"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

AdHoc Studios has explained why Dispatch ditched some of the game-y elements that were typically found in the previous Telltale releases.

Speaking to Game Informer, AdHoc Studios co-founder Dennis Lenart explains that with Dispatch, it felt essential that it strip the adventure game-style settings: "We'd say, 'hey, you might really like this Walking Dead game or this Wolf Among Us game we're making,' and they would check it out and go 'Ah, it kind of looks like a video game'."

Lenart adds, "So with Dispatch, we'd always had this theory: Could we bring these types of interactive stories to a larger audience if we removed some of these barriers to entry?" He explains that this philosophy is "part of the reason why the game looks the way it does, to sit alongside a premium animated television show that someone would be familiar with."

A result of this approach was that Dispatch "stripped away all those pieces that slowed down the pacing," Lenart says, further explaining, "In a television show, someone doesn’t get up from the desk and go, ‘All right, I gotta go make a cup of coffee. Walk over. Where’s the cup? I should talk to everybody'."

Dispatch director Nick Herman adds, "Dennis and I made that stuff for a long time. We made a lot of adventure games with a lot of exploration and puzzles. And we were feeling like it was stale."

The ironic part is that a lot of adventure game fans thought the route Telltale went down with The Walking Dead and future titles was already too streamlined, so it's interesting that the perspective was almost the opposite from those making it.

Dispatch broke me out of my gaming slump when nothing else could