The Cycle: Frontier Devs Talk About Upcoming Gear Balance Adjustments

Ensuring a game is balanced in all aspects is a never-ender ending challenge for developers, especially for PvP games like The Cycle: Frontier. It’s a challenge that the dev team is diving head first into following the start of the PvPvE shooter’s first season. Creative Director Dan Banefelt and Senior Combat Designer Michel Nohra talks about work being done in this regard in Yager Development’s latest dev update video.

According to the devs, the current focus is finding the sweet spot between making sure that players feel that they’re getting stronger as they get better gear while also ensuring that those with lower quality gear still remain competitive.

“When it comes to power progression, our high level goal is really about finding that sweet spot where getting better gear is something you want to do and you feel the impact of having better gear but the disparity is not so great that you can’t compete,” said Banefelt. “We want a person with maybe less good gear to be able to take down a top-geared player but only if they play really, really smartly.

In line with that, the team will be boosting the efficacy of weapons and armor to increase that disparity by a tiny bit to hopefully achieve that coveted middle ground. The devs go into detail about the upcoming changes which will include buffs to SMGs and nerfs to lower tier shotguns. They’ll also be addressing the issue of grenade spamming by adding a delay when throwing multiple grenades in succession. While the team hasn’t settled on an exact time yet, they said that it will be enough to give players time to move out of range before the second grenade lands.

You can find out more about the upcoming adjustments in the short but informative dev update video below.