Episodic games, much like baggy jeans and curtain haircuts, may be about to make a comeback, and once again it’s Telltale staff – former Telltale staff – who are leading the charge.
AdHoc Studios, a team founded by Telltale developers in 2018, when Telltale collapsed, will launch debut game Dispatch – a superhero workplace comedy – episodically in October.
Episodes will be roughly an hour long and launch in quick succession. The plan is for two a week, I was told during a press briefing. The releases will begin Wednesday, 22nd October, and continue through 29th October, 5th November and 12th November until the whole series is done.
The entire Dispatch game or series, depending on how you look at it, will cost $30, or you can splash $40 for a Deluxe Edition with some fancy extras. Note, however, you won’t be able to buy episodes individually; the team clarified this to me in a separate interview after the briefing. That means if you pay-out at launch, you’ll have to wait four weeks for the whole series to arrive. The idea is to make it like watching a TV series.
I can imagine what you’re thinking: didn’t we try this episodic thing before and didn’t it fail because it didn’t work? Weren’t we waiting ages between episodes which seemed to only ever get further and further away? Well, yes – and the former Telltale staff at AdHoc are the first people to admit this.
“We never really were able to hit it at a cadence that people could expect,” said AdHoc co-founder Pierre Shorette, a former TellTale dev, during the Dispatch press briefing. “It’s probably led to a lot of distrust with episodic formats, because the first episode comes out and then it might be ages before anything else shows up.”
Fellow former Telltaler, and fellow AdHoc co-founder Nick Herman, added: “This time we’re going to do better.” But in what way will episodic gaming be different with Dispatch?
The big difference with Dispatch is that all of the episodes are already made, so their releases are locked. We’re not in a position where a development team moves from one episode to another after each one is made. “They’re all made,” Nick Herman told me during a follow-up interview. “It’s all good.”
Another fellow Telltaler and AdHoc co-founder, Denis Lenart, added: “Part of the transaction formula in our mind was they’ve all got to be ready and they’ve all got to be good to go. Because that happened to Telltale – that’s one of the problems that happened. People would pay money and then go, ‘I thought you said next week.’ And it was like, ‘Actually, maybe it’s three or four weeks… We’ll let you know in a few weeks.’ And then that’s a horrible situation.”
Dispatch is very much like a Telltale game of old in the way it plays out – the way it gives you choice-and-consequence control over the way scenes unfold. It tells the story of a sort-of superhero called Robert Robertson, played by Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, whose inherited mecha-suit breaks and leaves him – effectively a normal person – needing to get a different job. And the job he gets is in an office working as a superhero dispatcher, sending misfit superheroes to the rescue.
It’s funny, it’s handsome, and it’s got some great voice talent in it, including Critical Role’s Laura Bailey and husband Travis Willingham. Critical Role is actually a silent partner on the game. “They’re helping us in a variety of ways that aren’t maybe traditional publisher stuff,” Nick Herman told me, which I assume to mean ‘Critical Role is lending clout and exposure’.
Why would Critical Role do that? Because AdHoc is making Critical Role’s first Critical Role video game. All we know about that game is it’ll be set in Exandria, which is the world all three of the group’s major Dungeons & Dragons campaigns have taken place in. Will it also be episodic? We don’t yet know, but I’d say there’s a good chance it will play like Dispatch or a Telltale game, given AdHoc’s area of expertise. I reckon it might draw inspiration from the Vox Machina animated Critical Role series on Amazon too, but that’s just a hunch.
A Dispatch demo was released on Steam earlier this year and is still available there now. It seems to be going down really well.
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