In a surprising revelation, the creators of the recently popular game Dispatch have admitted that their in-game success probabilities don’t function exactly as presented to players. They’ve implemented a subtle system, drawing inspiration from Firaxis, the studio behind the renowned XCOM series.
During the recent GDC conference, the developers shed light on their method of secretly tweaking these probabilities:
“We were aware of tools designed to mitigate frustrating scenarios, such as missing a shot with a 99% chance of success. As any dedicated XCOM fan knows, one of Firaxis’ clever tricks involved subtly adjusting the numbers ‘under the hood’ to make outcomes *feel* fair, even if they weren’t strictly random. They’re smart folks, so we decided to adopt a similar approach.”
Following extensive testing, the Dispatch team settled on a specific rule: any action with a displayed success chance exceeding 76% is guaranteed to succeed. However, this beneficial adjustment isn’t limitless:
“After a player benefited from this bonus three times consecutively, we would temporarily disable the automatic success and revert to the true probabilities. If a player then failed an action with a displayed chance above 76%, we would reactivate three automatic ‘Successes.’ This ensures they don’t encounter a frustrating streak of failures and prevents them from feeling the game is unfair.”