Free-to-play extraction shooter The Cycle: Frontier is shutting down servers and going offline on September 27th, developers Yager have announced. “Despite our best efforts and meaningful improvements brought to the game since launch,” they wrote in a Steam blog post, “the reality is that The Cycle: Frontier is unfortunately not financially viable,” leading to the game’s shutdown twelve months after launch.
]]>Listen, I don't have much time. I enjoyed a lot of games this year, but Alice just told me that if I spend more than 1,500 words on this list then she's going to murder my whole family*. And that includes some people I like.
So without ado: here's a handful of the games I enjoyed the most this year which (crushingly) didn't quite make their way into our soft 'n' snuggly RPS Advent Calendar 2022.
]]>Guides work is a very strange beast, and one that we don't talk about as often as we maybe should. By its nature, we here in guidestown can feel a bit isolated from the rest of RPS. Our guides aren't very visible to our regular readers. No one hops onto a website like this and says to themselves, "Well now! I wonder what guides have been written today that I can spend my time reading through!". The vast majority of people who read our guides come straight from a Google search into something specific like "Can I romance Yennefer and Triss at the same time?" (spoiler alert: you can, but it may not end well for you).
Because we operate so much behind the scenes, it's easy to miss some of the amazing stuff that the team did in guidestown this year. It ain't easy, writing a walkthrough or how-to that's useful for the reader while simultaneously appeasing those nebulous and mercurial SEO gods. But 2022 has been a stonkingly good year for guides, and I'd love to take a little bit of time to shine a light on some of the things we're most proud of having achieved this year - and to toast what will hopefully be another smashing year for guides in 2023!
]]>I wasn't on call last night, so I didn't get to experience The Geoffies in their full, live glory, as God intended. But that doesn't matter, because we've done our own awards, and who needs a live show with a smiley man in clean, clean trainers when you've got a list of the games and things in games that we liked for reasons too specific to get a category on stage? Also, none of them are Elden Ring.
]]>Free-to-play extraction shooter The Cycle: Frontier is heading underground for its upcoming The Depths Of Tharis Island expansion, arriving in the game with the start of season two on September 28th. The new map brings a network of enemy-filled caves stuffed with loot to find. Pop on your helmet and grab your pickaxe to watch the trailer below.
]]>Looking for Miniature Reactors in The Cycle: Frontier? Finding Miniature Reactors is a slightly more involved process than finding most other items and materials in Yager's tense extraction shooter. There are only a few locations where you can find Miniature Reactors, and they're all locked behind doors which only open once you complete the area's puzzle.
Below we'll explain how the process of completing these puzzles works, alongside a map of all the Miniature Reactor locations in The Cycle: Frontier. Further down we'll also explore the different ways in which you can use Miniature Reactors once you've got your hands on them.
]]>Against all possible odds, we're officially halfway through 2022. What a year it's been so far! After one of the busiest starts to the gaming calendar in recent memory (looking at you, Elden Ring), my backlog is barely keeping it together right now. I've started so many things on as many different services that just keeping track of what I've played when is fast becoming a second job. If you, too, have been feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of new and exciting releases coming out, then why not have a gander at this freshly compiled list of all our favourite games from the year so far? Maybe you'll find something that will similarly catch your eye, just as it's done ours. I'll warn you now, though. It's a big list.
]]>Looking for Veltecite in The Cycle: Frontier? Veltecite is one of the earliest materials that may give you a bit of trouble finding in the wild and wonderful lands of Fortuna III. Found mainly around water, these veins are fairly abundant but you still need to know where to go to find the highest concentration of Veltecite. Not least because you're probably gonna need a lot of it, for both quests and crafting items.
Below we'll show you the very best Veltecite farming locations in The Cycle: Frontier across both maps. Further down, we'll also explore the various things you can craft using different kinds of Veltecite, so that you can understand which types of Veltecite to keep and which to sell to your favourite faction.
]]>Looking for Smart Mesh in The Cycle: Frontier? The Cycle: Frontier has you drop down repeatedly onto the deadly world of Fortuna III, scavenge useful loot, and then extract. At first the materials you're after are fairly easy to come by. But then you're asked to find Smart Mesh, and Smart Mesh is quite a bit harder to find than anything you may have seen thus far.
Fear not. Below, we'll walk you through the very best places to go to find lots of Smart Mesh in a short space of time. Seeing as it's such a useful material, we've also listed all the possible items and pieces of gear you can craft using Smart Mesh.
]]>Looking for Titan Ore in The Cycle: Frontier? It's an aptly impressive name for a very valuable and hard to come by type of ore that grows in certain areas of Fortuna III. As a prospector, you'll be expected to go out and find Titan Ore at times - at which point, you may scratch your head and wonder where you need to go to get it.
Below we'll explore both Bright Sands and Crescent Falls and show you exactly where to go to find the highest concentrations of Titan Ore veins in The Cycle: Frontier. Further down we'll also go into detail about what exactly you can build using pure Titan Ore.
]]>Looking for Pale Ivy Blossom in The Cycle: Frontier? Some loot in The Cycle: Frontier is far easier to get hold of than others. Pale Ivy Blossom may seem innocuous, but this tiny, valuable flower is very hard to spot unless you know exactly where it grows. And it's well worth finding out, because as you'll see, Pale Ivy Blossom is used to craft some very important items later on.
Below you'll find out the very best places to look for Pale Ivy Blossom across both maps in The Cycle: Frontier, and the amounts you need to gather it to make various useful components and powerful bits of gear.
]]>In the giant jumbled word cloud of all my qualities and traits, I'm willing to bet that "pluviophile" would be one of the biggest words. I adore rain. Whenever it starts, I tend to drop whatever I'm doing - work, dishes, significant other - and I'll be out frolicking in the downpour before they've hit the floor.
Because I love rain so much, I hold games to an almost unfair standard when it comes to the simulation of precipitation. How in the world can a videogame come close to emulating that wonderful, transcendental feeling of being outside in the middle of a thunderstorm? The answer is, it can't. Games have to rely on other things, like textures, sounds, and clever little animations to really sell the idea of being out amongst the H₂s and the Os.
The time has come, fellow pluviophiles. It's time to grade the very best rain that PC gaming has to offer. Below you'll find our eight worthy contenders. Each has been chosen for their spectacular rendition of one of nature's greatest phenomena. Each one shall be marked according to my patented and cutting-edge WIPERS grading system for digital rain. So drop what you're doing. It's time to frolick. No umbrella required.
]]>Looking for Optic Glass in The Cycle: Frontier? The maps in Yager's extraction shooter may be beautiful, but they're also deadly - filled with hostile creatures and enemy prospectors looking to kill you and scavenge your gear. So it's important to be as efficient as possible when it comes to collecting the loot you need, which means knowing where to go to find the items you're after in the highest quantities.
If you've been struggling to lay your hands on Optic Glass in the amounts you need, never fear. Below we'll walk you through the very best areas for scavenging Optic Glass across both Bright Sands and Crescent Falls in The Cycle: Frontier, along with an explanation of what you can use the Optic Glass for once you've brought it back to Prospect Station.
]]>Which are the best weapons in The Cycle: Frontier? It's early days for Yager's gorgeous and atmospheric alien world extraction shooter, and already there's a rich arsenal of high-tech weapons to wield. You begin The Cycle: Frontier with just a few weapons available to purchase (though you can of course get lucky and loot better weapons from enemies), but by earning enough goodwill with the three different factions on Prospect Station, you'll unlock ever-more exotic weapons to take into your drops.
There's a total of 29 weapons in The Cycle: Frontier, and below we've organised them into not one but two tier lists: one on the best guns in the game, and another on the best value for money. Following that we'll walk you through 10 of the best guns in The Cycle: Frontier, starting with the three best budget weapons for the early-game, before proceeding through up the faction tiers to mid-game and finally late-game options.
]]>Now that all the unusually stressful benchmarking is out the way, let’s talk how mineral-grubbing “quest shooter” The Cycle: Frontier performs on PC. Short version: pretty well! It can make do with older and lower-end hardware at 1080p, and scales nicely all the way up to 4K and ultrawide resolutions, taking full advantage of the best graphics cards or the best gaming monitors with high refresh rates. If your rig is only just scraping past the system requirements, there are also some chunky performance improvements available via the right graphics settings tweaks.
]]>Today sees the arrival of season one of free-to-play sci-fi looter shooter The Cycle: Frontier with the 1.2.0 patch. The game soft-launched with a pre-season on June 8th, so its transition into the first season seems to consist largely of the launch of its Fortuna battle pass. Here’s a trailer detailing what the pass entails, below.
]]>Looking for a list of all dead drop locations in The Cycle: Frontier? Rather than battling it out until just one player is left standing like in traditional battle royales, in The Cycle: Frontier you drop in, loot, complete missions, and extract. Many of these missions involve delivering items to specific yellow crates dotted about the map, known as Dead Drop containers.
To use a dead drop location to complete a mission, simply open the yellow crate, place the items you wish to deposit in the container's inventory, then click the "Deposit" button. That's the easy part. The hard part is finding these well-hidden dead drop containers in the first place.
Below we'll show you how to find every single dead drop container on both the maps in The Cycle: Frontier. We've put together annotated maps for both Bright Sands and Crescent Falls, and we also explain where to go to find each dead drop.
]]>Since The Cycle: Frontier is having its second (???) launch tomorrow, June 22nd, I thought I’d knock together a performance and settings guide to mark the occasion. This would involve, as they always do, a bunch of benchmark tests: repeatable runs through a specific area or sequence that would give an accurate indication of how different settings and hardware affect performance. In most games these are either quick and easy or time-consuming and easy, but not The Cycle: Frontier. Oh no.
See, without a dedicated benchmarking tool, running these kinds of tests requires a certain controllable environment, where variables are known and parameters can be reset in a click. This is not the case for The Cycle: Frontier, whose environment is usually trying to fucking kill you, particularly though the unavoidable presence of other players. I’ve never sat down to record some average FPS values only to spend half my time cowering behind a tree, fearful of being shot, robbed and – worst of all – forced to start work over again.
]]>Do you want to get better at The Cycle: Frontier? It's a slow but glorious journey on which you've chosen to embark, fellow prospector. The latest in a burgeoning line of multiplayer extraction shooters, The Cycle: Frontier drops its players into the gorgeous world of Fortuna III, where they must fend against both the fauna and rival prospectors while attempting to gather precious materials and extract with their lives and gear intact.
I've played a great deal of The Cycle at this point, and I've got a pretty good grasp on how to quickly learn the game, improve your gear, and turn yourself into a powerful rival against any enemies you come across. So, to help you achieve the same, I've put together the below beginner's guide to The Cycle: Frontier.
This comprehensive guide is split into 9 sections, each one filled with numerous in-depth tips, tricks, and tactics. We'll cover everything from what equipment to take into your first drop to good stamina management and stealth; from hunting creatures to defeating other players; from armour and penetration stats to quickly earning money to buy better gear. Just about everything you need to become an expert in The Cycle is waiting for you below, so let's get started.
]]>Free-to-play science fiction PvPvE shooter The Cycle: Frontier will begin its ‘pre-season’ phase on June 8th, developers Yager have revealed today. Season one will then launch on June 22nd, bringing the extraction shooter’s full complement of ‘Fortuna’ season pass rewards along with it. Check out the launch trailer below.
]]>Deep breath. The Cycle: Frontier is a free-to-play PvPvE first-person shooter. Whew, that's a lot of parts smushed together, but think of it like a baby's first Hunt: Showdown. You're a Prospector, tasked with descending into Fortuna 3, an alien planet filled with minerals and plant matter and dinosaurs. Corpos hire you to get these goods and bring them back safely. The catch is other players and inconvenient helicopter schedules. Other Prospectors will murder you for your precious rocks and weeds, so your aim is to get a helicopter out of Fortuna before this happens. It's a setup where success breeds success in its current closed beta form, but failure also begets frustration. In the end, you might wish Fortuna was yours and yours alone.
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