A second season of Dispatch is being discussed “as seriously as anything” at AdHoc Studio, and the team will sit down any day now and make a decision about it.
“People are mad that we haven’t told them what we’re doing,” studio co-founder and Dispatch game director Nick Herman told me in an interview. “It’s the new problem, right? It’s like, are you doing it? Are you not doing it? We’re days away from really sitting down and having the time – because we’ve had to support the game – where we’re going to really sit down and lay those plans out.”
I spoke to Herman and Pierre Shorette, the lead writer and another studio co-founder, as part of a longer interview live on Eurogamer now. But though Herman said the studio is yet to make a decision on Season 2, the ways they referenced a follow-up made it sound like a much surer thing.
When they talked about a cut Kpop idol-inspired character called Winter, for instance, and a love triangle he was involved in, Shorette joked that he could reinstate this for Season 2. “We should do that for Season 2,” he said, before quickly adding: “If there is a Season 2!”
It was when I questioned them directly about a second series and how seriously the studio is talking about it, that Shorette said, “As seriously as anything.” But though Dispatch has been an obvious success, racing to 2m sales and capturing a large and passionate fanbase, there are concerns internally about following it up.
“You have your whole life to write your first album and then eight months to write your second”
As Shorette explained: “The thing is, the tough thing is, it’s like in music: you have your whole life to write your first album and then eight months to write your second. And there’s a little bit of that feeling. We had so long with this – seven years is a lot of time. If anything, it would have been embarrassing if it was bad. I mean, you took fucking long enough! We’re taking GTA 6 amounts of time on this shit, you know – it better be good. I know we’re not going to have that amount of time for Season 2 because we want to meet the demand.”
Then Herman added: “There were zero expectations for Season 1 – external expectations. People just had to show up and enjoy it and not have a bunch of theories and stuff in their head. Season 2, if we do it, we know that’s going to be an extra challenge.”
“A lot of pressure,” Shorette said. “It’ll be about what it’s not as much as what it is.”
It might be a surprise to hear Dispatch was in development for several years but its journey was a twisting, turning one. From being a live-action television series to being dropped by a publisher half-way through, the game has had to survive some bumps. You can read all about it – and about that cut Kpop character and more – in a Making Of-style Dispatch interview live on Eurogamer now.
