who the hell decided it's too much work to add m&k controls to a PC PORT?? that is absolute madness. i hate that game companies can get away with that shit

Not surprising that Konami would do that. They are already lazy, soulless, and don't give a crap about anything. It is ridiculous for sure, but it is Konami we are talking about. The high seas are waiting

I really enjoyed Cycle: Frontier when it first released. It was a lot of fun interacting with people in the world. I felt it was ruined as soon as they added the first battle pass. Not because it was a battle pass, but because it added SUBSTANTIALLY more incentives for PvP and nobody was willing to group up to take on any of the big PvE elements on the map. It just made it much less enjoyable to explore the world they had built.

I love that the game issued some refunds and heavily discounted purchases across the board. They gave a clear end of service date and are allowing players to still support the team if they'd like, while allowing them to know how short the time frame will be to enjoy that content.

Valve literally just saying "Please, if you own the assets then let us know, otherwise we can't confirm that you're not just stealing from somewhere else" The Cycle: Frontier was kinda bad tbh, it was much more fun when it was more like a BR game

Bro there's still like 200 ai hentai Puzzle Games. Hope to god they don't let any of them get grandfathered in.

I never played The Cycle and didn't really ever see myself picking it up, however it always saddens me to hear when a game shuts down. Just the thought of a game never being able to be played again just doesn't sit right with me.

Valve continues to take the best stands. It's pretty simple, if you don't own the copyright to the assets you're using to make a product you plan on selling then it does not belong in their shop.

The Cycle: Frontier youtuber here. I played from the betas till basically a month or two ago. Season 1 had 40k players, a lot of promise, BUT they didn't ship the game on launch day with any anticheat. Not even 3rd party anticheats. It was pretty bad as cheaters were in basically every server you joined (as servers were persistent for up to 6 hours, so cheaters would just sit in servers for hours until they shut down for restarting). They didn't add any type of anticheat or compensation system until Season 2, about 6 months later. Season 2 released, and only 8k players showed up for it, and many of the issues in the game, even down to balancing, were very divisive amongst the community... Some people wanted a very fast TTK game like Tarkov or CoD, others wanted something akin to Halo or Apex. Sometimes every week the balancing would turn the game into something fundamentally different. It didn't feel like a "release" as much as dramatic testing post "launch". Season 3 would be the make-or-break moment for the game... The devs added a new mobile boss, loadouts, removed wipes, and changed the lobby area... But all of these came with a catch. The Mobile boss could be very annoying to get rid of, and often would slow down the gameplay in a lot of ways, becoming more of a hinderance to the PvP. Loadouts were finicky and often didn't work properly, the "no wipe" change also came with a lot of unknowns which further pushed the narrative that the game was going to go out regardless of outcome, the lobby rework was just visual... the overhaul people were asking for turned into adding more visual things to the current layout... Other bugs also ruined the experience, but the worst of all, a bug that took a WEEK to fix, was a bug where your team would launch into a match, but all your teammates would be put into separate instances as solos, in squad lobbies. That was the nail in the coffin for many. But even then, even when the game was doing a lot of good things, it equally did a lot of bad things that also caused the game to receive criticism, such as Skill based matchmaking, loot based matchmaking, being able to buy insurance (and therefore, in-game money to buy items) with REAL money as Aurum, selling 100$ skins, constant culling of their creator partner program, and more.

Idk maybe Konami forgot that emulation is legal in several large western countries and thought they would be getting away with it. It matches the complete lack of research that game companies have done ahead of making games lately

I didnt know The Cycle is being shut down again. I played the original in 2019, it was a lot more creatively designed and unique. I thought it was popular now though, so im shocked to see it leave for the second time

weird, i could've sworn Bonelab had some AI generated art in some areas like the Rooftop level

Great gaming news update, Garbaj! :)

I would agree with steam however, meanwhile there are games using asset flips and Vampire Survivors which clearly took retro nintendo game sprites.

Valve is taking the right path on this one.

thank god

Well, that's sad, because it at least handy to skip a little bits of human-hours in development here and there, and now it's being much sketchier to publish done product if there is let's say few si gen models/props/textures

I wonder why custom servers are never mentioned for these games that are shutting down, even if the devs can't support them anymore, at least give players the ability to do so.

amazing work konami! was honestly hoping to see how they'd deal with some of the old input related stuff like what button to mash in the torture scenes but alas, i am disappointed. i dont have a controller sadly so i'll have to use something like xoutput to get it to work or buy a goddamn controller

this is literally the first time ive even heard of cycle: frontier and it sounds like a game id really enjoy which makes it sad that the same time i discovered it i learned its being shut down. i wish i couldve learned about it sooner but hopefully i can at least get some playtime in before it gets shut down

Certified Konami moment; literally scraping the bottom of the “barebones port” barrel

Was never a frequent cycle frontier player but the few times I hopped on it was really fun, sad to see it go.

you covered great content, sad news, but news that I liked to hear.

I enjoyed the cycle beta more than the final game. It was much more unique. There was a strict 20 minute time limit, get as much loot in that time and survive to the evac ship. You could actually team up with others in the lobby in game, and then part ways when you've looted an area together. Then it became just another looter shooter with no real gimmics. Me, my brother and our friend were dissappointed to see the final game after the beta.

I make games and i think using AI tools to help is perfectly fine, but if you somehow automate the making of games just to pump steam full of them, thats when theres a big problem

Steam allows games with AI artwork, just go to the newest NSFW games and you will find at least 2/10 games have most of the images generated though AI and they are still there.

With the AI games ban thing like, i'm pro ai, but when i opened the "upcoming" tab on the steam store and found a few "games" that appeared to be basicaly just ai art displays i got a bit disgusted. Though if the ai assets were 3d i wouldn't have any problem with it that i can think of.

Valve may be rejecting AI generated art to avoid another Hawken Reborn incident

I'm a fan of Cycle but I recently stopped playing because I found more interest in other games. It saddens me to hear the news because I still like the game. It was my introduction to extraction shooters 😢. I will download it again so I can play it at least one more time before it's gone. And I do recommend giving it a try

I played cycle for a while, maybe like 10 hours or something, and i feel bad for saying this, because the game is very polished when it comes to graphics, physics, bugs and alike, but they did a very poor job at balancing stuff, so the meta was very frustrating, and idk, maybe extraction shooters are just not for me, but this is the only extraction shooter i've played, and the way the action unrolls is pretty boring, idk how to explain. For me, it was obvious that this would happen :/

It makes sense for Steam to decline games with AI assets because of potential legal issues, but after the legal issues are sorted out I expect them to lift the ban, as it doesn't make sense long term.

The cycle just cant stay alive. It was cancelled once already and it got shut down and assets repurposed into the cycle frontier and now its shutting down again. I really hope we get something else on fortuna in the future because i really like their alien designs and possible lore behind them.

Metal Gear Solid already HAD a PC port. In 2000, for Windows XP. With mouse support.

I do feel like pc controls for these games would be weird. They'd have to make it where only while you're in firstperson mode do you actually have mouse aim, and the aiming in thirdperson would be keyboard only. It's still unacceptable for the port to come out with no MNK support.

Great to see Valve doing this, it sets good standards for the industry.

Konami was definitely thinking about money. I'm also going to be putting part of the blame on the developers as well unless if there's actual proof of some higher up outright banning them from making any attempt at M&K controls.

This is cool because it limits people from just letting ai create for them. It’s an incredible reference tool which you can work off of, not an all-in-one asset creator.

But how will you defeat the boss if you don't have a second USB port?

I enjoyed the Cycle for about 6-9 months started mid season 1 and played up until last week.. Overall it was a good experience but it was let down by some big issues, for me the main one was the FPS mechanics felt lack lustre, it was not twitchy enough to have good PvP gun play but it was not tactical enough to make up for it either. It suffered from realy bad issues with latency especially if you played during the quiet times of the day and it could not make a good match with those in your region as i often wanted. It was also let down by a lot of cheaters in the early days, and while they fixed this it took far too long, and the player base had all moved on and never came back. The 3rd map was a nice addition but they would have been better investing time in the cord mechanics IMO.

On GOG, mgs had mnk support so idk why it's so hard to port mnk.

AI art has been deemed to not have any copyright since it wasn't a human that made it

for the mgs port does it apper that the roms will be available so that it can be used for legal emulation?

Awesome news!

Very much agree

the cycle is an underrated game.

SIXTY DOLLARS?!!!!?!?!!???? WOW!!! 😧 thats just amazing

A fellow an-94 user I see, a man of culture.

THANK YOU GOD

if you have a passion for this stuff, learning how to model or sprite you're own characters and world is probably the best and most fun and interactive part of game development..

I liked the original version of The Cycle better. Still sad to see it shut down. I hope the studio doesn't disappear, they had a cool world and aesthetic going on

The Cycle being unplayable for a second time is a terrible fate. I missed the old one but now I can't even enjoy the new Frontiers. Makes me sad that we lost 2 different Cycle games.

I didn't even know Cycle: Frontier was a thing.

That's how you closing servers and how you not making ports. Great news, everyone! We finally publish our game on PS5.. with one condition: you have to use keyboard and mouse. Don't miss the opportunity to preorder new products: PSBoard and PSMice, both of each has unique system with keys resisting your input, what only three games will use. All of that just for 499.99 with RGB option just for 599.98!

Only Konami would fuck up a port of 15+year old games... ridiculous, and even more absurd is the people suddenly thinking Konami is going to do a good job with MGS Delta and Silent Hill 2 Remake (which is already worrying seeing the studio that is behind it).

the cycle was fun but plagued with bugs that made it unplayable for me

was a big fan of the cycle, i could get immersed the best out of any other game, even singleplayer. it had SOOOO much potential, and the core was excellent, but the devs are clueless as how to handle what they had built which is baffling to me. Once they revealed that game wipes were out the window, it was just a matter of time before they shut down the game.

What were they thinking? I'll tell you, "shall we have some free money?" and Geoff was like "splendid idea, I could chuck that game people like on a different store for 50 bucks?" and Brent was like "that's a great idea" and then he snorted a fat line of coke off his butlers ass.

I can tell you what Konami were thinking: they were thinking about money.

Problem with that stance is that it doesn't really matter, there are already games with a decent following like High On Life that has things made with AI,yet it's still on. I don't think this is about AI at all,Steam just wants to avoid low effort AI trash games being uploaded,with they did the same for asset flips.

The phrase 'tried to hide it was ai generated' rather than actually put in the effort at all really reeks of the sort of laziness ai gen Devs are so focused on

Hey can we get more Stalker content? Super cool mod

I've played The Cycle: Frontier since beta and even there I've felt this game is gonna have a bad end (it's gonna be shut down at some point) Number one issue I saw, was that the developers did not listen to any kind of criticism. One of my friends wanted to bring up some issues about the game and was forwarded towards their Discord server. He went there and put alot of effort into a well put together text, that adressed the issue. What was the dev teams reaction? His message was deleted and banned from the server. I personally never had any issue about this, since most of my feedback was put into the feedback portion in main menu. But any game, where it's developers treat any form of negative feedback just by blocking the users and acting like nothing happened can only lead to one and only ending. Issue number two, since the beta there's been talk about more wepon variety... in season 3 they "delivered" by making some of the guns having a MK2 variant which was SLIGHTLY better version, which could be found ONLY in game. Honestly I'd be cool with this, but these weapons were "rebalanced" 3 times I think? And still they were absurdely strong in most cases. Issue number three, I get it, it was a free to play game which needs to get the income from somewhere else. That's where the battlepass comes in. I've never had an issue with BP in games if you can get the same amount of currency it costs (I'm lookin' at you greedy bastards from Activision) so when I saw you get the same amount from the BP? I was completely okay. Some cosmetics/skins here and there, bundles ofc and other stuff I was FINE. The problem for me was, that it felt like these cosmetics and skins were the top priority for the devs. There was a big issue with AI and their detection in season 3. You could NOT sneak around anything, monsters would agro at you even if you were behind a wall/hill/bush so going stealth wasn't an option. That issue was in-game for 2-3 weeks? before they rolled out a patch that said "IT HAS BEEN FIXED" but the first game I played it was completely the same like before. Marauder was sleeping, I was crouch walking mile away and he just slowly walked towards me anyway. Issue number fou, the devs PROMISED in the beta stages, there won't be any wipes. Yet with every new season they had wipes. To be honest, I wouldn't post this as an issue, because early game state of a looter extraction shooter are the BEST moments you can have. Everyone sucks, no chance you'll meet someone with the best armor/weapons so you can take more fights/not be scared of everyone you see. But alot of people had an issue with this so I'll put this one here just for the sake of seeing this "being an issue" quite alot (Maybe I just saw a really vocal minority, I can't tell, sorry) And lastly? Cheaters. Since the first two weeks of the game being out of Beta, the cheaters ruined the game for good. You had Blue or better gear? You were dead in seconds once you've landed. It was so bad I just gave up and issued a request to put this to the top of their priorities. Sadly season 2 rolled out and the cheaters were still rampant. Their try at limiting the negative experience by giving you back all your gear, once it's been confirmed the one who killed you used cheats was a really nice start. But that's probably where it all ended. Battle Eye in general is a TERRIBLE AC to relly on (Hello Tarkov) so if I recall correctly, they added ANOTHER AC on top of Battle Eye. But still, in season 3? I was killed by one to many cheaters... At least those were banned since I got every gear back, but before it was returned to me, I've advanced further with gear so my green gear that I lost couple days back was useless since I was going full Blue. Another thing was the players who queued with cheater were not banned or penalized at all. So you could create a new account, have your buddy play on his main and cheat your socks off, while he gets all the good shit and never be banned. NOW NOW, I know there's been official post that these players who queue with cheater are being punished and I'm sorry to break it to ya, they weren't. I can't remember who exactly it was, but I saw around ~15 videos from a guy, that wanted to prove it and played with his friend. His friend was cheating and he grabbed all the loot. He went to Purple/Red gear in just 7 episodes from regular white. When you read the comments, it was apparent this was a common practice among most of the cheaters for all the seasons :^) And I could ramble on and on about cheaters, but I suppose it wouldn't add anything more to it. TL;DR -Devs were not listening to what the community wanted, instead were doing their thing and this lead to decline in playerbase. -Instead of releasing new weapons/rebalance existing, they focused on pushing out cosmetics at the price of not being able to fix issues fast enough. -From what i saw, many people had issues with the game being wiped with every new season, while the devs promised they won't wipe the game ever. (Personally I didn't mind this at all, quite the opposite) -And lastly, cheaters that were ruining the experience sine week1 of the game. Some efforts into dealing with them were made, but it just wasn't enough with the amount of how much of them there was (and quite frankly, that's what F2P games should imo focus THE MOST... a proper AC and systems to deal with them) Please, if you have any questions/opinions, I'll gladly hear you out (unlike YAGER devs amirite?)

Any game that straight up ends and becomes unavailable for purchase should be *required* to release its client and server source code the day you can't purchase/play it anymore.

when you close down a game, *refund* people and block money-related options (for people who don't know about shutdown) you're smart and a good dev in my opinion. apex mobile got shutdown, they took all money and did not care, the greed of big companies,....

"The laws around copyright and AI generated work are still being figured out". Sure, in the sense that if one day, all drivers unilaterally ignored current traffic laws and started driving on the opposite side of the road, it would suddenly be in the publics best interest to reexamine existing traffic laws. When they put the data sets together they just straight up ignored existing copyright law. All those images are being used by for profit companies in payed commercial products without the consent of the authors. In any other context we wouldn't even question the legality of something like this. Valve may be in the right, legally and ethically speaking. But the widespread adoption of these AI tools could mean that soon, the use of such tools is just a common practice in game development and Valve may need to reverse course.

what game is that which he was playing the first half of the video

i hope it doesn't mean that games like Source of Madness can't happen again. that is a wonderful, wacky game.

Rip the cycle :(

RIP Cycle

We so back...

No M&K support for MGS1 and 2 makes no sense. PC ports for those games already existed on release, and both were available on GOG until MGS2 had to be taken down because of the copyrighted footage.

i think its a good think not to let ai games on steam yet since it can have legal problems in the future but if they dont change that policy when the law is clear its really dumb

I've never seen it as MNK, only KBM

literally just gonna continue to emulate for MGS lol

Topic one: AI assets in games aren't that big of a deal on one hand, in the sense that, if you actually pay for the assets that are generated, you do own them and it can be a great way for indie devs, specificly small and single dev creators to cut down on workloads for more ambitious projects. However, on the other, it could set a terrible precedent wherein large companies begin firing their asset teams on favor of just designing algorithms to generate their assets and removing human work from games, which saves them a lot of money on games they will likely charge the same price for. And of course, there will be those who use 3rd party AI generation without paying for the assets created by others, as, even if it was generated by an AI program, the AI itself was designed by a human, or, likely, multiple people, and therefore, would be stealing their work for profit. I'm honestly siding with Valve on this issue, there's a whole lot of negatives that outweigh the few positives there could be, and I'm not looking to put people out of work while we still live under a system that demands we work to survive. Topic 2: while their decisions to minimize the fallout from shutting down their game is commendable, this is the best case scenario for one of the real problems with live service games. No matter how much time, money, and passion you put into supporting a game you love, all of that can be pulled out from under you the moment a dev or publisher decides they no longer want to support a title. And since you don't really own anything you've paid for, any money you've spent just disappears and you have nothing to show for it but memories. Honestly, i know it would take a massive shift in culture to do this, but realisitically, no one should be spending money on live service games until this problem is properly addressed. Topic 3: I genuinely don't understand how you can release a PC game of any kind without MnK support. Even Dead Cells, which is demonstrably awful on MnK, still supports it. As with any game, I don't think it should be required to buy a whole separate device just to play a game on your preferred platform. If you're going to port something, do it correctly. Let's be honest though, this is being done to cut down on costs, and I'm certain they're going to rely on the modding community to make up for this fuck up, which, at this point, are just straight up unofficial unpaid laborers with how often modders have to fix terrible ports and badly optimized games.

The Cycle Frontier was like lighting in a bottle for me. It was EXACTLY the game I was looking for, and I played it for hours and hours. After playing for 500~ hours, it sort of lost the magic for me, but I still think it’s a great and underrated game, that had such much potential. It breaks my heart that they’re killing it off

I wished valve would offer a stable diffusion Checkpoint that can be used together with loras of a Developer. As Somebody who cant draw but whants to make an aesthetically pleasant game i don't mind using stable diffusion with prompts and image to image generation for drafts i made. It has become such a useful tool in my game creation process that i would really lose a lot of wuality of the game i make if i went without Stable diffusion.

Sounds like Konami. Sees the money on the wall and puts no effort into it

I have 500 hrs in the cycle from the past month alone, such a shame the devs never listened to the community and how they made a half arsed response to cheating, by making high kd lobbies and low kd lobbies. By doing so, it made dedicated players get put in games with almost exclusively cheaters. Furthermore, there is no active anticheat, just reactive bans and compensation. There are sooooooo many more issues and tbh I cba listing them off.

Good.

AI can be used to give you a speeding ticket, but YOU cannot use it to make funny pixels

the continued use of the term “Artificial Intelligence” is incredibly frustrating, what these algorithms do is more like Automated Plagiarism and I’m glad Steam has taken this position about these games

That scope-in transition to a PNG looks awful 😭

didn't grove street games use ai tools to make some assets for the trilogy DE?

I think it's a W on Steam's part

I agree with steam because they're not taking a stance per say, rather, they're being cautious about the potential legal ramifications.

I played the cycle way back in the day, and it was ok. Now I own a copy of tarkov and it's way better. Btw, how's the game development going?

definitely have to give that free game a try.

the ports of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 are native ports because i don't see Konami packaging ps3 emulators onto the XBox and Switch lol

i agree with the stance

I am kinda tired that companies think they can make remasters/new releases which don't cater to people's needs and expectations. No other industry gets away with this in the capitalist world, why can they?? As for AI content being used, i am sure there will be a service in the future with a sibscription based licensing which will allow content creators to use AI assets more freely in their game developement.

I really love the Graphics of Cycle Frontier the setting is just so great and I am really sad, the are goobg to shut it down😢

what is the point of a pc port if i cant use mouse and keyboard...WHAT?!

Not surprising given the fact extraction shooters,br etc etc have all been done to death and need to be cut back on.

I didn't know that metal gear solid gets a PC-Port, cool. To be honest, Japanese games usually play like shit on Keyboard and Mouse anyway, the level of incompetency is insane at parts (you open the map with G on Elden Ring, and you can't rebind it, it hurts my Soul)

Well the law is actually very very clear on AI. Only human created art can be claimed as copyrighted so AI art cant be copyrighted at all. In fact I could probably snag an AI created ad and fix it up nice and neat and claim it as my own IP :D

balls

Ngl, the old the cycle was fun. The extraction shooter version isn’t.

personally I'm fine with a controller being required, playing mgs2 or 3 on mouse and keyboard would probably feel like shit

imagine not having mnk on a pc game