Hey there, Prospectors.
Community Team here, under some circumstances that are a bit different from our usual patch notes, since we have some news that isn't particularly grand: The Cycle: Frontier will sunset on September 27th, 2023. We do have an additional blog post that discusses this in much greater detail and also includes a handy FAQ, but for this post, we will dive into the details of Patch 3.5.0, as it will be our final patch for The Cycle: Frontier. With this patch, we will disable all forms of microtransactions, adjust a handful of systems, balance some weapons, and we've also added some final changes that we hope players will enjoy. While we know that this Patch will be bitter sweet, we here on the Community Team want to extend a heartfelt thank you for all of the support and feedback you have given to us during the development of TC:F.
We hope that you will join us one last time for some prospecting adventures, onto the notes.
Changes
Weapons, Armor, and Inertia
There's a handful of changes here worth mentioning, so we'll take a moment to highlight them! Starting with weapons, after looking into feedback from our players, particularly also taking into account the feedback from 3.4's patch, we know that there are some higher level weapons that people would like to either use more or have seen too much of. We'd like to shake up the meta one last time for Patch 3.5. While these changes may seem minor as we did not do a major balance pass, we do hope that they will impact your choice of weapons that you bring into engagements.
- ASP Flechette Prototype
- Damage increased from 9 to 10
Next on the list of balancing updates is armor. We know that a massive balance pass on armor has been a big request from our players, but we unfortunately lack the means to be able to flesh the system out as much as we would have loved to. With Patch 3.5, we have made some minor changes to armor value in order to make the higher tiered gear feel a little more "worth it" in comparison to it's lower tiers. Those changes are as follows:
- Armor Durability
- Common, Uncommon, Rare
- +100 Durability
Lastly on our list for this section is Inertia, which has been a hot topic with our players for a while now. During the PTS leading up to Season 3, we had made some very minor changes to the acceleration of strafe movements. This change was intended to be a small part of more substantial changes to bring grounded movement more in line with the direction of the game. However, with the game sunsetting and us being unable to expand on that further, we decided after some discussion that the best option was to revert those changes to allow for players to have fun with the Season 2 movement between now and sunset.
- The acceleration values for walking, sprinting, and braking deceleration have been increased back to Season 2's values in order to remove the inertia of movement.
Aurum Generation, More In-Match Activities, and Increased Rewards
To make sure players can have fun in the final patch and are not hindered by Aurum, we wanted to increase the Aurum generator's values in order to have it output much more Aurum than previously. At level 1, before the patch, players could earn about 6-7 Aurum over a 24 hour period. Players can now expect to earn around 200 Aurum over a 24 hour period. If your Aurum generator is maxed out, you can expect to generate a little more than 2,500 Aurum per week. We hope that with this increase to Aurum, you will be able to skip Crafting Timers with ease among other things. Additionally, and because we will no longer offer in-game purchases from this point forward, both the Bundles tab and Aurum Offer tabs have been removed from the game. You can of course spend your Aurum that you earn in the game on insurances and skins that are in the rotations. When it comes to progression and rewards, we've made a few changes worth noting:
- All IMA Recipes have been made roughly three times easier to craft by costs, time, and materials.
- The quest prerequisites for those items have been removed.
- In addition, Laser Drills have been brought back to Bright Sands by popular demand.
Other Changes
- Developer Credits have been added to the game
- In-game newsletter has been disabled
Bugfixes
- Fixed a stuck spot with a rock formation near East Caverns on Bright Sands
- Addressed an exploit at Pinnacle Labs on Crescent Falls
- Raised collision mesh present between Rock Pools and South West Collection Point
- Fixed an issue with faulty reverb being present at a specific location within Nutrion Farms Processing on Crescent Falls
- Fixed an issue with the "Veltecite Poker" melee weapon being misaligned at the weapon preview menu
- Fixed an issue with Noise Trap Birds and their audio not properly being synced up when being triggered
- Fixed an issue with the "Your Civic Duty" campaign mission's UI
- Fixed an issue with the "Dangerous Science" campaign mission's UI
- Fixed an issue with the "Time to Punch In" campaign mission's UI
- Fixed an issue where the "Not Enough Space" message was displayed when stacking certain items with enough backpack space available
Don't forget: Fortuna Favors the bold!