Five Million Players Later, AdHoc Explains How Dispatch Was Built Like TV

Dispatch passed five million players within a year of its 22 October 2025 launch, and its studio AdHoc attributes that reach to a deliberate production choice: build an episodic game with the pipeline and discipline of premium animated television. A Dispatch Deluxe Edition, released now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, adds new ways to play — including swapping the rendered graphics for storyboard art — and costs $10.99 as a digital upgrade for existing owners.

The game stars Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad as Robert Robertson, a former hero working as dispatcher for a team of reformed supervillains, alongside Jeffrey Wright, Laura Bailey and members of the Critical Role cast. AdHoc co-founders Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart, who serve as COO and CTO respectively and share the co-creative director credit, have now detailed the craft behind those performances.

How do you direct dialogue that branches?

Dispatch runs on Unreal Engine 5, but its consistency begins on the page. "Everything is written with choice in mind," Herman said. AdHoc built its own tools to ingest scripts, including a playable script the team can read and click through. That tool produces the recording script actors use in the booth — one Herman admits is "a little bit crazy to read on a linear page". Each scene has a spine: every branch eventually trunks back into the main flow.

The studio also treats recordings as a directing instrument. AdHoc ingests every performance as it is captured, so an actor recording opposite someone already in the booth hears those existing lines played back. With Aaron Paul already recorded, the team could bring in the actor playing Blonde Blazer, play Paul's lines for her to read off, then play him again after her response. The effect, Herman said, simulates the actors being in the same room, keeps performances grounded, and makes testing branches straightforward.

Facial animation starts only once the voice work is trusted. "Not everyone laughs the same. When they cry, they look different," Herman said. "Every character is their own person. Like they are on the page, they are in animation." Getting there takes, in his words, "a lot of review, a lot of ref" — the team shoots extensive reference footage for its animators.

What does the shift mechanic solve?

For AdHoc, the recurring problem was the seam: the moment a cutscene ends and gameplay begins. "The goal was always to make it feel integrated," Lenart said. Both founders had shipped games with clearly separated story and gameplay sections, and "you could feel that break every single time" — something Lenart said "always kind of drove us crazy".

Their mandate for a studio of their own was to pick mechanics that belong to a character's life rather than scenes contrived for interactivity. In Dispatch, that is the shift mechanic: Robert dispatches heroes to calls because it is his job. "It's the thing he does every day," Lenart said. "So, when he sits down at his computer to do it, it feels natural."

The Z-Team keep talking to the player throughout each shift, so relationships and dialogue never stop for gameplay. A shift can cut to a cinematic and back, and Lenart said that only feels organic because "we spent a lot of time and effort to make it that way".

What did the founders unlearn from Telltale?

Herman and Lenart spent years at Telltale Games, the studio behind The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us and Tales from the Borderlands, where cinematics were "fast and loose". Telltale ran what it called live development: release one episode, spend roughly the next six weeks on the following one, and fold player feedback into cinematics and character intentions up until the day before shipping.

Dispatch inverted that model. To hit the target of a "premium animated television show" that would not barrier non-gamers, AdHoc adopted a traditional animation pipeline with decisions made much earlier — in some cases locked a year in advance. "That was a really big learning curve for us since we were used to being able to make small adjustments all the way up until the last minute," Lenart said. He now credits the discipline with forcing detailed conversations earlier, which "only better informed how each piece of the story was going to play out". His verdict: "Oh, this is actually the way to make the best quality product."

With five million players and a Deluxe Edition widening access to three console platforms, the early-lock model is no longer an experiment for AdHoc — it is the studio's template for its next production.