The creators of Dispatch explained how they abandoned Telltale's old formula and decided to make gameplay more interesting
The team behind Dispatch says they hit a sort of creative surprise mid-development: after many years working inside an established interactive-story groove, they started asking whether the playable bits could actually be worth playing. It wasn't a marketing line; it came out of frustration, curiosity, and a tiny bit of stubbornness.
Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart — co-founders of AdHoc and former Telltale staff — came from a place most players recognize. Telltale made story-first games (e.g., The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Borderlands, Batman, Game of Thrones) where the mechanical template rarely shifted: dialogue choices dominated, with shallow puzzles and QTEs filling the gaps. That pattern felt like the norm for so long that the team treated gameplay as a checklist item rather than something to savor.
For years they worked amid what they now call, candidly, "simplified beginner-level puzzles" — tasks designed so the mechanics "didn't annoy." In plain terms, the expectation was: keep the story moving; keep the player from getting stuck. But during Dispatch's creation the question changed tone: what if those interludes were actually fun, or at least interesting enough to matter on their own?
The change wasn't total abandonment of narrative priorities. Dispatch still hinges on tricky choices and character-driven scenes, but the devs folded in new systems: a hacking mini-game, plus a light strategic layer where you assign heroes to incidents based on their abilities. In practice that means players triage situations, matching skills to problems rather than just clicking through cutscenes — i.e., gameplay that asks you to think beyond dialogue branches.
That rethink altered how the project progressed. It forced compromises, experiments, and occasional backtracking, but it also opened a route where an interactive story can keep its emotional weight while offering actual, tangible play decisions. The team describes that point as a pivot — not a slogan, but a moment when design priorities shifted in real time.