QCF: Dispatch

tory-telling is such a powerful method of expression, and is something that can really make the difference in a piece of media, like a film where the production quality isn’t great, or a book where the writing is banal, or for a video game that doesn’t have the best gameplay. An immersive story can save any one of these experiences, but unlike film or literature, a video game has the strength of being designed around a well-crafted story, thanks to the ability to interact with the content diegetically.

All of those moments you found yourself yelling at the characters on screen to discover the  Machiavellian identity of someone close to them, or when you clicked with the hidden message that was woven throughout the progression of the plot—all of these micro-expressions seem to hit even stronger when you had a hand in making it happen. One specific studio has earned its Butter Brickle out of delivering those experiences at a premium, and after being out of the game for the last couple of years, the former development house,  Telltale Games, is now under a new banner, Adhoc Studio, and their reentry to the scene is accompanied by an exciting collaboration as well.

In partnership with the Tabletop gaming fanatics, Critical Role, Adhoc Studio has unveiled their debut, Dispatch, a brand new original story that takes inspiration from the cape-intensive ambience of a Superhero-centric Universe. The world of Dispatch wears its comic book inspiration proudly on its sleeve, and has embroidered that stitch in the thread of Telltale’s previous hits like The Walking Dead or The Wolves Among Us, only with a statistical twist that was built with the spirit of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign under the guise of a 911-like dispatch work simulator. Now, the juxtaposition of choice-driven comment and dice roll-fueled action may initially come off as a dissonant formula, especially when broken down to an episodic format no less, but y’all—they done did it.

The ambitious alliance between Adhoc Studio and Critical Roll proves to be more than just a dap-up for the clicks, as Dispatch arguably stands to be the best choice-driven narrative game the team has ever made.

In what may as well be the first chapter of the Superhero 101 textbook, the best superhero stories aren’t just about the chaotic reality of the God-like beings who walk among their otherwise worldly peers, but more so about the interpersonal drama and consequences that stem from those God-like beings and the various actions they take towards the world around them. Achieving a compelling story like that takes a special kind of character work that sells the fact that this larger-than-life existence is there every day, especially since the medium of superhero fiction has become as mainstream as it has within the last two decades of pop culture. Thankfully, the direction, writing, and stellar voice acting from Adhoc Studio is what really push the world of Dispatch to leave such a lasting impression on those fundamentals, and then some.

While I’d like to break down the assortment of writing devices and presentational nuances that make up the engaging setting for Dispatch’s choose-your-own adventure shtick, I want to lead in with what I have personally glommed on to being the heart of the game’s incredible world-building—the voice acting. Leading the eclectic cast of the voice talent assembled for the production is Aaron Paul, the actor who famously portrayed the troubled deuteragonist of one of the best crime dramas to have ever been broadcast on television, and an actor I firmly believe at this point is contractually obligated to sob at least once in every role he’s cast in.  Aaron Paul voices the main character and titular dispatcher of the game, Robert Robertson, an iconic, but traumatically disillusioned vigilante for the Los Angeles area, who famously does not have any superpowers of his own, and primarily fights crime within the cockpit of a personalized mecha, with the aptly named moniker, Mecha Man. To further complicate Robert’s work, he also contends with the fact that he’s a legacy hero and the third generation to take up the mantle from his father and grandfather, and is currently devoting his time towards tracking down the Super Villain that escaped from prison for the crime of killing his father, Shroud. This vexing range of despondence and devotion makes Aaron Paul a natural fit for the role, and despite the wide spectrum of choices and reactions to the narrative elements at hand, he convincingly delivers the complicated nature of a man who encumbers himself with a sense of duty that’s actively affecting his mental health. As familiar as some of these character traits may initially appear, Adhoc has done a phenomenal job of establishing Robert’s identity with a canvas just unfinished enough for players to fill in the blanks without any of the cliché references to similar superheroes in fiction like Batman or Iron Man.

The story hits the ground running fast as Robert is able to get a lead on Shroud’s location after a surprisingly revealing interrogation, and the ensuing assault doesn’t go well, leading to a hasty retreat and an unfortunate blow to the Mecha Man suit that renders it inoperable beyond repair.  As devastating as the incident is to the sullen do-gooder, he’s suddenly presented with a new opportunity to contribute to the chivalrous work of crime fighting, without all of the danger, and what will make up for the other half of Dispatch’s core gameplay.

A split-second decision could significantly impact you as both a Dispatcher, and a Paramour.

After an awkwardly flirtatious meeting with the Blonde Blazer (one of the most prominent Superheroes operating on the west coast), she offers Robert the opportunity to work for the biggest hero-for-hire agency in the state, the Superhero Dispatch Network, as a, well, as a Dispatcher. If you’re familiar with Business-Management Simulation games that involve job assignment mechanics (Promise Mascot Agency and Yakuza: Like A Dragon come immediately to mind), then the setup for the Dispatch part of the title will be right up your alley. Each shift will have a team of heroes on standby who are ready to depart for any sort of emergency that’s called to the SDN, be it as simple as volunteer work at a local school, to a full-blown Kaiju attack downtown. Every member of your super-powered roster will have their own strengths and weaknesses that are divided between five categories—Combat, Intellect, Charisma, Mobility, and Vigor—and these stats will greatly impact their chances of success depending on the nature of the job they were discharged for. For example, if a distress call comes in for a hostage negotiation, then a hero with strong Charisma and Intellect is the best choice to succeed on that call. Other situations may be a little more open-ended as well, such as a bomb threat that could be handled by a high enough Intellect to defuse it, or a stacked Mobility perk to jettison it away from harm’s way. Some tasks may even demand multiple heroes to attend to the issue, and in those situations, players will need to ration out how many heroes go where, so as not to deplete your forces for other potential calls that may come through in the meantime.

See if you can parse the clues in the mission summary—who would you send out to the job?

Unlike the contemporary examples I gave earlier, however, Dispatch doesn’t telegraph what is specifically needed for success as clearly or directly as you’d expect from other Business-Management Sims, and even when you do go with a strong choice, it can still have the potential to blow up in your face. While many of the dilemmas may hint at needing a hero that specializes in one of the aforementioned areas of expertise, the summary of the distress call won’t signpost anything specific in line with a numbered threshold or odds of success. You could very well send your strongest hero into a warehouse full of thugs, and their combat score as high as it may be, just might not be enough to cut through the villainous mustard. The reason for this is that, like a tabletop RPG, chances for success will hinge on a dice roll that will determine the action value of the job attempt after the calculations of the added Hero stat are taken into effect. This means that even if you come in strong with a hero assignment that accounts for an 86% chance of a successful mission result, you can still get boned by the randomly generated base roll that could potentially net you a result that figures into that 14% failure rate. The only way to completely ensure a 100% chance of success on a call is to ensure that the hero you sent out is just THAT stacked, or in some cases, the job might allow for more than Supe to hit the call, and give you the option of sending out a veritable squad of heroes to the job. This strategy is again, not without its drawbacks, as it can totally blow up in your face if you spread your resources too thin to attend to other incoming calls, with some having a shorter window of time to address than others have, which can be determined from scale or urgency.  Other factors to consider are the cooldowns that your heroes have between gigs to rest up for the next job, and that even when they are fully recovered, they aren’t ready for dispatch again until the mission results are generated from their previous assignment. Navigating the map and menu options can also turn into a yoga-like exercise in and of itself, as the UI can make it tricky to multitask if there are too many service posts to navigate, especially when they’re waiting with varying timeframes to address before becoming abandoned, something that will tank your work performance score. The other risk is that if your hero fails to complete their designated task successfully, they’ll get injured from the aftermath, which will not only increase the length of their cooldown when resting, but it’ll debuff their perks towards subsequent calls, and increase the chances of them shitting the bed again. If a hero fails while they’re already injured, then they’ll be taken off the bench permanently until the end of the shift, and something that players will want to avoid at all costs if possible.

Now, work performance may not sound like this BIG thing in the conceit of a choice-driven narrative game, however, Dispatch is more of a campaign-styled work simulator where choice outcomes (and in some cases, the availability of other choices altogether) will entirely depend on how well you do on assorted work shifts. The job results that populate at the end of each shift will impact the influence your choices will have on others, and the kind of response they’ll reciprocate with, and will play into one of several factors during crucial decision-making. The rating at the end of your shifts does help with promoting your Dispatcher rank, with each promotion carrying a one-time ability that can be activated for an easier shift, like a coffee cup boost that will take a hero immediately out of their rest cooldown and put them back into the bench for another assignment. Additionally, every time a hero successfully completes a call, they’ll earn experience of their own, with each level up netting them an extra point to add towards one of the five aforementioned skills to balance out their utility in the field towards mission types they may have otherwise been a bad fit for. Finally, later shifts will open up hero courses led by Blonde Blazer that can help enhance one of your heroes to have a special, unique power to make a shift even easier, such as invulnerability to injury from a failed mission, or a secondary dice roll on a failed mission that could potentially net a successful job on the repeated attempt. Overall, this performance element influencing the outcome of your choices isn’t an entirely new concept, but it’s one that’s significantly evolved beyond the effect of poor Quick-Time-Event scores and has now been seamlessly integrated into the conceit of Dispatch as a game.

The amount of voice talent bringing this game to life is unreal—there's so much personality coming at you scene-to-scene.This campaign-based twist on the decision-making plays especially well into the other big element of the Dispatch’s excellent world-building—the team you’re assigned is sourced from an experimental rehabilitation initiative of paroled villains who have enlisted under the agreement that their hero work would be treated as restitution for their previous crimes as super villains. This dynamic naturally puts players into a position to lead with their best foot forward because many of the members of the affectionately named “Z-Team” make it abundantly clear that they don’t respect you, and will make you eat a ton of shit if you end up managing them poorly. Speaking back to the incredible world-building that’s carried by the strong voice-acting in the game, the motley crew of rogues is not only voiced by some Critical Role Alumni like Laura Bailey, Travis Willingham, and Matt Mercer, along with a melting pot of content creators and voice actors who share an expectedly potent sense of chemistry with one another.

Every plot scene and work shift is chockful of these micro-interactions between Robert and the team, or themselves, that are delivered with a natural energy that convincingly portrays an interpersonal energy, and with every exchange, be it hostile or friendly, invested me into their world that much more. Even when some of the dialogue reaches cringe territory, it’s still delivered with this earnest gusto that does a lot to finesse the otherwise somewhat occasionally awkward writing (Jeffery Wright’s portrayal of Chase alone has imprinted at least three quotes minimum into my brain that will live on rent-free for the rest of my days.) The biggest knock I could honestly levy against Dispatch is its musical composition, both in terms of the selection of licensed music and its royalty-free arrangement. Aside from two really memorable moments that were made that much better by the audio tracks they’re playing against, specifically the cuts like Homeless in Heathrow from Fartbarf or PRISM Song from Thot Squad, the rest of the music curation didn’t have as much thought for the moment they were serenating, and instead came off like white-noise throughout my play through.

Overall, Adhoc Studios and Critical Role have introduced an ingenious blend of Tabletop RPG dynamics and choice-based character progression in Dispatch, where wanting something isn’t enough; you have to put your money where your mouth is and live up to those lofty intentions with your direct actions—like a real Superhero would do. After what seemed like a glut of these choice-based outings flooding the marketplace that did little to enhance the dozen or so licenses they took on (I’m looking at you Minecraft: Story Mode), it’s refreshing to have a brand new IP offer a refreshing world to attach to with an even more gripping gameplay loop to reinvigorate an admittedly well-worn formula. Don’t sleep on Dispatch, it’s an experience that proves that old dogs really can learn new tricks, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what Adhoc Studios does next with it, or anything else for that matter.