, meaning that chances of taking someone else’s loadout were minimal, and new players found themselves using low-end weaponry and farming PvE encounters almost endlessly to progress.
While the removal of mandatory wipes made The Cycle: Frontier more approachable for casual players, endlessly farming low-tier enemies and making repeated drops to gather low-end crafting materials quickly lost its shine, a problem made all the worse by the limited carrying capacity of bags that were readily available to new and casual players alike.
The Cycle: Frontier was a good game, but there was nothing to keep veteran players engaged long term; with no proverbial carrot on a stick or promise of new or more exciting locations to explore, players found themselves farming better gear, only to use said gear to continue playing the same lacklustre PvPvE content they had been farming endlessly.
If I were Yager, I would have focused on making player encounters far more frequent. Without tangible risk/reward, the average drop onto Fortuna III was barely more exciting than a trip to a big box store, a large part of why it died when it had a very good chance of succeeding in almost every other regard.
Despite allowing players from Steam and Epic Launcher to play together, there was no way to carry progress between stores, meaning that players were stuck on whichever eversion they first played unless they were willing to lose all of their progress and unlocked cosmetics.
In a time when most games allow users to carry their progress across multiple platforms, being unable to carry progress between launchers felt nothing short of archaic.
Yager’s choice of aesthetic for The Cycle: Frontier worked well, and the bright colours and bold visuals helped to separate it from other titles on the market, all of which have a more grounded and less colourful aesthetic.
A bonus for developers and players is that highly stylised visuals such as those employed by The Cycle: Frontier and Fortnite age much slower than other aesthetics, which would have allowed The Cycle: Frontier to look its best for years to come, unfortunately, that was not to be the case with The Cycle: Frontier sunsetting for good in September 2023 for unrelated reasons.
When The Cycle first entered early access on Steam, it did so with a variety of founder packs that offered players a wide variety of fairly priced unique designs for their player character; unfortunately, with each successive cosmetic release since the quality of skins has seemed to lose not only quality but cohesion, with Fortuna III quickly becoming populated by a collection of absurd looking characters, whose only purpose was to appeal to players who value standing out from the crowd and who are willing to pay for it.
While discussing cosmetics, It would be remiss not to address how expensive The Cycle: Frontier’s cosmetics were, with skins costing roughly 150% of the price of comparable skins in titles such as Fortnite, Overwatch, and Call of Duty.
While every puzzle in The Cycle: Frontier could be completed solo, several puzzles that were required to progress faction reputation tracks had been designed with groups in mind, and as such, players found themselves performing an excessive amount of busy work for very little reward, something that even the most diehard supporters of the game conceded to be true.
The Cycle: Frontier is a shooter video game developed and published by YAGER, it was released on 8 June 2022 and it is Free-2-Play.
The Cycle: Frontier is available exclusively on PC.
The Cycle: Frontier is no longer in active development, and the developers have moved on to other projects.
The Cycle: Frontier is offline as of September 2023, and there are no publically known plans for a community/private server due to the small size of the community and the complexities involved in reverse engineering modern video games.
The Cycle: Frontier offers the following matchmaking options:
The following peripherals are officially supported:
The Cycle: Frontier is unrated and contains:
The Cycle: Frontier was a good game and a great way to introduce new players to the extraction genre, but with so many better and frankly more interesting and rewarding extraction titles on the market, it struggled to hold the attention of veteran gamers for more than a few weeks at a time.
