After spending years in development, juggling players from closed beta to closed beta, The Cycle: Frontier is finally ready to launch in earnest. On May 25, developer Yager announced their ambitious take on the budding extraction royale genre will enter Season 1 at the end of June. A pre-season soft launch is also scheduled for two weeks ahead of the official release of the game. Among other things, the official launch of The Cycle: Frontier will introduce a new playable PvE dungeon zone for players to explore.
For the uninitiated, The Cycle: Frontier is a PvEvP sandbox survival shooter akin to Hunt: Showdown or the ill-fated Battlefield 2042’s Hazard Zone mode, albeit much less structured. Players gear up with items and guns from their inventory and then enter instanced lobbies that remain online for up to six hours at a time. Other players can drop in and out at will, and everyone in the lobby shares the world, fighting over the same loot spawns and extraction zones. Death has permanent consequences: everything you have on you when you get killed becomes the property of the player who did you in. There is no shortage of similar games on the horizon, though The Cycle: Frontier seems to be exceptionally well received so far.
Yager warns players familiar with The Cycle: Frontier from the betas that a number of things have changed since those closed playtests. The game’s expansive maps have been expanded and retouched, AI enemy behavior has been improved, and a number of weapons and items have received substantial balance tweaks. Notably, the release date announcement also reveals the addition of a brand new “PvE dungeon for all your looting cravings.” There is a pretty hefty caveat, however. Since The Cycle: Frontier is a PvP-focused game, the new dungeon isn’t a separate game mode, but rather a system of caves added to the game’s existing maps. Players who venture in will have to face off against hordes of AI enemies for a chance to acquire high-tier loot, and as soon as they leave the caves they will have to contend with other players camping the exits.
The Cycle: Frontier will launch its pre-season on June 8, and will begin Season 1 with proper fanfare on June 22. The game will be available on PC only at launch, through both the Epic Games Store and Steam. Yager has stated that account transfers will be enabled at some point shortly after launch, so players can migrate their progress across storefronts. Furthermore, all progression carries over from the pre-season into the full The Cycle: Frontier launch, so anyone who plays during the pre-season gets to keep their loot and unlocks.
Published: May 25, 2022 11:10 am