Comment on The Turbulent, Seven-Year Saga Behind Hit Game ‘Dispatch’

Ok_imagination@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• UltraMagnus@startrek.website ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Gameplay - quick time events weren’t super annoying (I wasn’t a fan of telltale batman quick time events), I personally liked the hacking minigame (though not everyone did), and the actual “dispatch” segments were tons of fun.

  The story was excellent - I kept expecting a “twist” like we’ve seen in a lot of superhero media recently, and there weren’t any big twists. I think this was a good thing, it’s nice to see more of a “reconstruction” of good guy vs bad guy.

  Spoilers - ::: spoiler spoiler If there is a twist, it’s that Shroud’s actually kinda stupid with common sense things - no grand plot, he’s just good at math and let it get to his head. Letting Robert live since he was “unimportant” really was just Shroud missing an opportunity. Not having Toxic kill him in the first scene really was just shitty planning, and probably the need to be a drama queen in the warehouse and the need to defeat Mecha Man, not some “I am your father” type moment like some theories were suggesting.

  I enjoyed this a lot, even though it meant a lot of theories around the game didn’t plan out.:::

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• Glide@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Just finished Chapter 3 of 8. It has some very classic Telltale foibles: sometimes the script seems to assume you made a decisions that you didn’t make and it makes the dialogue feel awkward, or the sarcastic tone in a written dialogue choice isn’t clear when you select the option and the resulting scene isn’t at all what you thought you were suggesting.

  Despite these fairly common for Telltale problems, it’s an incredibly witty and entertaining piece of entertainment. They use the “dispatch” mechanic to engage you as a player and they tie it into the narrative in ways that feel clever. Everyone is at each others throats because of a story beat? People are actively sabotaging each other on the job and it’s making your job as their dispatcher harder. The writing is laugh-out-loud funny, the voice acting and character animation is top notch, and there’s an interesting story and world holding it all together.

  It’s very good. Not perfect, but very good.

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  • naticus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Interesting that you felt the game assumed you made choices you didn’t, I hadn’t ran into that despite very frequently picking the less popular options. I won’t ask for specifics for obvious reasons, but that does make me curious whether there was a bug or a gap in logic. Definitely not a flawless game as gamepad is a very flawed input option when things get hectic, but damn the writing and action sequences had me hooked immediately.

    Still can’t believe my first time through was only 7.5 hours. Can’t wait to go through with different choices.

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    • Glide@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m going to spoiler it and talk about it, because I am genuinely interested in other people’s opinion/experiences on this.

      Spoilers for late chapter 1, early chapter 2

      This is mostly centered around the kiss. Save the “proposition” innuendo, it became pretty clear that Blonde Blazer’s whole schtick was to recruit Robert. Even in the moment when she moved close to him, she kind of sizes him up like someone looking at a horses teeth as opposed to someone losing themselves in the eyes of a prospective lover, so I didn’t kiss her, and save making a joke on the “proposition” comment, didn’t say anything overly romantic of flirty. This made the whole conversation the next day feel weird and out of place. It was toned like Robert DID kiss her, as Blazer just constantly apologized, and the responses I had options for (“I don’t think it was a mistake” met with “it was, for reasons I’ll explain later”) kept that same awkward connotation. Blonde Blazer acted like she did something incredibly inappropriate in… being slightly drunk when she offered Robert a job? But as a result of my options, there really was nothing to act like this about. But the conversation HAD to be toned this way, otherwise Invisigirl overhearing and responding with “what, you two fuck?” wouldn’t make any sense. The game didn’t “assume I made choices I didn’t” as much as they clearly wrote it with an expectation in mind, but my choices didn’t meet those expectations, leaving the whole section flowing weird.

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      • naticus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Oh okay I see what you’re saying, but I took it as more than just that.

        spoiler for the same event

        She was being flirty with him while not just on the job but also in a relationship, and for some that’s enough for them to feel guilty. Yes, at this point Robert didn’t know about the relationship at this point, but from his POV he’d still read that guilt for what he saw might have been a signal he missed.

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    • LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I think they mean how the suggested responses were summarised, sometimes when you choose that dialogue option it doesn’t always say the thing it suggested in exactly the way you were expecting,. Personally I found it on point and did fit within the parameters of the summarisation. My 17yo son played it and loved it so much he made me sit and play it with him, and I noticed that he didn’t pick up on what some of the dialog summaries meant. Whereas old and ancient me, whose been around the block a fair bit, understood the nuances behind them all.

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• ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I liked it a lot. It’s engrossing enough to make you just want to keep going to the next episode, and it’s beautifully animated. Other than the story stuff, the gameplay loop is just This is the Police, and I think this improves both the Telltale design and the design of This is the Police by way of pacing. It did still leave me wanting more as a video game, but as a story and a comedy, I loved it.

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