Melody over Quality of Choices in Dispatch

If action games primarily test how people react, adventure games lean on how people respond. This is why quick-time events, of which Dispatch is at least partially guilty, seem so out of place there: prominent enough to matter, but not substantial enough to be fun nor frequent enough to let me get good at them.

Here’s the twist: another mechanic constrained by seconds, timed dialogue choices, is a consistently brilliant addition in the games where it appears, and Dispatch isn’t an exception. Real conversations, after all, aren’t built by specific word choices. They’re a melody. They’re a dance full of deliberate phrases and pauses, some on-the-spot improvisation and occasional knee-jerk reactions. Absence of answer or a delayed answer may be an answer in itself, and it’s much more effective when it’s the consequence of me, the player, being too late to respond rather than actively picking it as an option.

So many wordy, fully voiced games never make me inclined to listen to them properly: I quickly read and click through them, thanks to the industry-standard “Skip” button. I’d rather got rid of the convenience though, give me some substance, give me the melody and the rhythm! Thankfully, Dispatch writers are so good at pacing their dialogues that, similarly to how the management portion of the game functions, it feels real-time even though in a lot of ways it’s turn-based. It’s a limit that removes pressure but doesn’t let things stall, leading to a conversation flow that never feels explicitly mechanical.

I can’t recall a single overly mechanical conversation that ended well, you know.