Dispatch dev was "heartbroken" that you thought Blonde Blazer was a villain, and they found your Shroud theories "very funny"

Following Dispatch discourse from week to week was certainly a ride. While I loved nothing more than reading up on 'why Waterboy is actually a villain,' or 'Beef is Shroud,' the fandom's edges really showed when it came to discussing the game's two super romance options, Blonde Blazer and Invisigal. In the most extreme corners of social media, battle lines were well and truly drawn, and it got more than a little nasty for Blazer after the end of episode two. If you haven't played Dispatch yet and are spoiler sensitive, what are you doing? Go on, scram, and come back after you've experienced peak. Thank you.

So, as I was saying, at the end of episode two, it transpired that Blazer was actually dating Phenomaman. Obviously, if you opted to kiss her up on the billboard, this becomes slightly problematic. But with the internet being the internet, all nuance surrounding what eventually transpired to be a very complex situation was thrown out the window, and Blazer ended up being dragged through the mud. As I discovered while chatting to creative director Dennis Lenart and narrative designer Polly Raguimov, this particularly caught the AdHoc Studios team off guard.

"The Blonde Blazer controversy was a thing that we definitely weren't expecting," Lenart reveals. "It brought a weird life to a whole different part of the game. No one could have predicted that people would see the Blonde Blazer character and think that she did not have true intentions. She's always been this pure-hearted character to us. So, as developers, we're heartbroken. It's like seeing a friend of yours get flak from people and you're like, 'no, no, I know they're such a good person, you're so wrong!' But part of the episodic release is you've just got to roll with it and let people have their own experiences."

The Blazer controversy, if anything, highlights just how well Dispatch's episodic format worked in its favor when it came to generating hype and discussion. Each week, I watched its player count progressively soar, with its peak concurrent Steam numbers effectively doubling as each new batch dropped. When Dispatch's finale arrived, its record surpassed 220,000 players, temporarily beating out some of the biggest triple-A behemoths around. In a world that's now hard-wired to instant gratification and full content drops, it's heartening to see there's still a demand for this sort of format in videogames.

It's also apparent that this level of theorycrafting (and borderline tribalism) could never have flourished without Dispatch's overarching structure. Considering the pace at which conversations move on socials nowadays, a week felt just right. As Raguimov highlights with that cliffhanger at the end of episode six, "it wouldn't have been as impactful" without the time to build tension before its resolution; a trend present across Dispatch's storylines.

However, as we know from past interviews, AdHoc had to really fight its corner make Dispatch episodic. For Lenart, there's a real sense of vindication.

"Honestly, a lot of things on this project had a similar vibe where a lot of people said 'don't do this, don't do that,'" Lenart regales. "And we were like, 'okay… I feel like it might work though.' […] Working in different studios in the past, there's always things you want to do that you aren't able to for different reasons; disagreements with higher ups, or publishers, or licensees, whoever. So, getting the chance to have our own IP in our own studio just kind of made us go, 'all right, well, maybe this is it. So let's just do the thing we want to do. And if people don't like it, at least we will get validation that we were wrong, and that's fine.'"

"[…] Obviously, there are a lot of folks who saw the episodic piece and said, 'that's not my deal, I'm just going to wait till it's all out,'" Lenart continues. "And we're totally fine with that. If you want to experience it that way, that's great. And that was part of the reason behind having such a short cadence between episodes. Releasing two at once, having only a week between them was so that it wouldn't feel like in the old Telltale games, [where] if you were waiting till the end you had to wait six months or seven months, and by then everything's already spoiled, everyone's moved on to the next game. So it was important to us to offer players that flexibility.

"It is validating to see and, honestly, just exciting along the way to watch players experience it and come up with fan theories of things that we'd never thought about. I'm sure Polly was probably seeing all sorts of crazy stuff on the Discord and posting it on our company Slack and just thinking like, 'hey, want to hear some crazy stuff that people just came up with?' And we'd hear it and go, 'Whoa, they think Waterboy is the villain?'"

"It was very funny how many theories there were about who Shroud is when we literally say who Shroud is at the very beginning of the game," Raguimov chimes in. "And I'm just like, 'oh, they're expecting a twist.' And the twist is that there is no twist."

While there are myriad reasons for Dispatch's breakout success, it's clear that AdHoc sticking to its gut, and allowing space for its superpowered narrative to organically grow and take on new life within its fandom, were two critical factors. Though Blazer is a flawed character in many ways (as is the case with literally everyone else in Dispatch), it only made her more human and inherently more relatable, despite the fact she could probably send you through a building with the flick of a wrist.