For as long as video games have had stories, there have been creators working to make their narratives more cinematic. Early on, in works like Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear (1987) and Snatcher (1988), that meant making action- or text-based experiences that rudimentarily emulated the visuals or plot devices of movies. The advent of point-and-click adventure games like LucasArts’ The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) pushed immersion even further with deeper exploration and plodding mysteries to solve. But for the most part, narratively driven games ultimately fell into a formula defined by a handful of popular studios that dominated the space.
For mainstream audiences, PlayStation first-party titles like Uncharted and The Last of Us often get saddled with the (derogatory) descriptor of “playable movies.” Clearly separating the direct action of gameplay from the story-driven bits meant to be viewed passively during non-interactive cut scenes, these types of games tend to be linear — the plot’s pushing forward whether the user is in control or not.
Arguably the most successful studio in this niche was Telltale Games, a small publisher that became known for their emotionally affecting work with established IP like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us (a spin-off of Vertigo’s comic Fables). With rich characters whose fates were often determined by player choice, Telltale’s projects often felt like the pinnacle of what the graphic adventure subgenre could be. But through years of iteration, even their thoughtful approach became strained. As interest waned and episodic releases became more sporadic, the company’s reputation soured — and by their closure in 2018, multiple games including the follow-ups to Game of Thrones and The Wolf Among Us were cancelled.
Telltale Games ended up being revived under new management in 2019, but not before much of its core leadership departed to form AdHoc Studio — a collective of industry veterans looking to push the boundaries of interactive storytelling. Their first game, Dispatch (out Oct. 22) aims to accomplish what previous ones couldn’t: creating an immersive TV-quality experience that can appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike.
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Recently, Rolling Stone played a demo of Dispatch and spoke with multiple of the game’s developers about their new approach to the graphic adventure genre, what they’re leaving behind from Telltale, and why episodic releases can work better than ever.
Redefining the interactive story
Unlike Telltale’s most popular games like The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands, Dispatch is an entirely original concept created by AdHoc — but there’s still familiar elements. The game follows Robert Robertson (voiced by Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul), an ex-superhero who’s lost everything after his mechanized suit is ruined in a fight. Given the opportunity to work in the emergency call center for the Superhero Dispatch Network (SDN), Robertson is tasked with thankless job of remotely managing a group of former supervillains as they attempt to do good.
The cast includes Aaron Paul, Jeffrey Wright, and multiple Critical Role alumni like Laura Bailey and Matthew Mercer.
AdHoc Studio
“He’s kind of like Tony Stark, except he’s not smart and he’s not rich,” says Nick Herman, co-creative director of Dispatch. The parallels with Iron Man are there, but mostly superficial; the game’s setting feels like a mishmash of tons of different superhero media — from the edgy animated violence of Invincible to the “bad guys go straight” schtick of The Suicide Squad and Thunderbolts*.
As a dispatcher, Robertson has an essential role answering community calls, encompassing everything from fires and robberies to saving kittens and sending heroes to make public appearances alongside c-suite execs. The gameplay bounces between fully animated dialogue sequences that require timed choices to advance and multiple interactive sections like managing the dispatch and hacking computers.
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While dialogue trees and mini-games are well-worn territory for games of this ilk, the developers are actively eschewing specific mechanics that they’ve grown sick of during their tenures at Telltale. Namely, all the boring walking and item collection that normally constitutes filler content has been cut.
“There was a conscious effort to avoid things that felt like we were asking you to interact purely for the sake of needing to interact because it had been a while since you held a stick or pushed a button,” says co-creative director Dennis Lenart.
Dialogue trees have timed choices that will impact the plot in major ways.
AdHoc Studio
Previous games from Telltale heavily relied on controlling the player character through long stretches of monotonous walking around fixed spaces looking for the next interaction to trigger. In Dispatch, the goal is to ensure that every action has a satisfying purpose.
“[At] Telltale, there was a lot of extra gameplay,” Herman says. “Kind of like, ‘Oh, you’ve got to walk from here to here to hit a trigger.’ And it’s like, ‘Did I really?’ That was mainly just anxiety and insecurity of not [being] sure that people are engaged and [needing] to make sure their hands are on the controller. We don’t want to make the same mistakes we did last time.”
Herman and Lenart note that many of the systems implemented in Dispatch are ideas that date back more than 10 years but couldn’t be accomplished for one reason or another. Playing the game, the difference is instantly apparent. Without drawn out exploration, the story zips along at the pace you’d expect from an animated comedy, allowing audiences to bend the arc of the plot with quick decisions made in action. It’s not a new idea, but by driving the narrative forward with minimal stop-down, Dispatch feels much closer to mentally guiding a TV show than playing a full-blown game.
Dispatch shifts are interactive sections that replace the traditional plodding and exploration.
AdHoc Studio
But there’s also more traditional gameplay involved — primarily through the dispatching and hacking sections. Working the hotline, players get to view the world through an in-game monitor that lays out a grid of the city and the roster of heroes on their shifts. Displayed at the bottom of the screen, the characters are all on an open line, talking shit (mostly about Robertson), and reacting to their various assignments. Each hero has specific attributes and specialties that make them better or worse suited for unique tasks, and choosing the right ones is key to successfully saving lives or making the public happy.
Conversely, the hacking mini-game requires direct input from a controller or, for greater immersion, a keyboard where it actually feels like breaking into a computerized security system. Simple button inputs can mean critical success or failure, and when under the crunch of the timer, the sequences can be exhilarating. One instance shown by the developers (but not playable directly) saw Robertson hacking into a store’s security feed and HVAC systems to help a hero take down a fire-based bad guy.
“I think the hacking mechanic, specifically, was [added] mid-development because [the] developers on the game were like, ‘I want to move something with my fingers on screen,’ Herman says. “Since we don’t have this, ‘I’m walking a character around, picking stuff up, looking at it, having direct control over something — it just felt like something we were itching for. Then [Helldivers 2] came out and were like, ‘Oh man, up, down, left, right is actually fun.’”
TV-show quality without licensed IP
For many non-gamers, the hesitance toward picking up even a slightly interactive narrative game often boils down to the disconnect they feel with the graphics. It’s why shows like HBO’s The Last of Us might do outsized numbers for the Sunday night streaming crowd even when its story is nearly identical to the virtual source material that’s been available for over a decade.
The game’s tone is comedic and violent in equal measure without feeling gratuitous.
AdHoc Studio
For the team at AdHoc, the visual fidelity of game design has been a sticking point for years. Although their previous games at Telltale have held up better than most due to their more cartoonish aesthetic (which ages better than attempted photorealism), Dispatch’s creators know that what audiences are seeing will be their first hurdle.
“We don’t like it when people are going, ‘Man, the stories are great. I love the dialogue, the writing, the acting is fantastic. But it’s not for me,’” Herman says. “Why? That doesn’t make any sense. And what we found [was], a lot of times, the barrier was just how it looked. It looked like a video game. So, people who would enjoy interactive stories were put off because they weren’t ‘gamers.’”
It helps to remove the UI and mandatory walking around, but Dispatch’s greatest strength for reaching non-gamers will be its animation style — which is decadent. While even the most popular adult animation today, from Netflix’s wave of anime to Amazon’s Invincible and Critical Role shows, look good enough to garner cartoon-wary viewers, they still often fall short of spectacular.
Visually, Dispatch looks better than most animated shows — something its creators will draw in diverse audiences.
AdHoc Studio
With high-end theatrical and streaming movies like Sony’s Spiderverse and K-Pop Demon Hunters, the bar has been raised to grab people’s attention. Fortunately, Dispatch meets those demands, while also weaving in some more familiar notes by blending the eye-popping colors of comic book media with the more mundane world of shows like The Office.
“People call the style ‘pretty.’ I think that’s fair,” says art director Derek Stratton. “For a comedy, a workplace comedy, in terms of live action, it’s like a lot of fill light and everything feels bright. There’s no really stylish workplace comedy. So, it was an interesting opportunity to jump in and do something new.”
Recreating the tone of a TV show might help bring in skeptics, but existing fans of AdHoc’s older work will be hoping to see the kinds of layered storytelling that made Telltale games famous. Despite mostly working with established IP like The Walking Dead and Borderlands, their narrative adventures generally met (or surpassed) the level of quality seen in the source material. But the writing process was never without friction. “Many times, you’re dealing with that headache of trying to satisfy criteria from the license holder,” Stratton notes.
Each character has a rich personality and traits that will determine how they handle assignments.
AdHoc Studio
Narrative director Pierre Shorette is keenly aware that fans expect a certain caliber of storytelling from AdHoc — one that’s distinctly voicey, even when they’ve previously played in someone else’s sandbox.
“On the one hand, we definitely did work on a lot of licensed projects, but I think if you look back on the stuff we worked on, all the way back to The Walking Dead, specifically [The Wolf Among Us] and Tales from the Borderlands — which had much more of a creative role on — they feel like departures from what you’re used to from those franchises,” Shorette says. “So, I think [we’ve] been doing this the whole time, doing sort of original stuff within the parameters of some existing IP. In that sense, it’s not too far of a reach for us, but it’s definitely going to be hard to know that, if we fuck it up it’s all our fault, and there’s no one else to blame.”
Creating water cooler talk
One sticking point that’s had players debating for years is the concept of an episodic rollout for games. While many of Telltale’s releases stuck to five to six chunks delivered over the course of months, the company’s latter years were embroiled in delays and cancellations that left fans hanging. It’s an issue that plagues the industry all around, with yearslong waits between indies developed by small teams or worse, unsatisfying cliffhangers needlessly padding out experiences that could’ve been a singular whole.
The episodic release aims to capture weekly players and bingers alike in the communal experience.
AdHoc Studio
While some series that previously released episodically have condensed their timelines to just two halves, AdHoc has decided to stick with the television-styled cadence of Dispatch’s drops. The game will consist of eight episodes, estimated to be roughly one hour apiece, launching two at a time weekly on Oct. 22, Oct. 29, Nov. 5, and Nov. 12.
With locked release dates, it’s clear that the game is actually finished, which should alleviate some stress. But will players be willing to tune in for scheduled programming when they’ve been brought up on binge models? It’s a non-issue for AdHoc, who hopes people will follow the traditional route, but fully embrace all methods of consumption.
“I’m assuming I’m in the minority where, [even] if a whole show is out, I’ll meter it out for myself,” Herman says. “Because I’m like, ‘Oh, I like this. I want to live in it longer.’ I’ve done it where I just binge something and was like, ‘That was incredible,’ and then two weeks later I’m like, ‘I don’t even remember what that show’s impact on me was.’”
Mini-games are easy to pick up and dynamic, feeling like an immersive extension of the plot.
Look, binging is fine — if that’s what you’re into. But the developers are looking to a healthy digital discourse to keep the water cooler talk going. “I like to make it a communal experience when I can,” says lead producer, Natalie Herman. “So, with my friends, [there’s] this new show that we’re all excited about every Sunday night; we’re going to get together as a group, or as many of us who can, and we’re going to make that an event for ourselves. It’s something we are hoping [for] with Dispatch, in the sense of the online community — that people are going to be talking about the game, theorizing what’s going to happen next in between drops.”
The popularity of Twitch and YouTube streaming can also be a boon for Dispatch. Today, huge contingents of people are just as happy watching others beat games as they are playing themselves.
“What’s nice about episodic is, if you do want to just watch your favorite streamer play it every week, you can do that,” Nick says. “But it also provides a stopping point where you’re like, ‘Oh, I really like this,’ and maybe I would have just binged through watching the streamer play the whole game if I could, but I can’t. Now I have this moment of thinking, ‘Do I want to join along? Or do I want to be more passive?’ We’re happy for folks to engage with it in whatever way that makes sense for them.”
Even if someone watches on Twitch, there’s incentive to try different story paths themselves.
AdHoc Studio
Beyond a virtual community, the game’s appeal will most certainly extend to people crammed together under one roof IRL. As Shorette is quick to point out, just because you’re not holding the controller doesn’t mean you won’t be locked in while friends and family do. “A lot of the times people play our games, they’re couch co-op experiences, even though it’s not integrated into the game,” Shorette says. “It’s just people sitting there talking and enjoying something together. And I think we’re making a comedy, we’re making entertainment. We just want to make people happy, enjoy something, and have a good time.”
It’s fair to say that there’s still some stigma among certain audiences when it comes to picking up a game versus watching a show or movie. For those with trepidation, the AdHoc team has a simple conceit: You’re already fiddling with multiple screens. What’s the difference?
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“Basically, everyone’s watching TV. A lot more people are becoming comfortable watching animated TV, [and] everyone’s used to sitting on a couch with a phone while they’re watching TV,” Nick says. “So, interaction while watching things is a thing that people are doing already, and we’re just trying to get those people who don’t think they’re gamers to give it a shot.”
Dispatch launches its first two episodes on Oct. 22 for PC and PS5, with subsequent episodes arriving weekly.
