There is an old adage in game design: true randomness feels unfair. When a 90% chance to hit fails, players do not think about probability distributions; they feel cheated. AdHoc Studio's new superhero comedy Dispatch discovered this the hard way, so they borrowed a page from a much older playbook.
According to Firaxis Games, the makers of XCOM, secretly boosted the numbers behind the scenes so that high-percentage actions felt fair, even if players did not earn them through pure chance. AdHoc's creative directors Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart, speaking at the Game Developers Conference, explained they decided to do the same.
The numbers tell a straightforward story. Dispatch ensures that anything with over a 76% success chance automatically succeeds. But the system is not a blunt instrument. After a player benefits from this auto-win three times, the boost is removed and true odds return, ensuring that once they fail above 76%, the three auto-wins are re-enabled to guarantee they do not experience a string of bad luck. The result: a system that punishes neither luck nor skill, but prevents the emotional whiplash of consecutive failures at high odds.
On the low end, any percentage between 1 and 14% is bumped up to a flat 15% chance of success. This prevents the worst kind of failure: the one that feels mathematically inevitable rather than unlucky.
Herman acknowledged the criticism this approach invites. "This is going to make so many people sad," he said, recognising that players who discover the manipulation might feel their victories are hollow. Yet from another angle, XCOM's approach recognises that true randomness feels unfair, so they cheated on behalf of the player.
The strategy appears to have worked. Dispatch sold over one million units within the first ten days of release and was on course to beat its three-year sales target. The game eventually sold over 3 million units within two months of its release cycle completion. The game succeeded not because of transparency about its probability mechanics, but because its narrative, character work, and sense of humour resonated with players who felt the odds were treated fairly.
AdHoc Studio was formed in 2018 by Michael Choung, Nick Herman, Dennis Lenart, and Pierre Shorette, former developers from Telltale Games, Ubisoft, and Night School Studio. The team had previously grown frustrated working on The Wolf Among Us 2, feeling treated like "work for hire" and lacking creative control. With Dispatch, they had to prove that players still wanted the kind of narrative-driven, choice-heavy game the industry had written off as commercially unviable.
The decision to manipulate probability in the player's favour reflects a deeper principle: games are not mathematical systems to be analysed but experiences to be felt. Sometimes that means honest randomness. Sometimes it means cheating.