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Dispatch‘s ending brings AdHoc’s superhero workplace comedy to a close in a swell of big battles and emotional resolutions, but it wasn’t always like that. AdHoc originally had a much different vision for the game in mind and struggled to make some of the revised, action-oriented finale’s plot points work. The right casting helped smooth over some issues, but the last touch that brought it all together was an overweight little dog.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Dispatch episodes 6-8]
At the end of Dispatch episode 8, Shroud (Dispatch‘s baddie) and his Red Ring gang swarm the SDN Torrance offices in a last-ditch bid to get the Astral Pulse, a high-tech item that powers Robert’s Mecha Man suit. After a series of exquisitely animated fight scenes, Shroud takes a hostage — Beef, Robert’s overweight little dog whose mission in life is to fart and cuddle, usually at the same time. He agrees to swap Beef for the pulse, and after the exchange, the player can choose to spare Shroud or murder him. Shroud murdered Robert’s father prior to the start of Dispatch‘s story, and the choice builds on an earlier decision where the player has Robert declare his intention to kill Shroud or to take a less lethal approach. It’s the story’s tense emotional climax, and for a long time during Dispatch‘s development, most of it wasn’t even meant to happen.
Dispatch creative director Nick Herman tells Polygon that the team thought of Dispatch as a hero-flavored workplace drama during development, not a straight-up superhero game. So earlier story drafts ended without that dramatic confrontation between the SDN good guys and the villains of Los Angeles or, really, anything you might recognize from the end of a superhero story.
“We were on the fence of whether or not we wanted the story to have a more traditional ending where the big bad guy shows up and everything culminates and the team comes together,” Herman tells Polygon. “We basically said ‘no, that’s not the kind of thing we’re making.’ I don’t know what tipped us in that direction eventually, but I think it was probably the fear that everyone’s going to expect this [kind of climax], so [we thought] let’s just give it to them, make people happy.”
“In a more traditional project, if we knew we had three seasons, we’d have ended on Chase dying at the end of episode 6,” narrative director Pierre Shorette says. “That’s the type of move you pull if you want to make people miserable waiting two years for another season.”
Uncertainty around Dispatch‘s — and AdHoc’s — future gave the team what Shorette calls a “burn the boats” mentality, though, so they threw every idea into the final confrontation in case they wouldn’t get another chance, including a showdown with the villain of the piece.
There was just one problem: Shroud never shows up again until episode 7. And you’d be forgiven for not knowing the criminal organization the team encounters during missions is the one Shroud leads, as their connection rarely comes up until the final chapter. Herman says they knew leaving the villain to the end was a risk, but even after deciding on a big finale, they still saw Dispatch as a game about relationships and workplace drama.
Shorette says casting Critical Role’s Matt Mercer as Shroud was a big step toward making it work, as he gave Shroud an “aura” that felt genuinely dangerous. But he still wasn’t convinced the Shroud story would resonate with people after such a long gap between introducing it in the first episode and ramping it back up for the finale. Dispatch‘s whole thing is about reforming villains and giving people second chances, and Robert even remarks at one point that heroes don’t kill people. That, plus the lack of emotional connection to Robert’s murdered father, whom the player never meets or even sees, made the team think that last big choice would matter for most people. They’d be heroes and let this man they had no reason to hate keep on living.
So for the final emotional push, they decided to have Shroud kidnap Beef.
“You’d see it happen where [testers] were playing and were like ‘I’m not going to kill Shroud if I get the opportunity,’ and then he holds up the dog, and that’s it,” Herman says. “He’s over.”
Folks who’ve played through episode 8 already had similar reactions. The in-game stats don’t show an even divide between people murdering Shroud and sparing him — at the time of writing, 35 percent of people killed the villain — but it’s a better split than the AdHoc team expected, and one they’re happy with. “Now, I’m worried too many people are killing Shroud, and we’ve got a problem in society,” Shorette jokes.
