Telltale was a pioneer of episodic storytelling in games, but in recent years, as with TV, it's fallen out of vogue as binge culture takes hold. So, when AdHoc announced that Dispatch would be split into parts to be released each week, it was pretty controversial.
In the end, though, I can't imagine it having gone any other way. The episodic model fostered a community that bonded over outlandish theories week after week, eager to share the different avenues their decisions had led them down. This collective spirit, playing through the game all together at once, would have been robbed by a full release, as the game would have become a race to the finish line, as we all looked away from social media, fearing spoilers.
Still, the choice to divvy Dispatch up into an episodic model wasn't one that was made lightly. Speaking to Knowledge, executive producer and CEO Michael Choung said that it was an "Insane thing to do" and that "everyone was telling us not to". AdHoc, made up of veteran Telltale talent, wasn't deterred, however, and was confident enough in its story that it stuck with the model.
"From every metric, from a production perspective, no...
