The Cycle: Frontier is a first-person shooter game where players have to exterminate violent creatures, complete quests, collect loot, and unlock more powerful artillery.
Game Rant recently spoke with lead producer Matt Lightfoot on Season 3's latest updates, monsters that players need to look out for the most, and the true story behind Fortuna III, the alien planet where The Cycle: Frontier takes place. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: For our readers, can you please tell us a bit about yourself and The Cycle: Frontier?
Lightfoot: My name is Matt Lightfoot, and I'm the lead producer here at The Cycle: Frontier as part of Yager Development. The Cycle is a PvPvE extraction shooter that's primarily focused on PC. And we're on both Steam and the [Epic Games Store].
We have been live for about 18 months, and we've just launched our Season 3, which is our biggest and greatest release. We've really focused on being able to try and remove a lot of the friction for new players coming into the game to make it easier for people to be able to access. We've also implemented some new creatures for our older players to be able to fight, such as the Howler, which is our new threat on Fortuna III, the in-game world.
This is to make sure that people always have a threat and that the world feels alien and really exciting to explore in The Cycle. Part of the main thing is being able to go out, land on the planet, and be able to hoard items; that means you can create craft items. You're able to build up your own gear and build the natural gear progression and then compete against other prospectors [and] fight one another for the best items and to be able to upgrade your gear on – eventually – the third map as well.
Q: What was the process of deciding what should be expanded on in the latest season?
Lightfoot: We work very closely with our community to listen to what players want. That's one of our values at Yager, and it's important to listen to not only what we want to play, but also what the general public and the people that are committed to the game want to play as well. So we listen to them. We also look at how we make sure that we're always authentic to our vision of the game as well – What are the features that push the game in the direction that we want to as well.
One of the problems that The Cycle has had previously is cheaters. In our first season, we had a huge influx of cheaters, and we set up a dedicated team that's persistently working at new preventative measures and that was one of the focuses as well for Season 3.
If you look at other games such as Tarkov, they have huge cheating problems right now, and it's a real pain for their community. For us, we always want to make sure that we're one step ahead so that we can minimize the impact of the players through our consistent preventative measures, but also implementing unique industry features such as like our cheating compensation as well, that if you do interact with a cheater, and you lose items, those are given back to you once we've detected them.
Q: On this planet there's monsters, and there's The Howler now. What kind of role do those monsters play?
Lightfoot: The creatures like the Marauder, the Strider, the Rattler, and the Howler, they’re an antagonist. They're a threat to the player, and they've taken over the planet after humanity has left, and now you are dropping in alongside other prospectors. You're competing for resources. The creatures are a threat, but the true monster are the [other] players because you can have positive interactions where you can work together to be able to achieve your goals, but equally, if you find yourself on the wrong side of the stick, other players can also kill you or you can kill other players to be able to get ahead as well.
And it's to make sure that we have these really tense gameplay moments where you do have fear, and you're able to really make impactful decisions in your play sessions so that you're able to go, “Hey, this was so cool because I actually met someone, I was able to speak to them, and we banded up, and we took on someone else, or we took on The Howler, or we took on another threat.” It's to make sure that we always have that emerging gameplay in interaction between people.
Q: Which monsters should players look out the most for, if not other players? Is there a specific monster?
Lightfoot: I would definitely say right now it's the Howler – that's our new creature, and it's our only flying creature. The Howler will roam across our maps, and it has ways of being able to detect players and really be a threat. [The Howler] is also a massive signal to other people as well. When you start fighting it, it makes a lot of noise. It's very visible, so players know that there's someone there that is already distracted. It's a high risk and reward, [but] it's really scary. It can drop good loot, but by taking it on, you're also risking yourself being vulnerable to other people coming in as a third party threat as well. So that's the big new shiny thing.
It's pretty awesome to actually see people fight against it. In a lot of our play tests, what we saw with some of the members of the community is you might have one group that's fighting it and another group will help them, and then at the end there's only one set of loot, so who's going to get it?
Q: Aside from the monsters, there also seems to be some beauty in this game. What do these different locations add to the gameplay experience?
Lightfoot: They're very vibrant. All the different areas have different threats and also different opportunities. Some items that you might be looking for on some quests will take you to specific areas that are high risk, and you will only be able to find items where they would logically be on the planet. It's about being able to really provide an intuitive way for players to navigate the map, but also to be able to provide different threats and also different challenges. We have some areas that are open and almost rolling fields, and there's no cover, but equally we have pretty dense jungles that offer lots of hiding opportunities. That means that players have to maybe be slightly more slow and methodical if they don't want to attract unwanted attention.
Q: We’re talking about these biomes and these monsters… Is there any lore behind Fortuna III?
Lightfoot: That's a very good question and this is where I'm maybe not the best person to answer, but I can give you my interpretation of it. Fortuna III is a planet that we used to inhabit in the law where people landed on it and everything was rosy. Everybody was living happily and able to prospect and take the natural resources. However, at a period in time, the planet turned against the prospectors — I would call them the inhabitants — and it became far more hostile with the creatures on the planet becoming openly aggressive and also a storm that comes through in cycles.
Think of that as almost a thunderstorm on steroids and the storm that comes in is very deadly to players. You have lightning, it makes the world a lot darker, so you can't see threats further away. That's what drove people off the planet in the lore, and that drove them to Prospect Station, which is a space station that is orbiting the planet. That’s where our players and the prospectors are able to get geared, be able to accept missions from the factions on there, and prepare themselves for the next drop.
Q: Have there been any challenges creating this latest season?
Lightfoot: There's always challenges. We always have lots of challenges around cheating and like I mentioned, [but] we've implemented a new middleware to be able to make it more difficult for cheaters to get through our net. Almost like the Swiss cheese effect, the more barriers we can add, the safer it will be. This is to make sure that our players are able to get in and have a fair game and always try to stay one step ahead of cheating companies because people make money out of it. Cheating is always a challenge.
On top of that, we're always focused on the biggest, the highest priorities as well, and that things are fun. There's no one definition of fun beyond maybe having a positive time. That's a sliding scale and making sure that all of our features are fun. I'm speaking to the community and there's never always one opinion. Those things are always a natural challenge, being able to come up with new seasons and new content, but honestly, I'm pretty happy with where we've landed.
I was reading a thread just before I hopped into this with cheating communities, pulling their own hair out, and we've had a really good reception. I think we've almost multiplied our current player count by five. That's a huge increase and really is a testament to how well the team's done with Season 3.
Q: I saw that matchmaking was one of the things that you tackled for this season. Were there any specific challenges in fine-tuning that?
Lightfoot: One of the things that has been an ongoing challenge is making sure that people with high-end gear and really dangerous weapons don't just destroy our new players. They’re puppies in the game, and we want to make sure that they're also able to come in and have a good time as well. People that are naturally good also get to play against people who are naturally good and that have learned so that they're getting a competitive, scary tense fight as well. They're not just destroying people who are like, “this is the first time I've played a PC game, how do I use a keyboard and mouse?”
We did some changes towards the tail end of our Season 2 to look at kill death ratio to orientate it around how good players are and that was an improvement over how much value you extracted from the planet. That was definitely an improvement. The extension that we've gone to in Season 3 is we've also had a clear separation between people that drop onto the planets as a solo, as a duo, or as a trio to make sure that those groups are always fighting other groups as well, so you get that fair challenge. It's really about being able to orientate players into the groups that most suit their play styles and their ability.
Q: What do you think is the cause of a player's fixation on being able to use weapon skins?
Lightfoot:
More now than ever, we live in a world where self-expression is vitally important. We live in a cultural melting pot of people from every corner of the globe speaking every single language, and we're all unique, and that's our beauty.
To be slightly less poetic is weapon skins are an extension of them. We all want to stand out, and we all want to have authority over how we look, how we dress, and how we act. By players being able to pick what they wear and what they show, it's just an extension to that, I believe. I think that's why it's really important to people because it's a form of self-expression.
Q: After implementing all these updates, what has the feedback been so far for Season 3?
Lightfoot: Initially we had some issues as with anything when it grows quite exponentially with our five times player count growth. The team was able to put out a hotfix to solve most of these issues within 48 hours, and we are doing quite well. We've had a lot of really great positivity.
If you look at Reddit, people are really supportive and there was a perception that previously we had challenges on the project, but now a lot of people are saying phrases like, we've turned it around, we're on the right track, and we're moving in the right direction.To me, in a leadership role, that's music to my ears. Being able to see that the players can see the progress and being able to see that in our numbers, our greater player counts, and people sticking around more as well. I think that the reception has really been extraordinarily positive.
Q: Is there anything else that we didn't discuss that you'd like to mention?
Lightfoot: My call to action would be if there's anybody that's considering it, we're a fully free to play game. We're not paid to win. We put a significant amount of effort into making sure that everyone, whether they've paid us or not, is able to have a fair opportunity at progress. It's about being able to really all of our monetizations around expression. Players can come in, they don't have to spend anything, and they can enjoy the game. So I would ask them to give it a try.
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The Cycle: Frontier is out on PC.