Superhero workplace dramedy Dispatch, from the former TellTale developers at Adhoc Studios, has caught flack for launching on Switch and Switch 2 with mandatory censorship not present in other versions of the adventure game. But the devs have now responded, claiming that they're looking to address some of the censorship with Nintendo's help and they too thought they would've been able to get away with what CD Projekt Red has.
While some early buyers have been getting refunds on the port, Adhoc explained that it's been so quiet since launch "because we've been trying to make sure we're being good partners with Nintendo," per a recent message on its Discord channel. Nintendo had already released a statement prior to this, essentially telling folks to not point the finger at them.
AdHoc's message, then, reiterates that Nintendo has content guidelines and Dispatch simply "didn't meet those guidelines," hence, it made changes to the game to ensure it could launch on the handheld consoles. "That’s what happened here. Honestly we thought this would be obvious since we're the devs that released the fully uncensored version of the game on other platforms," Adhoc writes.
Dispatch's censorship raised so many eyebrows because, as you might have already noticed, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 are both on Nintendo consoles flaunting the type of content that's covered up in the superhero game - nudity and sex noises and whatnot. Adhoc seemed just as taken aback as us, apparently.
"We initially assumed, like some of you, that because games like Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk are on the platform with similar types of uncensored mature content, Dispatch would be allowed to do the same," the statement continues. "During the porting process it became clear that was not the case. So we asked that we include a disclaimer on the store page to inform customers that content would be different than on other platforms. We worked with Nintendo to get storefront language approved. Where we absolutely need to take full ownership is the placement of that disclaimer.
"Again, it was our intent to go out of our way to tell people looking to buy the game that the content was censored. While we didn't have complete control of the language, we did have control of the placement. Wires got crossed and we put the disclaimer in the field literally titled "Disclaimer", instead of the "About The Game" section. We didn't catch this until after the launch when we saw people saying we should have called out the changes on the store page, and we went to go make sure it was there. It technically has been the entire time, just in the absolute worst spot that makes it look like we were trying to hide it. This is 100% our mistake and it was fixed in the Americas store pages a few hours after launch to give more visibility. We've also added a disclaimer before purchase," the studio goes on.
For now, the studio says it's "working with Nintendo on a path forward." But since things are still up in the air, it can't detail exactly what's going to change. "We're confident we'll be able to push an update to address at least some of the censored content," the statement continues. "I'll get ahead of it now and say that between dev time and the console submission process, we're talking weeks not days."
"We were feeling like it was stale": Dispatch is styled like "a premium animated television show" because devs didn’t want players to reject it like Telltale’s Walking Dead
