Dispatching the Dispatch
Hey there, reader. I’m Bogdan — writer, game dev, and someone who spends way too much time thinking about how stories work.
Most of what I write is about fixing things that almost worked — taking well-known stories and showing how they could’ve been so much better without breaking what made them good in the first place. This time I’m doing a deep dive on Dispatch, specifically the first four episodes.
Heads-up: there’s gonna be some swearing and sex talk ahead. But since that’s literally in the game — you’ll survive.
I wouldn’t call the writing in Dispatch complete garbage. It’s just... average. Flashy on the surface, hollow inside. To quote my own review:
“What does Dispatch actually have going for it? Style. Characters swear, crack jokes that occasionally land, there’s some sex, violence, good acting, expensive mocap — all the usual bells and whistles.
What it doesn’t have? Meaning. Depth. Craft. The characters are paper-thin, their motivations make no sense (if they even exist). Everyone’s supposed to be thirty-something, but they act like hormonal teenagers. It’s all exaggerated, cartoonish, and dumb. And despite the jokes, the game keeps trying to be serious — like a drama written by a high-schooler who is imagining a crush on her hot vampire boss.”
What follows is a point-by-point breakdown of the narrative — where it falls apart, where it actually works, and how I’d fix it.
My little dream here is that maybe someone from the dev team (or any higher up in the industry) stumbles across this, and one day I get to help build something really good. Realistically though, that’s a long shot — so take this as what it is: notes from a writer who cares too much.
The points aren’t ranked by importance — they’re just thoughts from along the playthrough. The biggest issues, my takeaways, and some broader ideas come closer to the end. And no, that’s not a “read till the end” clickbait line — it just turned out that way.
It’s clear what the writers were going for — a fake-out intro: “therapy session that turns out to be a conversation with the villain.”
Good concept, lazy execution.
Pulling off that kind of scene so it feels organic is hard. Here, the villain — who ten seconds later is screaming insults about the hero and his dead father (literally) — has to play along just to make the twist work. The result feels forced, like a high school play where everyone knows the punchline but still has to pretend they don’t.
How to fix it: make it a short monologue into the void. Have the hero vent his trauma at the unconscious villain — or at one gagged and unable to reply. You’d keep the misdirection, the smooth intro that flips into brutal action, and the contrast between self-reflective therapy talk and sudden violence.
Even better, make it an inner monologue or a voice-over. You’ll cut the cheap theater, keep the tone switch, and open the story with something that actually feels cinematic instead of scripted.
The game throws in a few light interactive QTE moments to help you “feel” the action on screen. Sounds good on paper — but, as with many things in this project, it’s done with zero thought and minimum effort.
Some might say, “who cares, it’s a small detail.” I’d argue it’s exactly the small stuff that shows how the team thinks. Right at the start, you get a scene where the hero puts on gloves and zips up his jumpsuit — and that’s where the game decides, hey, let’s make this interactive! A few clicks later, he’s suited up.
But just one scene after, when he climbs into a massive mech, flips switches, powers up systems, and preps for battle — no QTE. Nothing.
Like… seriously? What’s more immersive: pretending to zip your pants, or actually booting up a giant war machine?
It’s a perfect example of the “good enough” mentality that runs through the whole thing — features for the sake of checkmarks, not meaning.
How to fix it: swap the damn QTE. Let players feel the mech startup — the switches, the hum, the vibration of the cockpit. That’s immersion. Not button-mashing to close your fly.
So in the opening, Robert — our regular, unaugmented human protagonist — is interrogating Toxic, a flying, acid-spitting supervillain who can melt through shields and metal.
How the hell did that happen?
How did an ordinary dude manage to ambush, disable, and kidnap a monster like that? How did he stop Toxic from using his powers? How did he tie him to a chair, of all things? That’s the story I actually want to see — the plan, the trick, the setup. Instead, the game just skips over it like it’s no big deal.
And what makes it worse is what comes next: literally one scene later, the same guy charges headfirst into an enemy factory full of armed guards. No plan, no tactics. Just fists. He gets wrecked, loses the suit, and only plot armor saves his ass.
Why make your hero an idiot? Let him be smart.
Give him gadgets, intel, a bit of method to his madness. Let him pull off that first capture through a clever setup — then show how his overconfidence leads him to underestimate the factory fight where he gets into Shroud's trap.
That way, you don’t just have “a dumbass punching dudes until he loses,” but an actual duel of minds — a hero and his nemesis playing chess, not slap-fighting in the dark.
Does Robert even have one? At first glance — maybe. Early on, even if you pick the “bad” choice and toss Toxic (the henchman of his main nemesis, Shroud) off a balcony, Robert throws him onto a mattress so the guy doesn’t get hurt. Okay — that hints at a moral code.
But two minutes later, the same Robert stomps that same villain into concrete with a multi-ton mech.
Some will say “eh, small detail.” But this is exactly how stories fall apart — inconsistency in small details is what I call narrative grime.
So what’s the logic here?
Does Robert know Toxic can’t be hurt, so he’s just showing off early on? Then why bother with the fake mercy?
If he doesn’t know — why the sudden shift from “I won’t kill” to “murder via mech stomp”?
Did his moral compass just flicker off between cutscenes?
Later we see he has plenty of weapons but never uses them. So what’s the deal?
Is he a pacifist? A dumbass? Or a pacifist dumbass who occasionally forgets he’s one?
How to fix it: make the hero consistent.
Let his choices show his beliefs. If he doesn’t kill — give him tools that reflect that: shockers, sleep darts, EMPs, stun grenades. Let the player feel the restraint.
That’s how you build a moral code through action, not exposition. A character’s philosophy isn’t what he says — it’s what he does when no one’s watching.
Yeah, there’s no censorship in this game — we get the full package: blood, swearing, boobs, even masturbation. Fine. I’m not twelve, I can handle nudity.
But seriously — why the dick? What was the creative intent there?
I get that it’s “realistic,” sure. But a flopping penis mid–fight scene doesn’t make things more dramatic — it just turns the moment into a meme. You’re trying to sell me on the idea that the hero is seconds from death, and I can’t stop staring at his enemy's physics-enabled dong doing its own side quest.
And it’s not even consistent! Later there’s a werebat transformation, a full nude scene, even a sex scene — and in all of those, they cut away or hide the parts. So why this one? Why the random, solitary penis cameo? It doesn’t serve the story, doesn’t build tension, doesn’t even fit the tone. It’s just “lol, dick.”
Which is a shame, because it undercuts a serious moment right at the start of the game. The opening minutes of any story establish tone — and this one basically tells the player, “we’re going for edgy, not smart.”
Realism is fine — but everything you show on screen should have purpose. We don’t watch the hero sleep, piss, or brush his teeth unless it adds something to the story.
Same rule applies here: if you’re gonna show a dick, make it mean something.
Why are Shroud, Toxic, and that whole opening even there?
They show up, chew some screen time, and then — gone. Four hours of nothing. It’s like the writers opened the game with the promise of a big personal rivalry, then got distracted by shiny new plotlines and forgot their own setup.
Sure, maybe “they’ll come back later,” but that’s not an excuse for weak structure. You don’t introduce a dozen characters just to shelve them for half the story. Every named character should carry narrative weight — otherwise, it’s just noise.
How to make it better:
Imagine this — later in the story, Robert joins a superhero corporation as a dispatcher for a rehab team made up of former villains. Among them — Toxic.
Now the opening matters. Robert outsmarted Toxic early on, using him to find Shroud’s hideout. Shroud, being the smarter bastard, anticipated the betrayal, set a trap, and both Robert and Toxic walked into it. Toxic got framed as the leak and barely escaped — burned bridges, hunted by his old crew, forced to join the rehab program out of pure survival instinct.
Robert hates Toxic. Toxic mocks him. They’re stuck working together.
Boom — conflict, tension, arcs. Now the audience has something to hold onto besides dick jokes and half-baked moral choices.
Instead of a disposable cartoon villain who yells and flashes his junk, you’d have a character with depth — someone broken, cornered, forced into uncomfortable growth. That’s how you make people care.
A good villain doesn’t need to die or disappear. He needs to evolve — or drag the hero down with him.
Three generations of “mysterious Mecha Man” and no one’s figured out who he is? Come on. That’s not suspension of disbelief — that’s narrative lobotomy.
I get it, it’s a trope. But it’s a bad trope. Lazy. Especially in a story that’s clearly trying to be gritty and dramatic. If you’re writing a world that looks like ours — with smartphones, satellites, AI surveillance, drones, thermal imaging, and the fucking internet — then an anonymous vigilante running around in a homemade combat mech isn’t edgy. It’s stupid.
Do you realize how many red flags a guy like that would set off in the real world? He’s a civilian building guided missiles in his garage, sourcing military-grade batteries and exotic fuel. The FBI wouldn’t just find him — they’d clone his dog to get a DNA match.
There are dozens of simple, believable ways to handle identity without turning the story into a Saturday morning cartoon. Maybe his identity is known, but no one can touch him because of corporate protection or political deals. Maybe he works in the open — a face of justice in a world where everyone else hides. Or maybe he’s exposed early on, and that becomes part of his arc.
But “nobody knows who the guy in the ten-foot metal death suit is”?
That’s not drama. That’s 2003 fanfiction logic.
If you want to write mature scripts, write a world that reacts like the real one would. Otherwise, it’s just Iron Man with worse PR.
Robert — the hero — is weak. Not physically, but narratively. He’s a cardboard cutout with a pretty face and a cheat code life.
Let’s count the blessings that fall on his head like loot boxes on easy mode:
Two beautiful women fall for him instantly. He lands a cushy six-figure job. Everyone respects him, listens to him, gives him authority. He’s young, handsome, famous, has a loyal dog, and somehow, despite literally everything going right, he’s drowning in depression and sleeping on the floor of an empty apartment like a moody teenager.
It’s not brooding. It’s ridiculous.
The writers clearly wanted a tortured lone wolf, but ended up with a spoiled millionaire LARPing as a working-class hero. He’s so “broken” that he drags a multi-ton combat mech piece by piece into his apartment — alone — in a residential building — while supposedly being anonymous.
At one point a character even asks him, “Why did you become a hero? You had millions. You threw it all away on a robot.”
And Robert answers, “I like helping people.” That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
A vigilante story only works when it’s rooted in helplessness — when the hero risks everything because the system is broken, when he’s got nothing left to lose but still chooses to fight. When your protagonist has a fortune and access to infrastructure that could literally save thousands of lives, punching random thugs in an exosuit isn’t noble — it’s idiotic.
You could have hospitals. Or orphanages. Or a foundation that actually helps. Instead we got “rich guy buys a jetpack and goes bankrupt beating up strangers.”
Give the man a grounding conflict — something real, not “tragic dead dad #543.”
For example: Robert’s a mechanic. Not rich, not famous, just barely keeping things together. Two-thirds of his income goes to repairing his mech, his obsession. When he loses the core component — the Astral Engine — he’s desperate. He tracks down his ex, Blazer, who now works high up in the superhero corp. He begs her for a chance — says he’ll work off the debt, take the most dangerous missions, anything.
Blazer, torn between empathy and protocol, offers him the only position she can — dispatcher. It’s humiliating for him, but he swallows his pride once again. Then you add tension: there’s chemistry with his new teammate, Invisigirl. But rekindling that spark could cost him Blazer’s trust — and his second chance. And what if Blazer is also falling for her ex?
Now you’ve got agency, stakes, and character dynamics. The romance triangle isn’t random, it’s tied to survival and pride. The depression isn’t just an aesthetic, it has cause and consequence.
You don’t need a “cool hero.” You need a human one.
Robert isn’t the only one made of cardboard — the whole cast is flat-packed from IKEA’s “Narrative Starter Set.”
There are too many characters, and almost none of them are actually used. Those who get screen time are either paper-thin, internally inconsistent, or just pointless ballast.
Let’s unpack a few issues here:
Blonde Blazer.
Age unknown, but by context — at least 30. She’s a department head, repeats three times how she wants to stay professional — and then immediately invites Robert to a flirty, boozy “interview” full of giggles and touching.
Is this a CEO or a shy anime schoolgirl on her first date?
Then there’s her boyfriend — an alien so socially inept he talks like he’s been sedated and doesn’t have genitals, meaning their “making love” is literally hugging. Funny concept, sure, but a grown woman choosing to date this emotional manatee feels less like sci-fi and more like character design by committee.
Her logic also implodes in the story’s first major moral test. After the player spends a whole chapter trying to save InvisiGirl, Blazer drops the gem:
“Oh, by the way, I wouldn’t have let you fire InvisiGal anyway.”
So the entire gameplay segment we just slogged through — utterly meaningless.
Chase.
Robert’s uncle, mentor, protector, and exposition machine. His only job is to hand the hero a shortcut and pat him on the back. He adds nothing, resolves nothing, changes nothing. He’s there to rob Robert of agency — when the story would be much stronger if the hero found the job himself.
How to fix it:
Merge Chase into someone inside the team. Make him one of the reformed villains under Robert’s command — the only one who treats him with decency. Let friendship and moral tension grow naturally.
Then twist the knife: that ally becomes one of the candidates for termination. The other? Toxic.
Now Robert faces a real dilemma — fire the only person who’s treated him like a human being, or the unstable ex-villain he hates but who might actually be trying to change. Each option has consequences, both moral and social. That’s drama.
And speaking of stakes — the worldbuilding around this “supervillain rehab job” is nonexistent. What is this job? Is it parole? A corporate PR stunt? How are these people paid, monitored, or recruited? Why doesn’t anyone ever try to escape? Why would rich supers even agree to work there?
If your entire premise is “villains forced to work a 9-to-5,” maybe explain how that works before throwing in horny geeks and winged femme fatales.
Because when your first major choice boils down to “who do you fire — the quirky engineer or the sexy bird-lady we barely spoke to?” — that’s not a moral choice.
That’s a coin flip.
And coin flips don’t make stories.
The game suffers from it on every possible level — tone, logic, and even basic world consistency.
Let’s start with Phenomeman.
We’re told again and again that he’s one of the strongest hero alive, a living legend, someone powerful enough to destroy the planet.
So why, when he becomes a playable character, are his stats barely above the team average? Why is the god-tier savior of humanity suddenly is on par with drunken brawler losing health to street thugs? You can’t call someone a nuclear bomb and then make him hit like a soda can.
Then there’s Prism — the “charisma specialist.”
Her main stat is literally charm, yet in practice she’s the loudest, most abrasive, least persuasive person in the room. During her very first argument, she doesn’t use wit or empathy — she grabs a weapon and threatens to kill someone. Being obnoxious and aggressive isn’t charisma. At that point, InvisiGal and Coupe are way more charming without even trying.
Coupe, by the way, is an assassin with 68 confirmed kills.
And yet, she can’t handle throwing a drunk out of a bar.
I get that the writers wanted humor, but the tone isn’t comedic. The game tries to sell itself as a grounded drama about flawed heroes. You can’t play it like a sitcom and expect the audience to take emotional stakes seriously. You can absolutely have jokes in a drama — but here they made the drama a joke.
Then there’s the fire villain — the one Robert supposedly defeated long ago and who’s now in his team. That setup screams for moral tension. A hero forced to work with his old nemesis, the man whose capture might’ve changed his life, whose suffering could mirror Robert’s own.
Instead? He’s comic relief. A loud, clumsy jerk who keeps embarrassing himself. The perfect chance for a dark, layered rivalry — wasted for a cheap laugh.
Even basic world logic collapses under scrutiny.
Take InvisiGal. We’re told the objects in her hands don’t turn invisible. Fine — fun limitation. But her clothes do. Why? Nanofiber suit? Okay, then why doesn’t she have any useful gadgets — a taser, a smoke bomb, a tranquilizer made of the same stuff? She’s a fragile character forced into fistfights against men twice her size with actual weapons. The entire story hinges on her losing one of those fights — which happens because she’s unarmed. The writers could’ve fixed that with one line of logic or a single inventory slot.
And then there’s Malevola, who literally tries to murder a colleague mid-mission — and everyone shrugs it off five minutes later. If your tone is serious, then actions must have weight. Otherwise, it’s narrative anarchy — a soap opera in spandex.
How to fix it:
Ask the simplest question: why is this here?
Does it serve the plot? The tone? The player’s understanding of the world? If not — cut it or reframe it.
Don’t tell us Phenomeman can destroy planets unless you can show that mechanically.
Don’t make Prisma a charisma build if her idea of persuasion is screaming.
Don’t write a moral drama if everyone behaves like a cartoon.
It’s not even about budget — it’s about care.
Half of these problems vanish if the writers just stop treating the story like filler between QTEs and start respecting their own world.
Worlds don’t need to be perfect. They just need to believe in themselves.
This scene deserves its own autopsy, because nothing in it works.
It’s supposed to be the emotional and ideological peak of the story — Robert clashing with Golem and Prisma, everyone debating the purpose of the Phoenix program, the value of redemption, the meaning of their work. On paper, it’s your classic “heroes on the brink” meeting full of moral tension and weight.
In practice? It’s an empty void where a story should be.
The dialogue sounds like placeholder text written by someone who skimmed the outline five minutes before the deadline.
What’s at stake here, exactly?
Why does this job matter to Golem or Prisma? Is it money? Is it freedom? Are they trying to rebuild their lives, avoid prison, feed their families, prove something to themselves? We don’t know — and the writers probably didn’t either.
So when a character says, “Think about your behavior and whether you’re ready to lose this job and return to your old life,” it means nothing. It’s just a line someone wrote to fill the silence, because neither the audience nor the characters understand what “old life” even means.
The team conflicts also fall flat because there’s no context. These people don’t behave like traumatized ex-criminals or professionals under pressure — they behave like drunk regulars screaming at each other in a dive bar. They curse, threaten, and posture, while the supposed “leadership” watches in silence.
And then comes the cherry on top: InvisiGal.
She suddenly appears on a chair, invisible until the last second. Robert snaps at her for being late. She replies, “I’ve been here since the start.” Nobody believes her — even though there’s one door, half a meter away, and it never opened once during the meeting. It’s not a joke. It’s not a plot beat. It’s just a lazy mistake.
And yeah — someone might say, “Come on, it’s a small thing.” But it’s not. It’s a symptom.
A good writer knows where their characters just came from, what they’re feeling, what they want, and what the subtext of each line is. A good writer understands why this scene exists in the first place — what tension it resolves, what changes. Even if half of that stays off-screen, it still shapes every word.
You cant just open Jira, see a ticket labeled “Write conference scene: team conflict, boss lecture,” and go “Got it. Angry meeting. Couple insults. Done. Lunch break.”
That’s exactly what this scene feels like — written to meet a quota, not to tell a story.
A box checked.
And that, in a nutshell, is the real narrative problem with Dispatch.
It’s not that the game lacks polish — it looks like it lacks care.
We all know branching narratives are commercially extinct. They cost too much, take too long, and terrify every spreadsheet-worshipping manager in a five-mile radius. So instead of investing that money into more storylines or dialogue variation, studios just go, “Fuck it, let’s hire Jesse Pinkman for eight digits — he’ll grunt our way to immersion.”
Because, of course, unknown actors can’t possibly emote. Not with their voices.
So here we are — most “choices” in modern dialogue trees are props. Buttons for the illusion of control.
It’s like a magician dropping the rabbit halfway through the trick and saying, “Well, you knew it was fake anyway.”
And yeah, I get it — budgets are tight, branching scripts multiply VO costs, testing becomes a nightmare. But the best games still try. They respect the player enough to fake the illusion properly, to act like your words matter even when they don’t.
Movies are fake too — nobody actually dies on set — but good ones make you believe it for two hours.
How to fix it:
You don’t need five alternate endings to create engagement — just different voices.
Give the player a sense of who they are through tone and mindset.
It’s basic archetype work — rebel, scholar, trickster — but it already breathes life into your protagonist and gives the player a feeling of authorship.
Because even if the road leads to the same destination — it matters whether you walk, crawl, or dance your way there. It's called roleplay.
Why is your powerful heroine sitting in an office doing paperwork?
Seriously — who thought that was the best use of a superhero?
This is a woman who can, by all accounts, level a building, melt villains with her rays of energy, fly and god knows what else, and yet here she is, stapling reports, filling out HR forms, and probably updating someone’s payroll spreadsheet.
It’s not just absurd — it’s lazy worldbuilding.
If Blazer is that strong, her desk job needs a reason. Maybe she’s in forced retirement after a scandal. Maybe she’s traumatized, or her powers are unstable. Maybe she’s under political pressure, forced to play corporate face for a program she secretly despises.
But right now, it just looks like nobody on the writing team thought about her role past “we need someone to give the player orders.”
If she’s your superwoman, use her like one — or at least justify why she’s wasting her power doing middle management.
How to fix it:
Make her presence in that chair hurt. Let it say something.
Maybe she’s deliberately grounding herself, punishing herself, or protecting others by staying behind the desk.
Or make her the power broker — the one who chooses to stay out of the field because she knows that paperwork decides who lives and dies.
But don’t just leave her there pushing paper for no reason.
A god doing office admin isn’t irony — it’s a narrative bug.
So the candidates are Phenomeman and Waterboy.
And my only question is — why?
How did a program designed for the rehabilitation of supervillains turn into “anyone with a pulse and free time gets in”?
What happened — did the team just run out of ideas?
The entire premise was about a squad of reformed villains learning to coexist. That’s literally the hook of the story. So what the hell is Phenomeman doing here? What did he do in the last 24 hours to get demoted to the bottom of the food chain? Forgot to pay taxes?
The script just throws dice at the story and then expects you to make “meaningful choices” inside this chaos — as if it still follows logic or consequence.
Final thoughts.
Four out of eight episodes are out.
Judging by the pacing, they’re clearly planning more than one season.
There’s a saying — “Don’t show unfinished work to a fool or a master.”
But I already know how this ends — not in detail, but in quality. And I’d love to be wrong.
Maybe this post reads like ego and self-promo. Fine.
But I’m genuinely frustrated. Every time I see millions of dollars, hundreds of people, and years of work spent on something that had potential — great acting, good visuals, even an interesting premise — only to watch it all get wasted by mediocre writing, I feel sad.
Because I know I could do better. Much better.
Not out of arrogance — out of love.
I want to make great stories.
I want to build worlds that grip you.
I grew up on The Matrix, The Last Samurai, and old-school fantasy worlds that made you believe in something beyond yourself. Those worlds made me want to write, to create, to chase that feeling again.
But instead, I’m making match-3s.
And the people who actually made it to my dream job?
They dont seem to care.