After 4 years in development and almost as long in Early Access, the full release of Above the Fold is finally here, in the form of its biggest update yet!
This update covers everything, from some much needed stability and bug fixes to loads of new content to unlock and play through in the game, including a long, chained series of events that has multiple possible endings that can give you very different experiences playing through the game.
There are 10 new achievements too, of the more exotic variety. In an homage to the game being set in the 90s, you can now unlock achieves that are special nods to the popular culture of its time, whether its Seinfeld, Friends, or Spice Girls.
Note that the new achievements and some other features, are not backwards compatible. You will need to start a new game to get these, and to post your game score on the brand new Full Release Leaderboard!
There are several graphical updates as well, like the new Challenges screen shown below. As always, you can find a (more or less) complete list of changes and updates below - this time split into 3 sections, because there is so much to cover.
Changelist
NEW CONTENT
- New: 45 chained events, as a main storyline for the game. It breaks down into 6 storylines, leading to one of 3 possible ending-storylines. Each contains 5 events.
- New: 39 in-game celebrities added, making it a nice round 100 characters, nicely tying in with celeb politics (more details below).
- New: 10 new Steam Achievements to unlock, paying homage to some of the most popular TV shows of the 1990s. Note, these are not obtainable via older save games.
- New: Added tutorial tip about dismissing stories, and why you should love it.
- New: Full Release Leaderboard added on Steam. Note that only games created in this version or later, will count towards this leaderboard!
- New: Happiness goes up more for the top-billed reporter (diminishing return as more top stories are published).
CHANGES
- Changed: Initial office-expenses raised to $10,000/month, and scale up to $16k, $23.5k, $34.5k and $58k at subsequent levels.
- Changed: In-game celebrities now have political bias, and their reactions to your coverage of them is stronger, if their opinions are close to the newspaper political spread. There is also a lower chance that they will react to being written about one way or another.
- Changed: The Owner interaction screen got an update with all new graphics, closer matching what you see in the rest of the game.
- Changed: Slightly increased the line spacing on the strategic goal cards, to make them easier to read, and removed the previously visible "reward group" (it was just a letter in brackets, anyway).
- Changed: The Challenges screen got a visual overhaul and isn't just blocks of text and buttons any longer.
- Changed: Made slight changes to the default political bias of different story types, including lowering the max political impact of a single story. History stories no longer bias towards conservative, which should help balance out the politics of stories in the first stage of the game.
- Changed: Story score calculation streamlined. Slightly lower scores for matching interests, similarly lower penalties for disinterest, and slightly higher potential score (depending on skill, experience, and happiness) for stories that are neither on the interest or disinterest list of the reporter.
- Changed: Score bonuses for front page placement have been streamlined. The new score multipliers are: 3.25 (top spot), 2.75 for second row (2nd and 3rd place), and 1.5 for the bottom 2 spots. Stories not featured on the front page are counted at 1/3 of their base score.
- Changed: Stars displayed at the top when building your front page have been streamlined across game levels. Now, it is a little harder to get lots of stars until you can produce high scoring issues.
- Changed: Advertiser's political influence on the perceived political bias of your newspaper has been rebalanced.
- Changed: The ticker on the map now has a dark red background, to better catch your attention.
- Changed: Added more tips to the ticker on the map screen, and allowed more items to run per day
- Changed: Lowered the chance that a reporter will call you out for favoritism, just because you give someone else the top spot two days in a row.
- Changed: Lowered the chance that a reporter will quit due to low happiness, especially later in the game.
- Changed: Lowered the average happiness penalty for writing about a topic you don't enjoy working on.
- Changed: Lessened happiness punishment triggered by certain procedural events.
- Changed: Slightly increased the happiness reward for writing about a topic you really enjoy.
- Changed: Slightly lowered the chance that reporters become friends/rivals on the job.
- Changed: Lowered the happiness penalty/reward when a reporter's friend or rival leaves the newspaper.
- Changed: Reporters won't lose happiness below 35% for lack of raises given, and now expect a raise for every 6 top stories instead of four. It is also not a given that happiness is lost every day the ratio is off, as it was before.
- Changed: Slightly increased the chance that a reporter will take a personal day off, if below 35% happiness.
- Changed: Increased the cumulative chance out of 1000, from 1/200 (max 10) of your previous issue's score, to 1/120 (max 30) of that value, that your newspaper will win an award when publishing a themed issue, regardless of whether it is the theme of the month.
- Changed: Cut the daily happiness loss in half (almost). It still fluctuates by season; more happiness lost in winter, less in summer.
- Changed: Halved the happiness penalty for Reporters whose stories did not appear in the top 5 on the front page.
- Changed: Reduced spawn rate of surging stories; still higher than normal but without flooding the city with just one story type.
- Changed: Added a warning on the main menu, letting you know if a save game is too old to be supported (it means: it might crash)
FIXES
- Fixed: Crash, caused by certain procedural events trying to refer to reporters that have left the newspaper.
- Fixed: Completed challenges did not show a notification on the office screen until after you already looked at the challenges screen.
- Fixed: Sometimes, the text color didn't update right, when you changed the look of your editor's desk. Now, it switches as expected.
- Fixed: Story line progress was not being properly saved, making story lines repeatable within the same game.
- Fixed: The "Ads ending soon" panel did not show the corrent $-amount of ads ending before the end of the month.
- Fixed: Some in-game events were not showing up for the player, when multiple events were scheduled to run.
- Fixed: Crash caused by reporters taking time off for mental health. How dare they!?
- Fixed: Reporters could have the same interest twice and have the same topic as both interest and disinterest, if that topic was surging when the reporter spawned.
- Fixed: The text would get screwy-looking in the background when the options menu was open on certain screens.
- Fixed: Procedurally triggered surges sometimes triggered the wrong topic.
- Fixed: Well and Ill received issues were displaying the wrong issue number (it was one ahead).
- Fixed: Associated story line didn't trigger after publishing a History-themed issue.
- Fixed: Crash in older saves, when clicking Challenges.
- Fixed: Various typos and spelling mistakes
What's next for Above the Fold?
At the time of writing, there is one major post-release update planned, for some of the features and content that didn't make it into the full release, as well as anything the community inspires me to add. On top of that, there may be bug fixes and other such minor updates. There is no specific date planned for the update - it depends a bit on how many bugs that show up, and demand in general.
Thank you for playing Above the Fold. ♥