Dispatch developer AdHoc has told Eurogamer there’s one super-rare game-state that no player has unlocked or achieved yet – something it knows because it has back-end statistics that track these things.
It’s to do with a statistic that reflects how you played as Robert, the main character, which is given at the conclusion of the game.
“At the end of the game, we did a little personality test thing, where it’s like, ‘your Robert was an everyman’, based on how you played the game. Or ‘your Robert was an anti-hero’,” studio co-founder Nick Herman told me.
“There’s actually… I’ve only seen three show up, and there’s four. We know the fourth one is actually really hard to get, intentionally. That’s just a piece of content I have never seen, and we have stats on the back-end that show that maybe no one’s ever gotten it.
“It’s based on gameplay performance,” Herman added. “Have you perfected the game, essentially, is what that is. I don’t know that anyone’s done that.” And it’s based on perfecting non-randomly generated outcomes in the game, by the way. “We focused it on the non-RNG elements,” said Herman.
However, there’s a catch. There is a chance that someone has played Dispatch in such a way that they should earn this elusive game-state, or response, but it simply isn’t registering their efforts correctly. “It might just be a bug,” Herman said, casually. “It’s so hard to do regardless that we were like, ‘Well of course no one’s gotten it,’ but it’s probably a bug.”
“We have a permutation that you have not seen because you’re not allowed to see it because we broke it,” added fellow co-founder Pierre Shorette, the writer of the game, laughing.
Dispatch, a superhero workplace comedy, raced to 2m sales earlier this year, proving that an appetite for Telltale-like episodic series was still very much there. Attention now turns to a possible Dispatch sequel, or second series; to potential reinstated sex scenes; and to The Game Awards this week, in which Dispatch is nominated for Best Debut Indie Game. These are all things I spoke to Herman and Shorette about at much greater length. Look out for a fuller interview soon.