Dispatch, the episodic workplace comedy about superheroes, has quickly turned into one of the biggest surprises of the year — racking up over one million sales and blowing up across social media. And it’s the latest in a line of long games, like Baldur’s Gate 3, where players have absolutely lost it pining over the game’s romantic interests. But that’s not something the developers at AdHoc Studio, founded by former Telltale Games workers, necessarily expected.
“I don’t know that I anticipated it to be as ravenous as it’s been. It’s probably why we didn’t plan for more romance options, because we didn’t know it was going to be such a meaningful part of the experience for folks,” Dispatch writer Pierre Shorette tells Inverse, “One of my secret shames is I think I default to romantic comedy in my writing and my whole life. I’m trying to pull out of that and make things more serious. Even in Wolf Among Us or Tales From the Borderlands, there’s some romance.”
