Dispatch fyller år med kommentar- og storyboardmoduser for Deluxe-eiere

AdHoc Studio marked Dispatch’s first anniversary on 22 October with two new modes for Deluxe Edition owners: more than 16 hours of cast and crew commentary across every episode, and a Storyboard Mode that plays the whole game as the animatics it was first drawn as. The update is already live, and both modes sit in the Settings menu.

Commentary comes in two tracks, Cast or Crew, and which lines you hear depends on the choices you make, so a second run through an episode can surface material the first one never reached. Deluxe owners pay nothing for either mode. Anyone on the standard edition can upgrade for $10.99, which also carries the digital art book and all four digital comics, and the Deluxe Edition itself is 20 percent off.

The studio laid out the commentary lineup in its Steam blog post.

“Over 16 hours of commentary across every episode, with two tracks to choose from in the Settings: Cast or Crew. Different choices unlock different commentary, so your playthrough could share new insights every time you play it. You’ll hear from Aaron Paul, Laura Bailey, Travis Willingham, and more of the cast, plus the people who wrote, directed, and designed the game.”

— AdHoc Studio

Image: Steam/AdHoc

Storyboard Mode is the stranger of the two. Every episode runs start to finish as the original boards, which AdHoc describes as a way to see how the scenes and characters were designed before a single frame was animated. A game built almost entirely from cutscenes is one of the few kinds of game where that is even possible to ship.

It also draws a hard line around a question the community has been chewing on since launch. Lead writer Pierre Shorette and game director Nick Herman told Eurogamer last December that the rumoured cut content, including a post-party intimacy scene in Episode 6, was dropped before any of it reached the boards. Roughly 80 pages of writing came out of the game during scoping, and Herman put the reason plainly.

“So just to say it: those scenes were never storyboarded. They didn’t go into animation. So people say ‘release them’: they never tangibly existed.”

— Nick Herman

So Storyboard Mode is also an inventory of what survived. I work in content for a living, and a finished product shipping its own first drafts is rarer than it should be, which makes this the most interesting thing in the update to me by a distance.

The commentary carries its own history. Aaron Paul’s work on Robert stretched across nearly two years of irregular sessions, spaced weeks apart and reopened after long silences, because the character is in effectively the entire game. Shorette has said the team expected that to end the relationship.

“We were worried he would never work with us again because it took so long.”

— Pierre Shorette

Herman went further, saying Paul would have turned the job down had he known the scope at the start. What changed his mind came later, when people in Paris started stopping him about Dispatch rather than Breaking Bad.

The audience numbers moved in the same direction. AdHoc reported 3 million sales in January alongside an infographic showing 727 million emergency calls answered, more than a billion heroes dispatched and around 23 million hours watched on YouTube and Twitch. Only about 164,000 people finished without romancing anyone, roughly five percent, while close to two million chose Invisigal and about a million went with Blazer. The anniversary post now counts more than five million players, which the studio has not framed as a sales figure.

Dispatch is not the kind of game I usually spend hours inside, because nothing in it moves except the conversation. The choice and consequence structure is the part that works on me, and the viewing-hours number suggests plenty of people treat it as something to watch argued over rather than something to play alone.

The modes land on every platform that sells the Digital Deluxe Edition, which includes the version with a problem attached. Dispatch’s censorship on Switch 2 arrived in January as hard black bars over scenes that other platforms let you toggle off, with no way to disable them, and AdHoc said only that it worked with Nintendo to meet the platform’s criteria while the narrative stayed identical. Players refunded the game over it, and the eShop listing was eventually updated to warn buyers.

What comes next is still unannounced. AdHoc’s website refresh in August ended with the lines “and that’s it for now” and “more to come”, which fans read as a Dispatch 2 hidden teaser and the studio has never confirmed. The game sits at 87 on Metacritic across 61 critic reviews and took Outstanding Story-Rich Game at The Steam Awards 2025, so the pressure to say something is not coming from nowhere. The anniversary post does announce a mobile release, and a hardcover making-of called Dispatch: Design Works with Lost In Cult, with pre-order details at the end of November and a 2027 release.

The rest is a month of events. The music of Dispatch plays Avalon Hollywood in Los Angeles on Thursday 3 December, doors at 6pm, 21 and over, with composer Andrew Arcadi and the SDN Company Band handling the score alongside THOT SQUAD, Bershy, Primer, Caroline Kingsbury and Fartbarf. Email subscribers who sign up before 28 October get presale codes that day, and anything left goes on general sale on 2 November. The merch store has all four Deluxe comics in print for the first time with interlocking covers, plus 100 album art posters signed and numbered by art director Derek Stratton, and the first thousand orders ship with a numbered collectible card. New profile items landed in the Steam Points Shop on the same day, covering Team Invisigal, Team Blazer and Mecha Man across avatars, frames, stickers and animated backgrounds, and giveaways run on Discord and r/DispatchAdHoc until 22 November.

A year ago AdHoc was a studio that had nearly folded, kept alive by contract work after a publisher walked mid-development. I think the commentary track is the real anniversary gift, because the people who made Dispatch spent years being told nobody would fund it, and 16 hours of them explaining what they built is worth more than another poster.