In a slower year, Dispatch would have received more attention than it did at this year’s The Game Awards. Considering we saw a reveal for Naughty Dog’s new game, a cinematic trailer for The Witcher 4, and an announcement for a sequel to Okami, it was pretty easy for this game to get overshadowed, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
Dispatch is the debut game from AdHoc Studio, which was established by industry veterans from Telltale Games, Ubisoft, and Night School Studio (which made Oxenfree and its sequel). That’s an impressive pedigree, pretty much ideal if you’re gunning to make a killer narrative adventure game, and that’s exactly what Dispatch seems to be.
It helps that it has a ton of voice talent behind it, including Aaron Paul, Laura Bailey, and Matthew Mercer. There are also two YouTubers, for some reason. This has never gone wrong before.
So Far, So Telltale
The superhero workplace comedy, in true Telltale fashion, is a game where choices matter. Its premise alone is pretty interesting – you’re Robert Robertson, a former superhero, who has to take a job at a superhero dispatch center after your suit is destroyed in battle. You’re forced to send other people to handle problems instead of dealing with them yourself.
Complicating things is that you’re rehabilitating a group of ex-supervillains, and you have to manage office relationships while trying to get your suit rebuilt so you can take revenge. This is where the choices come in. You’ll be making decisions that influence the narrative, ranging from what you say to your colleagues in the breakroom to how you react to situations in the field. As in many Telltale Games, your choices affect your relationships with different characters and therefore shape how your story turns out.
But There’s Also… Strategy?
What Telltale games aren’t known for is deep gameplay. These games are hugely choice-based, with the extent of the gameplay being walking around and picking stuff up, quick time events, and making decisions. Dispatch, though, is moving beyond that, differentiating itself from Telltale games, or perhaps positioning itself as an evolution of the iconic formula.
There’s a strategy aspect to Dispatch, though we haven’t seen a lot of that yet. In Robert’s role, he has to review ongoing emergencies and decide who to deploy to deal with them. The Steam page says you’ll have to make “tactical decisions, knowing that each choice can have lasting consequences for your team and the city”. Each member of your team has their own quirks, flaws, and baggage, and you’ll be able to upgrade their skills and unlock new ones to make them more effective in the field.
We haven’t seen this in any Telltale games, but this isn’t a Telltale game. It’s an AdHoc game, carrying on the legacy while trying to move beyond it. Considering that a common criticism of Telltale’s games is that the gameplay is thin, this is a very welcome change.
I’ve always loved Telltale games – I’ve been playing them since I was a teenager – but the studio has been so influential that the model on its own isn’t necessarily enough to differentiate it from the games it inspired. Even if this swing at strategy mechanics doesn’t work out, I’m glad to see tweaks to adapt to an audience that’s grown a lot since The Walking Dead was released in 2012. Telltale is gone, but the Telltale game might just be coming back in a big way.
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