Dispatch‘s finale resolves AdHoc’s superhero workplace comedy with sweeping confrontations and heartfelt reckonings — but the game didn’t always aim for that spectacle. Early in development the team envisioned something quieter, and several late changes created narrative problems that only casting choices and one small, very chonky dog could fully resolve.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Dispatch episodes 6-8]
Image: AdHoc Studio via PolygonBy episode 8, Shroud and his Red Ring crew flood the SDN Torrance offices in a desperate push to seize the Astral Pulse — the advanced core that powers Robert’s Mecha Man suit. After a string of kinetic, beautifully staged fights, Shroud takes Beef — Robert’s pudgy little companion who exists mostly to cuddle and toot — as a bargaining chip. He trades the dog for the Pulse, and the player is then asked to decide: spare Shroud or end him. The choice amplifies an earlier decision where Robert either swore to avenge his father or vowed to find another path. It provides the story’s most fraught emotional moment — and, surprisingly, much of that moment wasn’t in the game’s original blueprint.
Nick Herman, AdHoc’s creative director, told Polygon the studio initially pitched Dispatch as a workplace drama with superhero elements rather than a conventional caped tale. Early narrative drafts ended without a climactic showdown between the SDN team and L.A.’s criminal underworld — the kind of finale people usually expect from a superhero story.
According to Herman, the team debated whether to resist or embrace that expected structure. Their eventual decision to give players a blockbuster-style culmination came partly from the realization that audiences would probably expect one anyway, and partly from a desire to deliver an emotionally satisfying payoff.
Narrative director Pierre Shorette adds that, on a more traditional production schedule, they’d have made even more wrenching choices earlier — for example, killing off a major character to force audience anguish between seasons. But because the project’s future was unsettled, the team adopted a “burn the boats” attitude: throw everything into the ending in case there wasn’t another chance.
Image: AdHoc Studio via PolygonThat ambition introduced a structural hurdle: Shroud largely disappears from the narrative until episode 7, and the criminal cells players face earlier don’t overtly link back to him. The gap risked leaving the finale feeling unearned. Casting Matt Mercer as Shroud helped a great deal — his performance lent the antagonist an immediately palpable menace — but the team still feared players wouldn’t feel the necessary emotional connection to Robert’s dead father (a character who never appears onscreen) to make the final decision hit.
So they engineered a visceral, simple motivator: Beef. When playtesters who had sworn to spare Shroud saw the villain hold the dog hostage, their resolve collapsed. Herman recalls testers instantly changing course the moment Beef was threatened — the emotional shorthand was brutally effective.
The choice resonated with players, too. In AdHoc’s internal metrics captured near launch, roughly 35 percent of players chose to kill Shroud — a split the developers found both surprising and satisfying. “Now I’m worried too many people are killing Shroud,” Shorette quipped, highlighting how unexpectedly divisive that single moment became.
Source: Polygon
