Telltale’s second series-slash-sequel, The Wolf Among Us 2, has become notoriously hard to pin down. Originally announced in 2017, the game disappeared when Telltale closed in 2018, then it was resurrected in 2019 only to disappear again in 2023, amid what sounded like burnout from crunch. And we haven’t heard a peep since.
But I had a chance to speak to the studio which was originally making the game for Telltale (then a kind of publisher but now making the game internally, it seems) to see if I could find out what was going on. That original developer was AdHoc Studio, a team formed by former Telltale staff, many of whom worked on the original The Wolf Among Us game.
AdHoc co-founder Nick Herman directed the first episode of The Wolf Among Us (known as “Faith”), and he told me AdHoc was working on the follow-up, The Wolf Among Us 2, for about two years. But as to why the studio stopped working on it, he said: “Look, the truth is…”
He was interrupted by fellow co-founder Pierre Shorette, another Telltale alumni, who asked with a smile, “Yeah why did we stop working on that, Nick?”
Put on the spot, Herman continued: “We wrote a season, Season Two. We think it’s better than Season One – and we were on Season One. And yeah, we’re really proud of it. We were doing tests. We were in cinematics and animation and stuff. And then basically they needed more time.
“They weren’t… We weren’t running the project. It was Telltale we were doing it in partnership with. And we couldn’t wait around and do nothing, so we had to move on to Dispatch to keep the studio moving, and they needed to go their own way.
“We’re looking forward to seeing what they do with it,” Herman added. “I don’t know how much of our version of the script is going to make it into what they end up making. But if one day we were able to make the thing that we wrote and were in the middle of directing, we think people would love it. So, you know, good luck.”
“Spicy,” added Shorette.
Dispatch – the game Herman mentioned – is the studio’s self-published debut game, released in partnership with role-play mega-group Critical Role and featuring some of the actors from there in the game. Award-winning actor Laura Bailey is one of them. Bailey was actually attached to Dispatch long before it was called Dispatch – even before AdHoc was working on The Wolf Among Us 2
The project back then was, bizarrely, linked in a roundabout way with US retail giant Walmart – a company connected to Walmart anyway. And AdHoc’s fledgling live-action superhero idea got quite far. It had shoot dates and everything was going ahead but then March 2020 rolled around and Covid flattened it. A blessing in disguise, Herman joked. “You’re asking a bunch of game devs to shoot a TV show,” he said. “It would have been a fun failure.”
The studio moved onto The Wolf Among Us 2 after that, in a work-for-hire capacity, but when that project stalled, it returned to the superhero idea and Dispatch, as we know it now, was born.
Dispatch is a superhero workplace comedy formed from a recognisably Telltale cinematic choice-and-consequence mould, albeit with added mini-games, and it looks enormously promising. It stars Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul as Robert Robertson, a man who loses the use of his superpowered mech suit so needs to get a desk job dispatching misfit superheroes to fight crime. They are unruly. Many jokes ensue.
Notably, Dispatch will be an episodically released game, but all eight episodes will be released in quick succession over the course of a month – two a week starting 22nd October. It won’t be a case of waiting months for them. There’s a demo of Dispatch on Steam if you fancy giving the game a go.
After Dispatch, AdHoc will move onto making a fully fledged game for Critical Role, set in the fantasy world of Exandria, which is where the group’s acclaimed Dungeons & Dragons adventures have taken place.
