The Cycle: Frontier is the latest shooter hope, even before it hits the market. The closed beta thrilled players and viewers on Twitch. As part of Find Your Next Game, MeinMMO author Marko spoke with the game designer and community & player support lead from the Berlin studio YAGER.
When the Berlin development studio YAGER launched a game called The Cycle in early access, it was the year 2019. It was the year of Battle Royale: Fortnite had its first world championship, a new blockbuster appeared on the market with Apex Legends, and fans of Call of Duty were eagerly absorbing rumors of an upcoming battle royale mode.
Also, The Cycle was such a battle royale and aimed to stand out from its PvP competition with PvE and survival elements. A storm made the map smaller over time, but you could also simply collect crystals or complete missions to succeed.
This attempt at the battle royale formula had fans, but it was unsuccessful. But instead of completely giving up on The Cycle and turning to new projects, YAGER found another way.
From The Cycle became The Cycle: Frontier; from a battle royale with survival elements a kind of more colorful Escape from Tarkov as free-to-play. And from an unsuccessful game became the latest, currently biggest shooter hope.
We embed a trailer for the game here:
Currently, The Cycle: Frontier is in closed beta 2, with the release tentatively scheduled for April 2022 – but they do not want to commit to a specific date.
During a one-hour gameplay session, I talked with 2 developers about the consequences of this radical decision and pondered why this type of game seems to have become a German specialty.
The Cycle is dead – Long live The Cycle: Frontier?
In the lively interview, my conversation partners Mando and Flo from YAGER were present. Mando is the game designer at The Cycle: Frontier, and Flo is the community & player support lead.
With this combination, I was able to gain many insights about The Cycle: Frontier from very different perspectives. But whether it was about the gameplay or the community of the shooter, both Mando and Flo spoke very openly about particularly 2 other games: Escape from Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown.
Because both games have a major similarity with the new “The Cycle”: The gameplay loop around the right gear before a match, the search for loot as the core element, the extraction at the end of the round, and the constant danger of losing everything with a wrong move.
Game designer Mando describes the optimal player experience in The Cycle: Frontier as follows:
Ideally, I imagine the gameplay loop to be that a player logs in, checks their missions, and reviews the loot drops. Maybe they also check where they are in the battle pass. Then they make their plans and consider what they want or should do on the planet. The player then makes a conscious decision about which map they want to play.
In a match, the player then has 3 ultimate goals:
- To find and collect better loot such as weapons, armor, resources, and valuables.
- To complete missions assigned by 3 factions beforehand.
- To successfully and alive leave the map by extraction.
Especially the last part is the most difficult, because during a match, players are faced with several dangers: “These include events like a falling meteorite, the dangerous storm brewing, being attacked by creatures, and of course, also through the biggest ‘wild card’ of all: other players.”
If you die in a match due to any of these dangers, you lose almost everything you had – the equipment you packed before the match and all the loot from the round itself.
That this type of gameplay is well-received by players is shown by the numbers. Especially on Twitch, the shooter from Germany is currently achieving great success. The developers have also noticed:
We got so much attention in closed beta 1 that it’s absolutely crazy. Suddenly we had 100,000 viewers on Twitch and were ahead of Fortnite, Minecraft, and Valorant. At times, it was absurd and gave us a lot of confidence.
“High Stakes” gameplay like Tarkov, but “essential for the broader mass”
Anyone who has played Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown will probably find this recipe for success very familiar. Although neither of the two games has meteorites or deadly storms as fixed events, the core gameplay of loot and risk is the same.
But as clear as the reference games like Hunt: Showdown and Escape from Tarkov are named, the name for this type of shooter itself is much less clear. A popular designation is “PvPvE” – that is, player versus other players and NPCs.
However, for YAGER, this is only part of it. The development team does not see itself as a survival game, as Flo tells me. Instead, he and his colleagues internally use the term “High Stakes.” This, by chance, evokes memories of a round in the casino, as Mando reveals to me:
For me, the essential thing is that in every match of The Cycle: Frontier, you can choose your stakes yourself. To me, it almost has poker elements: It’s up to me whether I go in with expensive gear; whether I dare to risk not losing it.
The Cycle: Frontier aims to tease a willingness to take risks out of the players. Through in-depth and extensive decisions with gear before a round and the approach in the match itself, this is supposed to be rounded off.
That this kind of game comes from Berlin with The Cycle: Frontier is amusing to me. Because the other famous example, Hunt: Showdown, was developed in Frankfurt. Therefore, I asked my teammates how ‘German’ such a “High Stakes” game mechanic is in their opinion. Mando replied:
Basically, I do find that this type of game fits Germany very well. If I look back and see what has been created in Germany in terms of pen-and-paper role-playing games or role-playing games that are very table-intensive and in-depth, then this kind of deep gameplay, which is so multifaceted, really fits perfectly.
That the developers themselves love this type of game was clearly audible in the interview. The fact that they are fans of Hunt and Tarkov is just as undeniable as the clear inspiration that these two games provide for The Cycle: Frontier.
But it was also important for the developers of YAGER to emphasize why these references are so clear:
Just to be clear: Yes, Tarkov and Hunt are indeed huge references, especially in game design for The Cycle; I won’t lie about that. I would even consider Tarkov our primary reference – at least regarding the core formula. For everything else, we have tried to really reach a completely different target audience than Tarkov, with a different development philosophy.
This different target audience is for YAGER “mid-core shooter players”, so players who come from Apex Legends, Sea of Thieves, PUBG, maybe Fortnite. The Cycle: Frontier does not want to be a military simulation with super-realistic systems to capture the hardcore Tarkov fans.
“We’re fundamentally different from Tarkov,” says Mando, “and the entry friendliness is of course a huge difference for us. We never want a player who, to learn the game, has to study any Excel sheets.”
Thus, The Cycle: Frontier is fundamentally designed for a broader audience than Tarkov and offers itself to a group of players who might not otherwise play such a type of game. For Mando, this represents a “market gap” that “couldn’t be clearer.”
Flo summarizes it as follows:
We pack the fun into ‘high stakes’. You can quickly drop into the “match,” you can also get into the game very quickly. It explains a lot to you at the beginning, and you can get into it very quickly.
Also, the matchmaking is significantly faster than that of the competition: Since the servers usually run for about 6 hours before the maps are refreshed with new loot, players can enter and exit these games almost any time. Only during events like the storm is this not possible.
For the events specifically, YAGER wants to be like Sea of Thieves: “It should happen as much unforeseen as possible on the player’s way to the goal. Every drop, every adventure should feel personal and unique.”
“We have communicated very openly that the old game didn’t work”
But this market gap was not the audience discussed from the old The Cycle 2019. Therefore, I wanted to know what had to change to be this kind of game that The Cycle wants to be with the addition of “Frontier.” The biggest change concerns the philosophy around competitiveness:
From a game designer’s perspective, the most important difference for me is that the word ‘competitive’ has been removed. That changes everything in game design.
You no longer have to ensure that the weapons are perfectly balanced against each other as you do in a competitive game. Instead, they just need to be balanced for their tier level.
As radical as this change in game design was, the surrounding context is still The Cycle – just better, says Mando: “I would say that almost everything except the game design could actually be retained or even improved and amplified.”
That The Cycle in its original form did not have the success that the developers wanted became clear quickly. It was also clear that a rethinking of the core gameplay must take place. However, it needed to be explained to the players, which, however, had significant stumbling blocks:
We have communicated very openly that the old game didn’t work. But the communication of the announcement at that time didn’t go smoothly.
There was particularly “a minority of super-toxic players who came from the competitive scene and didn’t understand why something they loved was being taken away from them.”
From a player’s perspective, that’s frustrating, of course,” says Mando. But the changes were so well received after the implementation in the closed alpha that many skeptics could be convinced of the new direction that YAGER has taken with The Cycle. Flo confirms this with his view of the community:
The community growth since the change is so much higher than anything we had before, so in the end, this core group of old community members can guide the new players. Our Discord moderators are almost all still from the old game, who have walked this path with us.
This community should also be a core part of the development of The Cycle: Frontier. That the final release still has no fixed date is also due to the wish to continue responding to community feedback.
“Of course, you can’t implement all feedback, not in a game like ours. But we want players to feel heard,” says Flo. Therefore, “everything that the majority of players want is either planned or already in the game.”
The future of The Cycle: Frontier
For the full release of The Cycle: Frontier, currently planned for April 2022, the game will be completely free-to-play for everyone. “It will also have seasons, with a battle pass (or Fortuna Pass, as we call it), with cosmetics and the usual F2P monetization mechanics.”
A major example for the seasons for the developers is the isometric action RPG Path of Exile:
What they do with the wipes in Path of Exile is just right. You think, “Wow, I definitely want to check that out again because I can discover new things.”
Over time, YAGER wants to thematically design these seasons, “even if that won’t work perfectly for the first season.” So one season could revolve around the storm, while another could focus on new weapons or mods.
These seasons are intended to last about 3 months, and the goal is to combine the progress resets and seasons: “After 3 months, everything will be wiped, and the new battle pass will come out – that would be cool, but we need to see if that can be combined.”
At the end of the interview, I asked my teammates and conversation partners why The Cycle: Frontier should be the next game for our readers. Mando’s answer was that their game is a kind of antidote to the consequences of shooters like Call of Duty:
I personally feel that I and other players have become a bit dull lately because players face very few consequences for losses in shooters. When a defeat can’t be bad, no victory can feel that fantastic.
And games like Hunt: Showdown or Tarkov have shown that people really want strong emotions. People want to be afraid of failure. They also want to be punished a bit when they played poorly. And then it’s even more valuable, emotionally speaking, when you make the right decisions and play well.
The Cycle: Frontier is currently in its 2nd closed beta. The full release as a free-to-play game on Steam and Epic Games is currently scheduled for April 2022.
