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.
Dispatch Ensured You Passed Your First Three Checks That Had Over A 76 Percent Success Rate
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 opportunity to min-max and send the perfect team without over- or under-committing your resources,” they said.
However, with any percentage below 100, there’s still a chance of failure, which could lead to frustration for unlucky players. The development team had a way to mitigate this.
“As any hardcore XCOM player knows, one of the tricks Firaxis implemented was to secretly boost the numbers behind the scenes so that it felt fair even if it was unearned. Those guys are pretty smart, so we thought we’d do the same,” Herman says. “After lots of user testing, we landed on anything that had over a 76 percent success rate would automatically succeed. After the player benefited their times from this boost, we would remove the auto-win and give them true odds again. As soon as they failed above 76 percent, we enabled the three auto-wins again to guarantee they didn’t have a string of bad luck and complain the game wasn’t fair.”
After lots of user testing, we landed on anything that had over a 76 percent success rate would automatically succeed.
Alongside this, the AdHoc team revealed that any percentage between 1–14 was rounded up to 15, to give players a slightly better chance of passing those low-score checks. At least until the game’s last chapter.
In Dispatch’s dispatching finale, LA is on fire. Crime rates are through the roof, and there is simply no time to relax. AdHoc really wanted the players to feel this stress.
“The final change we made was in the last episode. With things on fire and your dispatching skills being put to the test, we disabled all of these invisible helpers,” says Lenart. “For the first time in the entire season, the training wheels are off, and as a result, the game feels a lot harder—which is exactly what we wanted for our finale.”
- Released
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October 22, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood, Crude Humor, Intense Violence, Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Use of Drugs and Alcohol
- Developer(s)
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AdHoc Studio
- Publisher(s)
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AdHoc Studio
