Saving The Cycle Frontier: A Deep Dive

[Nerf Giraffes]

I along with many of you, greatly miss this game and was disheartened when I heard the unfortunate news that the cycle frontier was ending. The game was full potential and many of us truly enjoyed the aspects unique to the game. The Cycle: Frontier balanced the looter shooter part of the game, ensuring all loot was useful with crafting and hideout upgrades. With a unique graphic style and beautiful map design with careful consideration to traversing. While some felt the movement was a little clunky, however, it was very intuitive once you got used to it.

The first point I wanted to address was pricing and cheaters. For some reason, the developers decided to make the game free to play, which during the playtest was a brilliant way to get flocks of people to participate and check the game out. However, I think a few things weren’t considered. Cheaters and this was the main problem, obviously making the game free makes it incredibly easy for cheaters. There are many methods of combating cheaters and, you're never going to “solve” the problem, however, you can make it much harder for them. Which due to the free game allowed them to just create a new Steam account and join back. I’m no expert but here are some ideas, can only use Steam accounts with two-factor authentications enabled, steam accounts must be older than (1 year for example), and remove the ability to play on VPN. Allows for IP banning, and makes it more difficult to IP spoof.

The second part is the pricing, I think the game could have been sold for around the 40 USD mark, for the standard edition would be very reasonable. With the upgraded editions being more. Scout $9.99, Explorer $29.99, Prospector $59.99, Founder $124.99 The pricing of skins and other cosmetics was on the high side I think, with basic skins or recolours costing $20. It would have been nice to see charms and skins cost slightly less. I believe there was an evac skin for $100 dollars as one point??? Anyway I think making the game paid on release would have been a far better option that could have saved this game.

Now to dive into the mechanics that I think would have improved the game:

1. Fractions — The fractions were cumbersome, besides the guns the fractions didn't offer much utility & were a pain to run from one faction to the other. While I thought the station concept was cool, I think it would have been beneficial to introduce more items to be purchasable from the fractions. As there was some keycards, the drills, and meds, but besides that there wasn’t much depth to what each faction sold. KOROLEV (resources faction), ICA (Information Faction) & OSIRIS (Science Faction).

2. Story-line Quests — While the game had story-line quests, I think it would have been beneficial to introduce more purchasable items after completing the quests. A good example is the green and blue stims received from the trade quests. However, there were a lot of missed opportunities. The mineral scanner was a useless item, it provided no benefit for carrying. KOROLEV should have had a quest line related to different ores, completing these quests would unlock attachments for the mineral scanner. An example would be [mine 100 veltecite nodes & obtain 25 pure veltecite and hand it over] which would unlock a pure veltecite attachment for the mineral scanner. While this would be tedious, the effort is worth the reward. ICA could have had a table where you would unlock data drives over time, to receive rewards (attachments, keycards, weapons, rare items, etc). The items receivable and chances of receiving these items would relate to the rarity of the drive. Each drive takes a different time to unlock which could be sped up with K-marks or aurum. Drives once unlocked would give you 1-5 items and quantities based on rarity, a common item may give you 3-7 of that item. A rare 2-5, a epic 1-2. The epic drive would have a small 1% percentage of dropping items like a Veltecite heart, polirium crystal, abyss alloy, etc. Incentivising players to take the risk of upgrading their data drives at the various stations during their drops. The storm could have sped up data drive upgrade time, keeping players active on the map during the storm.

3. Quest & Job Rewards — I found many quests had useless rewards besides the K-marks and faction rep. Offering what I felt was often gear that would just be sold. Rewards like a scrapper weren’t exactly rewarding halfway through the quest lines. I think things like attachments and other rare resources could have been a better reward, it would have also been nice to receive a mystery item, which was selected from a pool of items based on job difficulty. Each faction could give different rewards, KOROLEV giving you resources like ores, veltecite, meteor fragments, focus crystals etc. While ICA might have rewarded you with more weapon attachments and keycards, Osiris with medical items, restorative helmets and items for crafting medical stuff, etc. I think a trader who would trade creature parts (similar to crafting) would have been a neat addition. Which could have been placed where all the striders were locked in cages at the station. Trading 3 hardened bone plates would trade for a marauder flesh for example. Maybe the trader changed their offers every few hours? Incentivising players to hunt the creatures while certain offers were available. He could even provide jobs to kill creatures for guaranteed rewards.

4. Quarters Upgrades — The hideout was brilliant, combining utility & benefits that made the game enjoyable. It offered rewards worth investing your time into including upgraded stash size, larger safe pockets, better aurum & K-mark generation and daily drops. The Quarter's items progressed as you did with quests, requiring you to explore the different maps and adventure out and collect the different items. It also made all the items worth collecting as they all served a purpose to players. One of the things I wished were added was an upgrade for creature damage. Where you would collect the creature heads. By placing that creature's head, you would receive a 10% damage increase against that creature, providing a benefit to not just selling the heads, and would reward players. Another upgrade idea could have been a second crafting slot, unlocked later on in the Quarter's upgrades.

5. The Forge — The introduction of the forge added a whole new feel and stage to the game. The event created high PVP encounters on Tharis Island at specific moments due to the storm requirement to operate. I loved this idea, however, there was one drawback, which was people ratting, which I'll cover in my next point. The Polirium Crystal was a useless item besides to sell for K-marks and I think it would have been beneficial to add it as a power source for the forge, enabling players to forge outside of the storm [1 crystal per granting 3 uses]. While rare, it makes them worth keeping.

6. Ratting — Nobody enjoys people sitting in a dark corner, which you run past and get melted by. While I understand it’s part of the game, when it becomes common that nobody moves it becomes unenjoyable to play. I recall for a while when playing, that players made a sort of static noise. Which was faint, but if you listened for it you could hear it. I’m unaware if this was a bug or not, however, I thought it was an interesting feature. It could have been tuned to only be heard within a short distance (5-15 meters). This wouldn’t solve rats but I don’t think it should, rather it would counter ratting in certain places like Tharis Island & the bottleneck of the forge. It is not fun or fair, to take your high-level gear in, take the risk and die to someone you can't even put up a fight against. There is nothing more frustrating.

7. Armor — This was completely ruined, there was 0 benefit to running purple or exotic gear. Someone with a grey weapon could easily demolish someone with top-tier armor or gear. There was a 2-3 bullet difference between a grey and an exotic gun. I’m not sure who thought that was a “good idea” but there is 0 logic & a change that was completely out of touch. I had the most fun with PVP during the first public playtest where armor was spongy. For every tier of armor you go up, there should be a damage reduction. Grey against green 10%, blue 20%, purple 30%, exotic 40% and legendary 50%. A blue gun against purple 10%, exotic 20%, legendary 30%. This should be adjusted and these numbers are just an example, but gear imbalances should be noticeable. If you were using a stock grey weapon (PDW) and you shot at someone with purple, I think it should take at least more 10 bullets. It’s supposed to be a challenge, it's a PvPvE game. And a stock weapon should 100% be outmatched against someone with high-tier gear. After all, there is an MMR system for this reason. Restorative armor was also useless, it didn't restore enough HP and also should have degraded the armor quality, as it just wasn’t worth the extra resources or cost of constantly repairing it. The tactical gear was fine, but due to the armor changes, it became useless. Instead, it should have been more expensive to craft, provide the same or maybe slightly less armor, but give you far more stamina, making it a consideration you have to weigh up. Let's say each armor point above the pen of the gun was a 1% damage reduction. So having a grey gun with 10 pen against a standard green armor with 20 armor meant you did 10% less damage. While using a tactical armor you had 15 armor, meaning you only did 5% less damage. But you also had 25 extra stamina. This is based on the premise, that every armor tier increases by 10 armor points

8. Events & Bosses — As I mentioned in previous points, the storm event added a unique feel that changed the “feel of the game” and added new difficulties to the map. The storm unlocking the forge was a neat feature, driving high-intensity PVP moments. The meteor shower, was a favourite of mine, always drawing players to fight for it, and spawning in less populated areas of the map, creating dynamic fights in areas you otherwise wouldn’t. Rewarding you with items required for higher-end crafting, quarters upgrades and forging. The howler was a well-implemented boss, however roaming the map was an annoying feature and the agro of him was targeted at one player, as opposed to targeting whatever prospector he could see. When killing him there was minimal reward. The ichor bulbs were kinda useless to receive since you could gather them from the howler sacks by crouching up to them and harvesting them similar to collecting dustblooms. You would only receive 1 howler dart most of the time, and the reward was just not worth the time or cost of bullets. The howler also had 45 armor points, yet showed a blue shield?

9. Creatures — The mob PVE was very enjoyable, at times annoying but the one problem was the agro & targeting. The creature would agro you and it wouldn’t target anyone else which was frustrating, especially when you were getting chased by 10 creatures and someone could just walk past all of them like they didn't exist. Also, the creature damage mods were overly useful in comparison to the pen modes, which seemed to do more damage to creatures anyway? I would have liked to see the creature damage attachment possibly increase the chances of receiving higher-tier creature drops. 2%, 4%, 8% for the tiers? Making them viable when needing to find items like marauder flesh.

Let me know what you think below, and be sure to add your suggestions, and thoroughly explain them! Hopefully, the more talk there is surrounding the game, the better chance it has a revival. The devs did say never say never!

[spiderpool77]

I would take the game back in any form just bring it back

[Fes_on]

I cant belive they chose to shutdown the game to work on Exoborn, this game feels so scuffed compared to cycle

[TC_Feralus]

Originally posted by Fes_on:

I cant belive they chose to shutdown the game to work on Exoborn, this game feels so scuffed compared to cycle

You realize that these things are not an "either or" situation?