Hello Prospectors!

I am Noise, the Lead Game Designer for The Cycle: Frontier.
I know that my name is not as fancy as some of our coolest team members (looking at you here, Marvelous Breadfish) and that you most probably never heard of me before.
It’s because I'm *that good* at hiding around on Fortuna III.

Now that Close Beta 2 has ended, we felt it was important to discuss our teachings from the CB2 and draw a picture of the future lying ahead for The Cycle from a design perspective.


Let's talk a bit about how we approached this beta on the design side.

Thanks to Daze's wonderful work, we had a lot of commitments and a very clear creative direction about where we wanted to bring the game to.
I won’t go into details here because that would be way too long; to keep it short, let’s say that we wanted wondrous feelings of exploration on a completely alien planet, tense uncertainty, unexpected adventures & outcomes, surprising events, and of course friendships and betrayals made along the way.
In that regard, we firmly believe that we achieved all the goals that we set for ourselves within this given time frame.

But now with CB2 rolling out, many of our hypotheses were put to the test.
With a combination of business intelligence, community sentiment, and player feedback, we have a much clearer picture of what we need to do next – all this thanks to you folks!

From now on, we will be able to focus on making the game better in every way, starting with the worst offenders and moving from there to smaller topics that we still consider worthy of note.

Right now, we are concentrating our efforts on several crucial points for release:

• Power progression
  
• Weapon balancing
  
• Campaign
  
• Matchmaking
  
• Dungeon
  
• Social

And who's best to speak about those changes, if not our experts on those topics?

Let me introduce to you Kril and Rumble!

Hello,

I am Michel aka Kril, Game Designer in charge of our lovely creatures and our deadly weapons, among other things. I will do my best to walk you through our reasoning for the changes we plan to make regarding our PvP combat.

During our Closed Beta 2, we gathered a lot of great feedback from all fronts. Some of them we addressed with our weekly patches which allowed us to better figure out the impact of our changes almost instantly.
Now that the BETA has ended, we are taking the time to look at the feedback and the data we received from our different patches in order to evaluate the best course of action for release regarding our PvP.

Here are the different topics regarding weapon balancing and power progression that we feel were the most important:

The fact that the power progression curve gives a big advantage to better-geared players was a big point of frustration for most of you.
We understand that it doesn't feel good at all to lose all your gear without a chance to be able to fight back, or rather that fighting back feels pointless.
We also want the best gear to feel like it is worth the investment to get it and to deploy with it at the risk of potentially losing it.

In short, we are looking to find that sweet spot where you always have a chance at fighting back even when facing the best gear, while making sure that deploying with the best gear is worth the risk.

Our Closed Beta 2 allowed us to make a few iterations in that regard (adjusting the economy, the penetration vs armor curve, and individual weapons) and although none of them were satisfying enough, each iteration moves us closer to that sweet spot.

So based on your feedback and our teachings for CB2, here are our intention for release.
Please note that although we are confident with these changes, nothing is set in stone and we will make sure to take future tests and feedback into account for our final changelog:

More diminishing returns on our penetration vs armor formula: the best gear (epic and exotic) will not be as powerful against lower-tier gear (common, uncommon, and rare)

The progression in armor and penetration values on shields and weapons now also have diminishing returns: upgrading from common to uncommon will give more armor and penetration than upgrading from rare to epic.

These two changes will make it so upgrading to uncommon or rare gear should be really significant while epic and exotic gears should feel more like luxury improvements for prospectors that can afford them: they still give you a significant enough advantage in PvP to potentially make a difference but not so much that you can't be challenged by lower-tier gear.

On a parallel topic, during Closed Beta 2 we reduced the armor value of the higher tier helmets. The initial intention was to allow players that are skilled enough to land more headshots to be able to more easily take down better-geared players. But it also had the side effect to reduce considerably the time to kill in exotic vs exotic situations for example. When we did the modification, we thought it was a desirable side effect: having a lower time to kill for the best gear adds to the tension and increases the requirement of having good awareness of the surroundings, which are skills that we expect players to develop as they progress through the game. But most of the feedback we got about time to kill and combat in general was that it felt good, although still perfectible, around common to rare tiers while gunfights are over too quickly at higher tier

So we decided to revert that change and come back to using similar armor values for Helmets and Shields, in order to have a similar time to kill at all power levels.

One of the points that came very often when reading the community feedback was that SMGs were too potent in too many situations during the Closed Beta 2. They overshadowed Assault Rifles in particular because they had a similar effective range but a higher damage input.
The main reason for that was certainly that we didn't have any damage fall off on our weapons: no matter the distance you were shooting your target at, your weapon always dealt the same amount of damage.

We didn't want to use damage fall off at first to tune the range effectiveness of our weapons for 2 main reasons:
To allow players that wanted to specialize in a specific weapon to be able to use it in most situations if they learn and master its recoil pattern

As we don't have any damage number showing on hit, we wanted to have consistency regarding the damage output of our weapons. So if players know that they need 10 hits with a specific weapon to kill someone with grey armor, that amount of shots wouldn't vary much depending on the situation and they can rely on this knowledge.

To make it so different weapons are more effective at different ranges, we then used different tuning parameters with recoil being in the end the parameter that has the most impact for automatic weapons. It is harder to land a shot on a target that is far away with weapons that have a high recoil value. To that effect, we tuned most SMGs to have more recoil than Assault Rifles for example.

In the end, it didn't prove to be enough to differentiate the several types of weapons we have as we also potentially wanted to have SMGs with relatively low recoil like the ASP Flechette Gun, and that made them compete with Assault Rifles too well.
So the first and most important change we want to make regarding our weapons is to make their damage fall off with distance. All weapons except Snipers will now be less efficient if shot from further away than their intended effective range.

Another related change is to reduce the damage input of all SMGs in order for other weapons to be able to compete with them at the same range.
On top of that, we think our recoil reduction mods were too strong and allowed to compensate too easily for the high recoil value of some of our weapons so we are tuning them down a bit.

Finally, we are working on individual changes on weapons in order to make more options viable, based on your feedback and the data we gathered, by tuning down the weapons that we felt were too strong (such as SMGs) while improving the weapons that underperformed. (yes, the advocate is getting some love)

In conclusion, these improvements should greatly reduce frustration coming from fighting at a disadvantage while allowing for more weapons and different combat styles to shine on the planet. And we are impatiently waiting for you to be able to experience this new combat tuning and to share your thoughts on the matter.


Hi Prospectors!

Rumble here, in charge of the Activities on Fortuna 3 as well as Jobs and Missions.

Just dropping by to say a few words on the topic of Faction Campaigns, one of the main new features introduced in CB2.

The main goals of the Campaigns were to provide players with a sort of red thread to progress along, motivate them to go outside of their comfort zones on a regular basis, and, of course, also to offer those of you that want it a bunch of nice pieces of story and worldbuilding to dig into.

Good news first: the campaigns delivered on those things pretty nicely! Players in CB2 always had something to progress towards, were forced into new areas and to face bigger and bigger threats, and could dive into a lot of the backstory and motivation of the three factions, while unlocking some cool new stuff along the way.

But of course, a feature as huge as the faction campaigns with such a massive amount of content is bound to have some flaws when it first goes player-facing. So what did we learn? And what will we do about it?

One common point of criticism that kept coming up in your feedback on campaigns, again and again, was the fact that some missions were just too grindy. I received complaints about having to go to the same area, again and again, to kill creatures there, or searching the same areas for loot items with low spawn rates again and again, until it became boring or even frustrating, instead of a fun challenge to overcome. We wholeheartedly agree with the complaints and have already done multiple tuning passes to make sure it will feel better next time you get your hands on the game. Bear with us, this stuff is very tricky to get 100% right on the first try while we don't yet have a lot of data to look at as a basis for balancing.

Another unnecessary source of frustration that we heard a lot while hanging out in Twitch streams and Discord channels was the confusion that came from players not being sure where to look for certain items or mission locations. My favorite example of this was us asking players to recover the Meteor Reactor Notes from the "Power Plant on Crescent Falls", before realizing that "Power Plant" was the internal name, and players only know it as "Geothermal Plant". We of course made sure to correct any discrepancies or unclarities that we were aware of, so please keep the feedback coming on this!
Also, the hints on the Missions telling Prospectors where to look for certain items were not clear enough about the tiered nature of Loot Containers. Missions will now indicate whenever an item can only be found in a certain container type in an area of a specific difficulty or tier. We hope this will make it more straightforward!

When going through the feedback that our lovely Community Team accumulated for us, we realized that we were being unnecessarily skimpy with the Mission Rewards. We want the Faction Campaigns to be motivating, worth the players' time, and something that encourages Prospectors to keep going to get their hands on more and cooler stuff!

Because of this, we have added more items to the Mission Rewards. Next time you play through the Campaigns, you will receive more Shields, Helmets, Guns, Backpacks, Consumables, and every now and then even Keycards for your efforts! Please let us know how this feels. Missions and Jobs asking you to stash certain items have also been tuned to always be worth doing, whatever the investment.

This last point does not directly come from criticism or complaints, more like something I have noticed and I thought I would let the Prospectors know: You all really really seemed to enjoy the Unique Missions! You know, the ones that send you to recover unique items or send you to unique locations.

Initially, we intended to just sprinkle a few of them into the Campaigns in order to make the Missions feel less generic and repetitive, but my current thoughts are that they actually enrich the game a lot for players. For this reason, we would like to increase the frequency of Unique Missions in future Campaigns that we will create, as well as maybe even add a few more Unique Missions to the existing Campaigns. No clear timeline on that yet, but let us know whether you agree with this!


For now, if you want to help out, please just keep the feedback coming (ideally in our Discord https://discord.com/invite/thecycle) and stay tuned. We have awesome stuff planned!

Cheers and see y'all on Fortuna very soon,

Rumble

With both our data and the community feedback, we are now in a place where we feel we can make changes to how our matchmaking formulas work.
We heard all sides of the equation here, and believe we can come up with something that will please most of you, if not all!

So here is what we planned and implemented:
We always had the intention of protecting new players. While we did try to do so already, we felt we could have done better on this, so we extended our steps to make sure we protect new players for a bit longer and give them a smoother onboarding experience when entering the "real game".
In our opinion, onboarding during the CB2 was not smooth enough, and it should now be way better.
We want new players to have the time to figure out what the game is about, how to behave with AI, and at least get a better sense of where to look while deploying on Bright Sands.
We use our own specific protection method here, which will disappear once we feel we are confident enough that you will be able to tackle the dangers of the alien planet on your own.
It's also worth mentioning that that method will not protect returning players that learned the game, as we felt we would do a disservice to new players joining us later on by doing so.

We have also decided to go with a Bucket approach for our matchmaking purposes.

What it means for you is that now the player base will be divided into much larger buckets allowing for more encounters along the way.
We are also dividing those buckets in a way that catered to both our technical needs and the needs of our players (keeping the smooth beginner experience in mind).

At least one of those buckets is dedicated to beginners only, while the other ones are centered around player progression and overall experience.
But also, we are taking feedback to help us do some live balancing along the way.
We certainly gave it a lot of thought already and figured out ways to make most of you prospectors happy, but we needed more tools to fine-tune this experience along the way, and we are aiming to have what we need for that around the release.


We really hope that you will enjoy what we created here, and we can't wait for you to test it once it goes live!

We are also going live with our first dungeon!

To explore it, you will have to complete the Osiris Campaign in order to unlock the Orbital Cannon Beacon needed to open an entrance.
Expect to find darkness, difficulty, and rewards for your trouble, but be wary of whoever could enter behind you!

We can't wait to have your feedback on this as this is our first dive into high-end PvE content.

On this front, we have good news: we are bringing back the Multiplayer Station!
Next time we’ll meet there, you will be able to witness the splendor of our new goods and customization options for all Prospectors.

There are some fantastic eye candies waiting for you right at the corner so that you can finally backstab unwary prospectors while dripping with style.
Of course, as for many other topics, there are several other things in the works in that regard, but we are not ready to comment on them yet :)


And that's it! (…for now at least)

Try and find us on Fortuna III if you can!
It won't be that hard to find me – I'll be the player with the fanciest suit.

Who knows, maybe you will learn some secret cool stuff about the game while teaming up with one of us?

Also, I definitely won't shoot you in the back as soon as the Evac Ship lands, I promise.

See you all sooner than you think!

Hi Prospectors,

Patch 2.5, our last patch for this closed beta is gonna be live tomorrow with the following fixes and adjustments.

We aim to have the maintenance at 10 AM CEST / 7 PM AEDT / 4 AM EDT on the 21st of April. Please remember the ingame announcements are currently not working, you will lose your gear if you are on the planet when the maintenance starts!

Reduced damage of high tier weapons:
• PKR Maelstrom: Damage reduced from 8 to 7
• KBR Longshot: Damage reduced from 39 to 35
• Advocate: Damage reduced from 10 to 9
• Asp Flechette: Damage reduced from 12 to 10
• KOR-47: Damage reduced from 15 to 13
• Hammer: Damage reduced from 31 to 28
• Voltaic Brute: Damage reduced from 12 to 10
• Basilisk: Damage reduced from 40 to 34

• Voltaic Brute: Increased horizontal and vertical recoil for Brute.

• Slightly reduced recoil reduction when in ADS with a scope

• Damage amplification for weapons with a high penetration value now can't exceed 30% against lower-tier armors.
• Fixed some additional exploits that could be abused
• Implemented more cheat detection and prevention
• Data in the battlelog can sometimes show misleading data

As usual, please feel free to share your feedback with us.

Thank you for your patience Prospectors and thank you for participating in Closed Beta 2!

Hi Prospectors,

Today's entry is going to be two-fold: we're planning to have our weekly beta update tomorrow and, as usual, are ready to share our patch notes early with you. You will find them as a second part to this page.

But first, we'd like to include a few words about the current state of the beta and, more importantly, its very near future.

Let's start with a few words about our ongoing beta.

We've been going strong for about a month by now and are still seeing thousands of Prospectors dropping on the surface of Fortuna III on a daily basis.
We're still constantly amazed and excited to see so many of you enjoying our game and sharing your feedback with all of us. It's been a huge help to our development teams, allowing them to confirm which points they should focus on and release those much-needed weekly patches. As usual, deep thanks to all of you out there!

But again, we are more than aware of all the issues that have been emerging since the start of our beta. We are laser-focused on fixing all those as soon as we can and want to make sure the game will reach a finely polished state at release.

The bad news is, we feel more time is needed to accomplish that and we won't be releasing this month.
The good news is, we definitely have time to run this beta for a while longer, granting you access to the game for longer and allowing us to keep working on our current build.

In other words, our Closed Beta 2 will be extended for another week, up to April 25th.

A further announcement about the release date will be published soon enough, so make sure to keep an eye out for that one!

And now onto our second part: tomorrow's update and all you need to know about it!

We aim to have the maintenance at 10 AM CEST / 7 PM AEDT / 4 AM EDT on the 13th of April.
Please remember the ingame announcements are currently not working, you will lose your gear if you are on the planet when the maintenance starts!

• The drop pod sequence of a player will only start if they have finished loading to prevent getting killed while your game did not load
• "Start mission" was changed to "Accept mission"
• As outlined in our last blog post, we are testing some changes to squads. The outlines of your squadmates will only be visible if they are in your line of sight.

Increased K-Mark cost for Rare to Exotic helmets and shields:
• Rare shields: Increased crafting cost from 4 600 to 12 000 K-marks
• Epic shield: Increased crafting cost from 9 100 to 36 000 K-marks
• Exotic shield: Increased crafting cost from 17 000 to 82 000 K-marks
• Rare Helmet: Increased crafting cost from 3 800 to 6 300 K-marks
• Rare Tactical Helmet: Increased crafting cost from 2 500 to 7 600 K-marks
• Rare Restoration Helmet: Increased crafting cost from 2 500 to 7 600 K-marks
• Epic Helmet: Increased crafting cost from 7 600 to 19 000 K-marks
• Exotic Helmet: Increased crafting cost from 14 000 to 43 000 K-marks
• NV Helmet: Increased crafting cost from 43 000 to 64 000 K-marks

Fixed Uncommon Restoration and Tactical Helmet costing less K-Mark to craft than the regular Helmet:
• Uncommon Tactical Helmet: Increased crafting cost from 840 to 1 700 K-marks
• Uncommon Restoration Helmet: Increased crafting cost from 840 to 1 700 K-marks

Fixed repair costs being much higher than intended:
• Fully repairing a shield or a helmet should now cost no more than ~85% of its K-Mark cost.
Reduced armour value for Rare to Exotic helmets:
• Rare Helmet: Armour value reduced from 20 to 19
• Rare Tactical Helmet: Armour value reduced from 17 to 16
• Rare Restoration Helmet: Armour value reduced from 17 to 16
• Epic Helmet: Armour value reduced from 25 to 22
• Exotic and NV Helmets: Armour value reduced from 30 to 24

Updated K-Mark shop prices and recipes for Consumables:
• Gas Grenade: Increased buying price from 2000 to 3000 K-marks.
Reduced crafting cost from 600 to 300 K-marks. Reduced amount of Toxic Glands from 3 to 1.
• Audio Decoy: Increased buying price from 1000 to 2000 K-marks. Reduced crafting cost from 300 to 200 K-marks
• Strong Stim: Increased buying price from 1000 to 3000 K-marks.
• Combat Stim: Increased buying price from 1500 to 4600 K-Marks.
• Strong Medkit: Increased buying price from 1000 to 3000K-Marks.
• Combat Medkit: Increased buying price from 1500 to 4600K-marks.

• Added Uncommon and Rare rewards to early game Contracts
• Rattlers and Marauders are now more likely to switch aggro when fighting multiple players at the same time.

• Fixed another issue where lost items could count towards mission progression in the end of match screen
• Additional fixes to some different exploits that could be abused

• Data in the battle log can sometimes show misleading data
• Due to an issue in the customer support tool you might not receive your answer, the ticket is checked and replied to though.

As usual, please feel free to share your feedback with us. Stay tuned for more information about the next steps of our Closed Beta 2.

Thank you for your patience Prospectors!

Hi Prospectors,

Patch 2.2 is here and it will bring the following fixes and adjustments!

We aim to have the maintenance at 10 AM CEST / 7 PM AEDT / 4 AM EDT on the 30th of March. Please remember the ingame announcements are currently not working, you will lose your gear if you are on the planet when the maintenance starts!

• Faction campaign missions got adjusted to be less grindy
• Material selling price increased to make looting more fun
• Hard Drive price increased
• End game activities are more rewarding due to increased selling prices
• Delivery and Dead Drops reward increased
• Crafting recipes for armors, backpacks, and helmets have been adjusted
• Fixed flashlight flickering and improved performance
• Rebalanced lighting, improving visibility in dark areas
• Additional audio improvements

• C32 Bolt Action: Magazine size reduced from 8 to 4
• KM-9 Scrapper: Magazine size reduced from 18 to 17
• AR-55 Autorifle: Refire time reduced from 0.13 to 0.11 Damage increased from 12 to 13
• Manticore: Damage increased from 11 to 13
• Lacerator: Base damage increased from 25 to 27
• Phasic Lancer: Base damage increased from 11 to 13
• PKR Maelstrom: Base damage increased from 7 to 8
• KBR Longshot: Base damage increased from 35 to 39
• Advocate: Base damage increased from 8 to 10
• ASP Flechette Gun: Base damage increased from 11 to 12
• Gorgon: Shots per burst reduced from 15 to 12. Ammo per shot increased from 0.4 to 0.5. Magazine size reduced from 30 to 24.
• KOR-47: Base damage increased from 12 to 15
• Hammer: Base damage increased from 26 to 31
• Voltaic Brute: Base damage increased from 10 to 12
• Basilisk: Base damage increased from 34 to 40

• Damage amplification and reduction of shields has been adjusted to make shields feel more meaningful
As an example - grey weapon vs purple armor - damage gets reduced by 43% (Before CB2.2 it was 34%)

• UI Marker on tutorial quests has been fixed
• Additional adjustments to level streaming. This will increase the download size (~ 15GB more) but should boost the performance
• The player report window in the battlelog has been fixed and now fills needed data automatically
• Fixed some smaller issues with jobs and campaigns

• Data in the battlelog can sometimes show misleading data

We will continue to work hard on additional improvements. Thank you for your feedback and your suggestions for the game.
Remember Prospectors "Fortuna favors the bold"

Hey Prospectors!

As you are well aware, our second Closed Beta started last week on March 16th and so far you have all shown us a lot of enthusiasm for the game. Thank you so much for your support!
However, we are conscious of several issues that have been appearing since the beta started and that may have affected your experience with the game. While a new patch has been applied with yesterday's maintenance, not everything seems to have been fixed just yet.

As a result, we have decided to prolong the beta for another two weeks. Closed Beta 2 will then be available until Tuesday, April 19th.

Additionally, you can expect to see more patches being applied throughout the beta, both addressing our ongoing issues and the current balance and economy of the game.

We hope that this news will help sweeten your experience with the beta so far.
See you next time, Prospectors. Until then, remember that Fortuna favors the bold!

Hello Prospectors,

As promised the patch notes for Closed Beta 2.1 are here. The patch contains some fixes for pressing issues and some adjustments and tweaks based on player feedback.

We aim to have the maintenance at 10 AM CET / 8 PM AEDT / 5 AM EDT on March 23.

• Some of the early missions from Korolev, ICA and Osiris got their numbers reduced (less pure Veltecite, less kills with Osiris weapons, less uncommon data drives required)
  
• Day and Dusk phase time got swapped. This means that you will have more day time and a little bit less foggy dusk.
  
• Slight increase of the walk speed. Stamina regen rate when standing still got increased slightly as well
  
• Audio of gunshots and footsteps got adjusted

• Fixed some broken mineral spawns
  
• Fixed a puzzle that spawned power cells in the wrong spot
  
• Fixed the Korolev mission that required you to visit "Greens Prospect"
  
• Fixed UI issues in the faction screens, missions can be completed without hassle now
  
• Fixed some small issues with the stuck prevention system
  
• Fixed freezes & crashes that some players experience
  
• Fixed texture loading and level streaming issues that some players experienced - This should lead to increased performance
  
• Fixed onboarding quests not starting / not completing
  
• Fixed duplicate quests & quest progress
  
• Fixed issues with the friends list
  
• Fixed friends list notification issues
  
• Fixed that you could get stuck in the "craft a backpack" part of the onboarding

• If you got stuck while crafting a backpack in the starter quests, you will have to redo the process
  
• It can happen that you have to send new friend requests to your friends.
  
• After claiming a mission in the starter quests, the marker stays on the NPC. This can be fixed with relogging
  
• Error 2,4,6 while launching the game. Please try again it should usually resolve itself
  
• Error 4 after several retries, please reach out to our Player Support or Community Management team

• Every Prospector that was logged in before the patch is applied receives 25.000 K-Marks as a small compensation for rocky start.
  
• We are looking into additional tweaks and changes and fixes for the future. One topic that we are closely monitoring is the power progression. That means we are looking at material selling prices, the fact that getting better gear should feel more impactful, some damage values (e.g. C-32, Scrapper, PDW, AR-55, Lacerator) and so on and on. There is a chance that we will have another patch during the Closed Beta.
  
• It can happen that the fixes for the quests resets your progress on them and that you have to recraft the backpack if you were stuck on that quest, sorry about that, but we hope that being able to progress properly will make up for it.

While we hope that most of these fixes resolve the issues for most of you, there is always the chance that it does not resolve an issue for all players.
Please make sure to give us feedback about the patch.

As the ingame maintenance notice is currently not working, please make sure to be careful tomorrow, as the start of the maintenance will kick you off the server and you will lose your gear!

Sorry about that and thanks for your patience and your interest in our Closed Beta!

Greetings Prospectors and welcome to something a lot of you have been eagerly awaiting these past weeks.

The Cycle: Frontier was made available to the public in our previous Closed Beta last year and enjoyed a great deal of popularity. We were absolutely thrilled by its reception and have been hard at work polishing the game since then: adding new features, upscaling our infrastructure and refining gameplay, all in reaction to your great feedback.

With all that in mind, we have an exciting piece of news for you all: our second Closed Beta session will kick off on March 16th 2022. This will be the perfect opportunity to experience once more the tensions and excitements of Fortuna III while taking a proper look at what we've been working on.

Opt into the beta on the game's page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/868270/The_Cycle_Frontier/
We are very much looking forward to seeing you walk the surface again. In the meantime, let's take a quick look at some of the additions you can expect to see directly in-game.





Last beta, you had been doing odd-jobs for Korolev, Osiris and the ICA, the 3 different factions of Prospect Station. These contracts were a great way of building up reputation and earning a few extra bucks, but weren't the most narrative experience around.

This time you will be able to experience 3 brand new faction campaigns, one for each faction. These campaign missions will guide you through your first steps on the surface and will eventually lead you into the usual contracts, all the while granting you a little bit of insight into the lore of The Cycle: Frontier.

You will also unlock valuable gear as you progress through the campaigns, so make sure to see them all through!





We've received a lot of praise about meteors and how they tend to derail casual drops, both in a rewarding and dangerous way. We want to integrate more of these activities to make Fortuna III the most exciting planet around.

For now, we are ready to introduce you to a previous fan-favorite, reworked and improved, something that will surely please both older and newer fans of the game: the Korolev Laser Drill.

Once you're done with their campaign, Korolev will offer you contracts allowing you to call on a Laser Drill on the surface. These contracts can be very rewarding, but you should always stand ready for a fight, as anyone in the vicinity can see the Drill coming down and decide to grab a share for themselves!







You've met the cute little Striders, the disgusting Rattlers, the monstrous Crushers and, of course, good old Jeff. Facing these beasts was a tough ordeal at first but with time you've learnt how best to deal with each of them. What more could there be to fear? We're so glad you asked.

Expect to see the Fortuna III fauna in a new, sturdier, deadlier light. Creature variations will provide an even greater challenge to those bold enough to explore the less welcoming area of the planet.

Of course, greater challenges often come with greater rewards. After all there has to be a reason these "elite" types decide to hang around specific places eh?





Last treat for today, we've taken another deep look at Bright Sands and Crescent Falls. Both maps have been reworked, revised and overall refined, based on the feedback you've provided us.

New paths have been added while a lot of other existing ones have been tweaked. We've also smoothed out a lot of specific spots, making edges easier to climb and making sure you won't remain stuck in certain areas. Traversal will overall be easier.

Loot has also been revised in several places, balanced out between contract requirements and what you would expect to find in some points of interest.

Finally, we are constantly refining the visuals of the planet, making sure Fortuna III is striking that perfect balance of threat and beauty.




And that's all for us today. Of course, we have been working on a lot more improvements for the game, including bug fixes, audio fidelity, combat balance, optimization and more. Be sure to keep an eye on our social media for an early glance at some of those.

So on that note, have a great day Prospectors, and see you soon on Fortuna III!

The Cycle: Frontier

Official The Cycle: Frontier Twitter

Official The Cycle: Frontier Youtube

Official The Cycle: Frontier Discord Community

Closed Beta Patch 1.2. is here Prospectors!

CONTENTS:
• Server stability improvements - we should be fully back once the maintenance is done.
• Big infrastructure upscaling and further improvements, to make sure it doesn't happen again for the remainder of the Beta.
• Fixes for rubberbanding issues. Hopefully, it'll be fully gone or barely noticeable now.
• Fixed 2 exploits that had been running around.

Heya there Prospectors!

We are applying a small patch to the Closed Beta build to fix a few issues and improve the overall experience for the remainder of the Beta. Check them out!

As a result to the positive reactions from our community, we have decided to lift the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) until the end of the Closed Beta.

That means you will be allowed to record, share and stream any and all content the game has to offer once the patch is applied. As a note, the starting screen will be modified to reflect that decision.

• Tutorial rewards have been tweaked a bit. You will now be able to craft a green quality backpack as part of your first missions.
  
• Insurances will now only cover gear and won’t include ammo, materials (including Old Currency), keys and consumables.
  
• Insurance payout has been slightly reduced as it was deemed a bit too high.
  
• The weight of some items has been adjusted to help with the early game:
  
• Compound Sheet – Weight decreased.
  
• Salvaged Insulation – Weight decreased.
  
• Some drop rates have been adjusted to help with the early game:
  
• Rattler Skin drop chance increased to 20%.
  
• Strider Head drop chance increased to 10%.
  
• Some crafting requirements have been tweaked to help with the early game:
  
• An Uncommon Helmet will now require a Strider Head instead of a Rattler Head.
  
• An Uncommon Backpack will now require 4 Insulations instead of 4 Fabrics.

• Using health consumables while sliding won’t activate them instantly anymore. No more acrobatic jabs!
  
• Fixed an issue with AZERTY keyboards. You will now be able to apply mods on your weapons (default: mouse wheel button).
  
• Fixed some collision issues at the Dig Site.
  
• Energy fields are now working properly and you shouldn’t be able to just blitz through them.
  
• The “Kill Striders at the Observation Area” contract is fixed and should now work as expected.
  
• Having a full stash won’t affect the item generator in your Private Quarters anymore.
  
• Various improvements on performance, specifically regarding ADS stuttering and rubberbanding issues.

• New players may have to restart the game after going through the tutorial missions before being able to send and receive friend invites.
  
• Garage office keycards don’t seem to be working at the moment. We’ll find the right lock soon, promise!
  
• Hardened Bone Plates can only be dropped from Marauders, despite the tooltip just stating “creatures”.
  
• The “Projectile Penetration” stat on weapons show no changes when applying an Armor Penetration attachment.

Prospectors, it's time to enter a new Frontier!

The Closed Beta starts today. Servers are open, so get ready to jump in a drop pod and take to Fortuna III!

If you've requested access and didn't get a key yet, check your inbox.
If you already took part in the closed alphas, download the update and you're good to go as soon as the servers open.

Granting access to you is a process that is ongoing, so please don't worry if you did not receive your access yet.

To get you in the mood check out our brand new announcement trailer!


And if that's not enough, check out our new and improved game intro!


Hope to see you on Fortuna III, Prospector!