All requirements for the neutral epilogue and how to track each Party’s strength using your save game.
Introduction
This guide explains each requirement for this epilogue and also showcases how to use your save game to gauge exactly how neutral things are at any point of your playthrough.
As should be obvious, there are spoilers ahead.
Keeping Jeremy save
Your actions throughout this broadcast don’t really matter for this – whether you play the Disrupt tape in particular has no relevant impact on what happens with Jeremy – how you finish the third segment is the only deciding factor. When security personal enters the studio, they count down ten seconds for Jeremy to surrender, with Jenny frantically asking you to cut to the ad break prematurely.
Waiting out these 10 seconds will result in Jeremy getting shot and killed, while following Jenny’s request and playing an ad before the time is up causes him to be arrested. Simply do the latter and you’re good to go.
Keeping Alan save
Here, you’ll have to do quite a bit more, with your success depending on multiple actions spread throughout the broadcast. Alan will ask you for multiple favours throughout the broadcast, with his (and Disrupt’s) fate depending on how many of them you fulfill.
If you help them enough, Disrupt will destroy the radio tower next to the broadcast room, before escaping the police. Otherwise, they’ll take too long to make it to the tower and are instead blown up by the military.
From the start of the broadcast, you’ll have a disrupt tape placed on the desk to your right. Alan requests for you to play this tape during the second ad break. Showing the tape during any of the other ad breaks will lessen its effect, but either way it’ll help Disrupt succeed.
During the first segment, Alan asks you twice to edit footage in Disrupt’s favour. First the archive material of Peter Clement, which he wants to give Peter a bad look, and second the coverage after the bomb blast, where you’re supposed to highlight police brutality and Disrupt messaging instead of Julia’s efforts to help people.
The game’s wiki states that both of these actions have little impact on Disrupt’s success and merely strengthen public opinion on them, though I’m not sure this is correct.
In segment two, you’re asked to switch to an unused camera, showcasing a disrupt symbol. You have to show the symbol for at least one second to fulfil the task, while showing it for five or more seconds further boosts Disrupt’s chances of success.
Alan will also tell you to play three “boo” sound effects (using the button with the “thumb down” symbol) during the episode of “The Noticeboard”. Playing only two may also be enough, but you should play all three to make sure Disrupt makes it through.
Segment three tasks you with censoring certain bits of dialogue during the Novaries interview. This is repeated three times, with you having to get at least two of them right to help Disrupt.
Additionally there are three Disrupt hacks you may show throughout the broadcast. The first two are played in section one, one during the title sequence and the other after the bombing, when returning to Megan in the studio. The third occurs right at the end of segment three, when Megan gives her final thoughts.
I’m not certain whether showing these helps keep Alan save, so I can’t give a recommendation on showing these. Logically, I think the third hack happens too late to influence the outcome either way. It also changes depending on whether Disrupt will succeed or fail, so it’d make little sense for it to have an influence on the outcome.
Exactly how many of these tasks you have to fulfill seems to depend on the strength of Disrupt. Personally, I succeeded by following all but one instruction and airing one of Disrupt’s hacks. You can use this script of the episode
Staying neutral
With this in mind, the basic strategy to get this epilogue is to mirror your actions between the parties, i.e. playing a Disrupt tape after you’ve played one from Advance, switching between positive and negative news headlines, going through with both or none of the party-specific censors etc.
After each broadcast you’re shown some statistics on how things are developing. You can use these to roughly gauge how public perception of each party is developing in response to the broadcasts and adjust your actions a bit in response to keep things balanced.
There’s a caveat with this however, as saving Alan requires you to perform a bunch of actions supporting Disrupt, inevitably pushing your alignment towards them quite a bit. There are only two more broadcasts after this point, with few opportunities to return to neutrality. Thus, you’ll already have to boost your standing with Advance before The Uprising in order to counteract the massive Disrupt-boost you’re guaranteed to get from it.
Especially given that last part, keeping track of your rough alignment isn’t easy, making it quite challenging to go for “The Middle Ground” just by feel. To help with this, the next section will show you how to figure out exactly how pro-Disrupt or Pro-Advance you are at any point of your playthrough.
Getting help from your save game
The folder containing your save games is found under:
In there, enter the folder for your profile and then the one for your current playthrough to access all relevant files.
Over the course of the playthrough, the game will create a ProfileData and ProfileInfo file for each section of the game you complete. For the most part, you’ll gain a new file pair for each of the three segments per broadcast as well as one for each group of text adventure days presented in between the broadcasts.
For our purposes, we’re interested in the ProfileData files – specifically the last one created, as it will tell us the current strength of either party (among a bunch of other info). Simply open the file in a text editor, then scroll down to the sections labeled “m_AdvanceStrengthChanges” and “m_DisruptStrengthChanges” respectively. The “m_Strength” value within the last entry of either of these sections tells you exactly how strong either faction is currently.
The file will become quite big as the playthrough progresses, making it a bit of a pain to find these sections manually. You can do searches for “m_AdvanceSuspicionOfPlayerChanges” and “m_DisruptSuspicionOfPlayerChanges” respectively instead, which will place you right beneath the relevant strength value.
To unlock the “The Middle Way”, both of these values have to be similar at the very end of the game – in my successful playthrough I had Advance’s strength sitting at 56 and Disrupt’s at 70. There will be a total of 42 ProfileData files created, with “41.ProfileData.json” being the last one – this is your deadline for evening out the values.
As I already mentioned, saving Alan will massively shift both of the values in Disrupt’s favour. For me they went from Disrupt 4/Advance 31 to Disrupt 60/Advance 4 and even playing fully pro Advance after this point I didn’t manage to fully balance them again, so make sure to give Advance a lead ahead of this broadcast.
You can take a look at the entries preceding the strength values to get an idea of how they developed and even what led to them changing. If it becomes foreseeable that you won’t be able to adjust the values enough, consider starting over at an earlier point right away – the game let’s you load any of the previous sections – and adjusting your playstyle.
As far as I can tell, none of the other values in this file really matter for staying neutral. For example, I got it while “m_AdvanceStrengthChanges” set at just 76, while “m_DisruptStrengthChanges” peaked at 154.
