This is how RNG works as an 'equalizer' in Dispatch
Dispatch, the superhero workplace comedy from AdHoc Studio, is lying to you (but for good reason).
The episodic title has players attempting to save the city by directing a team of dysfunctional supers from crisis to crisis. Pick the right hero for the job, and you'll have a better chance of success. Choose the wrong candidate, and well, those odds plummet.
The game tells players how likely some of their decisions are to succeed by offering them a percentile readout. One hero might have an 85 percent chance of completing an action. The odds of success for another hero might only be 15 percent. .
During a talk at GDC Festival of Gaming, AdHoc creative directors and co-founders Nick Herman and Dennis Lenard explain how they designed that RNG mechanic to ensure it met the expectations of players.
"Let's talk about RNG as an equalizer. The initial design scenarios had invisible pass-fail thresholds where players would have to guess what the stat requirements might be. We eventually switched that binary system over to be driven by chance," says Lenart.
"For casual players, that means as long as you send someone—even if they're a bad choice—you're going to have even the smallest chance of succeeding. For more experienced gamers, it was an opportunity to min-max and send the perfect team without over or under committing your resources."
Herman accepts that RNG can be divisive, but explains that because Dispatch is a story driven title it seemed like a good fit. There would, for instance, be little value in a hard fail scenario that repeatedly stopped players in their tracks. Even so, he explains it was important to mitigate frustrating experiences—such as missing a 99 percenter.
"As any hardcore XCOM player knows, one of the tricks Firaxis implemented was to secretly boost the numbers behind the scenes so that it felt fair even it it was unearned. Those guys are pretty smart so we thought we'd do the same," says Herman.
"After lots of user testing we landed on anything that had over a 76 percent success rate would automatically succeed. After the player benefited there times from this boost we would remove the auto-win and give them true odds again. As soon as they failed above 76 percent, we enabled the three auto-wins again to guarantee they didn't have a string of bad luck and complain the game wasn't fair."
In addition, Lenart explains that any percentage between 1 percent and 14 percent was bumped up to a flat 15 percent chance of success. With those systems in place, players told AdHoc that Dispatch seemed fair—if perhaps a touch easy at times. That safety net, however, was punted out of the window during the final act.
"The final change we made was in the last episode. With things on fire and your dispatching skills being put to the test, we disabled all of these invisible helpers," says Lenart. "For the first time in the entire season the training wheels are off, and as a result the game feels a lot harder—which is exactly what we wanted for our finale."
Game Developer and GDC Festival of Gaming are sibling companies under Informa Festivals.
