Look, if you've spent any time in modern gaming forums, you'd know that quick-time events are about as popular as a spoiled rotten goal. Most players treat them like a chore; a developer's way of turning a brilliant cinematic moment into a test of reflexes nobody asked for. So when AdHoc Studio sat down to design Dispatch, their superhero workplace comedy that launched last October, the creative team made an early call: absolutely no QTEs.
Creative director Dennis Lenart was firm on it: "We are definitely not doing QTEs." Fair enough. They'd just come out of years at Telltale Games, where gameplay was "a thing you had to do to check a box." They wanted something different.
But here's the thing about game development; plans have a habit of changing. Feeling it would be weird to have cinematic action without interaction, AdHoc decided to "just embrace QTEs and set the very low bar of trying to not make them suck," as Lenart put it.
The turning point came when the team realised something obvious but somehow easy to forget: people don't hate QTEs, just bad ones. That insight completely reframed their approach. Rather than ban the mechanic, they set out to fix it.
The solution was elegant. Once they learned that people felt good about QTEs when hitting 80% or more of the prompts, they made the system forgiving; players could mash any button, pressing it multiple times or early without penalty. It sounds simple because it is. The goal wasn't to punish failure; it was to make engagement feel natural.
The gamble paid off. When Dispatch's first two episodes released on 22 October, nearly 13,000 played concurrently on Steam; the next week that quintupled to 66,000; by episodes five and six it doubled to 131,000; and the final episodes reached 220,060 concurrent players. The game sold over 3 million units within two months of its release cycle completion.
What makes this story more than just another dev commentary is what it reveals about how easily good intentions can veer into poor execution. The team didn't fundamentally misunderstand QTEs; they just inherited years of industry habits that had turned them into a punishing nuisance. As AdHoc watched player choice unfold week to week, they learned things they weren't expecting and kept adjusting as real players showed them what worked.
You could spend all day arguing whether a game needs more interactivity or more cinema. That's fair. But Dispatch suggests there's a third way: lean into what you're trying to do, do it with respect for the player, and sometimes that means breaking your own rules. Lenart and his team did exactly that.