Dispatch boosts success percentages in the player's favor

When Firaxis's XCOM remake came out a constant complaint in the comments was that its random number generator was clearly cheating against players. As we later learned, the XCOM games do massage the math, but they do it in favor of the player—especially on lower difficulties.

True randomness feels unfair, so XCOM cheated on our behalf. Adhoc, the developers of Dispatch, followed the example set by Firaxis. Their superhero comedy's dispatching minigame, in which you assign heroes to jobs that best suit their abilities, gives a percentage chance of success based on how well you've selected your squad—matching their abilities to the challenges they'll face.

Adhoc's directors, Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart, discussed this at a GDC talk. They made one last change to the final episode of Dispatch—when the shit hits the fan and everything that can possibly go wrong does go wrong, all at once. "When the city is on fire and your dispatching skills are being put to the test, we actually disabled all of these invisible helpers," Lenart said.

dispatch, adhoc, xcom, rng, success percentage, dispatching minigame, heroes, gdc, nick herman, dennis lenart