The Cycle: Frontier alien boogaloo

Maybe I missed it , as I only played 3 rounds, but was there a way to team up with randoms before launching into a map?

There’s no matchmaking per se, but you can either invite someone on your friend list, or theoretically you can invite a random you see on the station to join you.

Here’s my random ball of stats for the last few weeks. Nothing crazy, but I generally haven’t had any super terrible nights. If I have 2-3 bad drops in a row I just quit and play something else.

Steam reviews are/were mixed, mostly citing the hacking.

The trailer music is a lot more specific to that than the regular game music.

But the regular music you hear during drop, and playing in the faction areas or on the station is actually quite unique and I’ve had it stuck in my head multiple times. So that just adds to the general vibe of the whole affair, which is still pretty good/different than the norm.

It’s got a lot of rough spots that need to be touched, but the bones are very good. If they can stay ahead of the cheats and keep smoothing things out and adding cool things I think this will have very good legs. It’s currently my favorite fps to turn off my brain and go loot some stuff. Each drop is a weird self contained adventure where you never really know what will happen.

That uncertainty keeps it fresh when it would otherwise be likely to get boring in a hurry.

It’s very common for this genre of games to have people saying everything is cheating or hacking. Tarkov has the same “issue”. But when you actually sit down and play, there really isn’t much cheating! I cannot say I’ve died to a cheater once in like 30 hours of play. So I honestly think this is a bit of whining from people who got nailed at distance and they just assume they were cheating. Steam reviews being mixed for this game is definitely 100% silly

It depends really. There have been plenty of cheats, but there have been updates and bans as well.

Plus there is some kind of ‘buckets’ they group players in for matches that is something like extracted loot average, which would generally make cheaters end up in matches with geared groups or players who tend to be in the upper level of wealth/progression curve. So the average player may not have as much of a problem, especially on the first map which has much less high level loot.

I haven’t personally felt like I’ve seen any cheaters, but my average extract isn’t usually huge value as I mostly drop for faction quests and fart around. I get out successfully a ton, but I’m not exactly hauling out epic stuff very often either and my faction level stuff is still all on the first map.

Fired this up today. Was shocked to see just how much they changed it. More like hunt/vigor/tarkov now. Liking it but I am ass with m/kb

Apparently cheating is off the charts in the game. Is there a way to play on your own or with a few friends “only”?

haven’t seen anything even remotely resembling cheating yet in almost 20 hours. So many games have people whining about cheaters, sometimes it’s a thing, sometimes it isn’t. In some cases it used to be a thing and the people complaining never revisited. Not sure the situation here, but so far so good.

I really want a game that’s like this movie:

Does this fit the bill? Is the PvP the focus, or something you just run into as part of your primary goal to get resources?

I think Icarus is probably more directly inspired by that movie than this is. Though Icarus just never managed to find the fun for me since their missions kind of suck.

This is basically each map is a revolving door of players dropping, dying or extracting. So you could drop in and loot or stash or kill some critters and get out without seeing anyone, or you could encounter someone and get in a fight.

There’s a lot they can improve, but the random nature of it is interesting at least.

The Cycle used to be exactly like Prospect, they reworked it and now it’s more like Tarkov Lite. I still like it (better in some ways) but I think there was room for the game it was before in the market as well.

It used to have everyone drop in together, and the planet would be closed off due to the storm in X minutes. Everyone competed to get pve objectives done in that time period (along with pvp happening). Some of the objectives would light you up for everyone to know where you are. Then the ship would come and it would be a battle for spots on the evac ship. Was a neat take on BR and did a good balance of pve, pvp and resource gather. I also enjoyed the Firefall style ‘thumper’ extraction of resources while hordes come at you.

Streaming my decidedly mediocre attempts at playing this again today.

the ‘how matchmaking works’ info from a dev interview was pretty straightforward and interesting to me. basically they look at your most recent X games and what the average loot value you extract with over that time is. so if you have a bunch of bad extractions/deaths in a short time you get easier lobbies basically.

No, it’s always online. But cheating is not off the charts. Again, people have been whining about cheaters in tarkov for years and I can count the number of blatent cheaters on one hand. the vast, vast majority of games do not have anyone cheating and killing you.

Season 2 starts today with a huge patch, and a new map that sounds like more of a high danger small area thing.

they also have implemented a way to slowly shunt cheaters into their own matchmaking pool. :)

I need to know more about this! I love stuff like that.

they are keeping most of it secret for reasons, but the basic gist people have figured out is that they are calculating a trust value per person and once that drops below a certain point you are matchmade with only other non-trusted people. You can group with anyone though but if anyone in the group is non-trusted you are in the non-trusted pool. Supposedly this will also allow them to figure out when people have made an alt account as well.

TLDR is that if you just play regularly and have bought anything with real money you likely won’t see nearly as many cheaters since they rarely buy anything and often have short lived accounts.

Safe to say cheating is kind of curbed at moment?