Dev Blog Change is in The Air

August 15, 2019

Last update August 14, 2019

=CHANGE IS IN THE AIR=

Greetings, Prospectors!

More than 250k of you are now part of The Cycle! It has been a wondrous ride until today, with highs and lows and a lot of fun playing The Cycle in all its stages. And we want to thank you for it. It has been an absolute pleasure to see more and more eager Prospectors drop down onto Fortuna III to stake their claim on glory and riches each week. So we want to ask all of you: can you smell the change in the air?

For us as a studio, the journey was no less invigorating. What feels like just a short while ago, we were still a classical development studio, working for a publisher. Now, we are publishing ourselves and are free to pursue our vision of open, community-driven development in order to make a game that YOU want to play. And we love every second of it!

Do you remember the introduction of the vehicles in their very first iteration? What did you do when we first announced that we would have weekly playtests? Were you there, back in the day, when the first Alpha tests became public and The Cycle became an open development project?

If you can answer any of those questions with a resounding “Yes”, then you have been part of our wonderful community for quite some time. Well, guess what: we are happy to take you with us to the next level.

THE PRICE OF PROGRESS
Like many wonderful things in life, progress and development do not come without a price. In order to ensure the technical stability of the game for the future, especially for all the content updates that we have planned for you, we will need to wipe the account progress for all players with the next update. We expect this to be the very last wipe, so we want to get it over with as soon as we can. This is why we decided that the time is right.

Furthermore, we will need to restructure the customization options into their final form. We always intended to give you a broad selection of default Archetypes with a few customization options to mix and match for free. Other fancy cosmetics on top of that will be our lifeline for monetizing the game to continue development and to ensure that we can keep pay-to-win elements out of our game. This is very important to us, and we fully intend to make good on that promise. But this also means that the Enforcer Archetype, as well as some currently available customization options, will be removed from testing and added to the list of available purchases.

We hope that you enjoyed testing them because we surely enjoyed getting your feedback on them as well! We also hope that you will find joy in all the new customization options that will come in the future because we intend to introduce a system that will let you unlock new vanity items by playing the game. For the future, this means free unlockable customization options besides the purchasable ones!

THE FUTURE IS COMING
The Largest Playtest will soon end, but this does not mean that you will have to stop playing The Cycle. On the contrary, we are now live 24/7 for you to enjoy the splendor of Fortuna III! The current development phase is nearing its completion, and it truly feels like the end of an era. But this also means that something new is on the horizon – a new dawn so to speak – bringing fresh winds and propelling the game onto the next step of its life cycle. So what do we mean by that? Well, let us tease you a little bit:

BRAND NEW ARCHETYPES
There will soon be 2 more Archetypes coming to the game, which will be usable by all players for FREE! We don’t want to spoil too much, so here is how they might look like…

ALPHA REWARD SKIN
Furthermore, if you played the Alpha version of the game on the Epic Games Store, you will receive the magnificent Alpha reward skin for FREE!

GAMESCOM SKINS
If you happen to stop by our booth on the gamescom in Cologne, you will get another amazing skin for FREE to celebrate the event.

THERE SHALL BE MORE
Of course, there are also a lot of new features looming on the horizon, some of which we have already talked about in the past, some of which are new, but all of them will help bring The Cycle one step further on its development path. A brand new enemy type, several features to improve emergent social gameplay, as well as more integration of the lore into active gameplay are already in the pipeline. We are grateful for every second that we can engage with you, gather your feedback, exchange ideas and see you thrive as a community on our sprawling Discord server and on all our social media channels.

Change is in the air, the future is coming. And we are ready to walk this path together with you, our precious The Cycle Community.

And now, the biggest thank you from the whole YAGER team!