This is the biggest update the demo has had. When you step back from the desk now, you're standing in a 3D office, and it's a whole floor of a building rather than a single room. You can walk to the window, sit down with your clients, and go down the corridor to the lifts and into the rooms off it.
The building also keeps track of your run. Crises play out on the trading floor, rivals come after your clients in your own meeting room, and when things go badly enough with the regulator, their people turn up in the lift.
Crises got a lot of attention too. All fifteen now unfold in stages, and each one hands you a brief with its own illustration. The soundtrack has nearly doubled, and the office finally sounds like an office.
The rules of the market haven't changed. There's one small exception, and it's explained at the bottom.
The office is 3D
Press Step back and the camera gets up out of your chair. The terminal stays live on the monitor the whole time, so nothing pauses while you look around.
From where you stand you can:
Walk to the window. There's weather on the glass, the ceiling lights reflected in it, and your own reflection coming up as you get close. Below you is a city with streets, lamps along the kerbs and blinking beacons. How far below depends on how high your career has taken you.
Lean over the tablet on your desk to read your career floor plan.
Sit down in the meeting room with your clients. Six places, the worst relationship on your left. A client who didn't bother to come leaves an empty chair.
Go down the corridor to the lift lobby. The committee's boardroom is through the door on the left and the records room is through the one on the right. If something is waiting behind a door, its little window is lit.
In the committee room, a member who has lost confidence in you sits in the dark, and pushes their chair a bit further back from the table every quarter it goes on. The records room has a drawer for every year of your run, and your open conduct matters are laid out on the table with the soonest deadline first.
The lift is 3D as well. Between runs you ride up to your floor, or down to a ground-floor lobby that's dark after a ruined run and brightly lit after a good one. The very first time you ride up, the doors open and you walk from the lift to your desk. After that it's the usual quick ride, and any key or click skips it.
The game opens on a title screen now (with the 3D office), over a slow camera move through the building. Leave it alone for 25 seconds and the menu fades away.
Photo mode. Press P, or the PHOTO MODE button, while you're standing in the office. The left and right arrows fly you between places, T takes a tour, S saves a picture to Pictures\\Market Panic, and Esc brings you back.
When a run ends you get a postcard: a photo of your office on its last day, with how it went written underneath. You can save it as a full-size picture.
The 3D office is on by default. If you'd rather have the old drawn one, it's still there under Settings → Office view → Classic office. Computers without WebGL 2 get the classic office automatically, and so does anyone whose graphics driver gives out mid-game.
The office shows you how the run is going
We didn't want the new office to be scenery, so nearly everything in it is read off your run.
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A bad quarter switches the ceiling lights off one by one and tints the room pink. Winter makes the glass darker.
The traders sit the way their accounts are going. A happy client's trader leans in towards the screen, and an unhappy one's slumps back in the chair. Open a sheet about someone on the floor and you'll walk over to their desk, and they'll turn round to look at you.
The screens on the floor show the market, cyan when it's calm and pink and jagged when it isn't. Each desk's second screen shows the account that desk looks after. The big board on the back wall shows your actual return for the run, the same number the terminal gives you, and your achievements hang next to it as plaques.
Your desk fills up as your career goes on: notes, a pile of filed quarters, a plant, a photograph, an award.
When a crisis hits, the traders get up from their desks, a strip light starts flickering, phones ring, and the headline runs across a ticker above the board.
The committee's messenger doesn't just appear any more. They come out of the boardroom, down the corridor and across the floor to your desk.
Two rival firms have their names on towers across the street. Their windows light up the further ahead of you they are, and go dark once you've overtaken them.
Rivals after your clients show up in your meeting room. There's a rival's folder on the table in front of every client someone is circling. When a pitch is close, or a mandate contest is on, that client gets up and stands at the far end of the room with two of the rival's people. Click them to see who's pitching whom and, if it's a contest, the deadline for answering it.
Compliance raids. If a conduct matter escalates while the regulator has you under formal review, two of their people come up in the lift, walk into your records room and start pulling out boxes. You can see them cross the end of the corridor from your desk.
Year-end letters. At the end of each year, the committee's letter to your clients lands on your desk in an envelope, sealed until you open it. Click it to read how it starts, or take it to the desk for the whole thing.
The people in the office breathe, and the ones facing you blink. If you've asked your system for reduced motion, none of that moves.
Crises
Every crisis now comes in stages. All fifteen can play out over up to three quarters, starting with a warning, then the rupture, then the aftershock, and each stage has its own headline and its own outcomes. Before this update, only six crises worked like that.
Crises come with a brief. When a crisis is on and you open the Market Brief, you're handed a short brief covering what's happening, which signal to watch, and which stage it's at. Every crisis and stage has its own ink-wash illustration, 45 in all. You only see each brief once, even if you reload.
Sound and music
The office has real ambient sound now, built from recorded layers: the air conditioning, the hum of the strip lights (it gets quieter as the lights go out), the city, the floor, and weather against the glass. What you hear depends on which floor you're on, the season, and how busy your book is.
A lot more music. Four parts of the soundtrack went from eight tracks to thirteen: ordinary quarters, the later part of a run, crises, and good times. The office has its own music when you step back, each kind of ending has its own piece, and the year-end letter gets a track of its own.
Footsteps, doors and boxes. Your walks have footsteps, and so do the messenger's and the regulator's people's. The lobby doors make a sound when they open and close, and during a raid you can hear boxes being dragged around the records room.
Smaller things
"Stage 3 / Forced merger" was in English in every language. It's translated now.
The 3D office works at every window shape the game supports, from almost square to ultrawide.
Known and deliberate
No balance changes, apart from the crisis stages. Because crises can now last up to three quarters, a run has a few more crisis quarters than it did. Across 400 simulated runs of the full game it came to about three percent more, and the number of different crises you meet didn't change. Nothing else in the market, your clients, the rivals or stewardship has moved.
The demo is still three years, twelve quarters. Everything above is in it.
The classic office doesn't get the new stuff. The rooms, walks, photo mode, postcards, rivals in the meeting room, raids and letters are all 3D-only. The classic office is the same as it was.
Some of the new sounds were made in-house rather than recorded: the footsteps, the doors, the raid and the ringing phones. Think of them as a first pass.
The rivals' names sit level with your floor, not on their rooftops. From your window the roofs are out of sight on every floor except the top one. Also, only two rivals get a tower.
All the new text is in all nine languages, but the newest lines haven't been checked by native speakers yet. If something reads oddly in your language, please let us know.
Standing in the 3D office uses a little extra CPU, a few percent of one core, to keep people breathing and screens moving. It stops when you sit back down or turn on reduced motion.