I loved Dispatch. Having never actually played a Telltale-style game before this, I found myself engrossed by its characters, their relationships, and the dispatching mini-game (mostly the dispatching mini-game). I enjoyed it so much, it made a late entry into my personal 2025 Game of the Year list.
It turns out, though, that the dispatching mini-game that I enjoyed so much had me tricked, with secret guardrails that ensured I, and every other Dispatch player, found more success than failure.
Speaking at GDC (via Game Developer), AdHoc Studio creative directors and co-founders Nick Herman and Dennis Lenard gave a talk on how they found success in a "dead genre", revealing some of Dispatch's big secrets along the way. One of these pertained to the game's RNG elements, and it turns out, we were being strung along.
During the game's dispatching segments, in which players had to send out superheroes to complete tasks, AdHoc wanted to ensure fairness, so it implemented its percentage system.
"For casual players, that means as long as you send someone—even if they're a bad choice—you're going to have even the smallest chance of succeeding. For more experienced gamers, it was an...
