When Firaxis’s XCOM remake came out a constant complaint in the comments was that its random number generator was clearly cheating against players. Someone would miss a 95% chance, or God forbid a couple of them, and confidently declare that Jake Solomon was personally tweaking the probability to fuck with them.
Of course, that wasn’t the case. As we later learned, the XCOM games do massage the math, but they do it in favor of the player—especially on lower difficulties. True randomness feels unfair, so XCOM cheated on our behalf. Which worked for most people, if not the ones in the comments section. I guess there’s always a chance someone will think they’re being hard done by even when you push the odds in their favor. It’s probably got like a 95% chance of working.
Adhoc, the developers of Dispatch, followed the example set by Firaxis. Their superhero comedy’s dispatching minigame, in which you assign heroes to jobs that best suit their abilities, gives a percentage chance of success based on how well you’ve selected your squad—matching their abilities to the challenges they’ll face. Adhoc’s directors, Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart, discussed this at a GDC talk.
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Which is why they made one last change to the final episode of Dispatch—when the shit hits the fan and everything that can possibly go wrong does go wrong, all at once. “When the city is on fire and your dispatching skills are being put to the test, we actually disabled all of these invisible helpers,” Lenart said. “For the first time in the entire season the training wheels are off, the result of which is that the game feels a lot harder at base level, which is exactly what we wanted from our finale.”
