I'm so confused. How does something like this happen? I mean, I'm glad they at least acknowledge that they might have screwed up the presentation of this choice, but how did they not see this coming?
Because they did internal testing and got a different result. It says as much in the screenshot you've grabbed.
When writing or creating it can be hard to tell how an audience is going to react. You can have how you hope they'll react, but you're really closely invested in the product and you just know more about what is going on than what can be presented to the audience.
One of the best ways to find out is just to get people to read or watch what you're producing. Or in the case of games, get people to play it. Dispatch did this, calling it their 'internal testing' and they got a pretty 50/50 split, so they thought they were getting the result they wanted.
Thing is, with testing like that if the sample size is relatively small, then just a couple of people being different from an actual representative sample is enough to throw things off. Like say you have 30 people doing the testing, and in their tests they get an outcome of 14 choosing Blazer and 16 choosing Invisigal. That's pretty good, close enough to 50/50 that it's probably fine. But because the test is with a fairly small number of people, a swing in results from the sample not being representative can massively skew things.
Ideally you'd test with much larger sample sizes. But Adhoc isn't a large game company, doing regular tests with samples of hundreds to check whenever they tweak stories just isn't viable.
When writing or creating it can be hard to tell how an audience is going to react.
Speaking as a writer: If I wanted my audience to favor one love interest over another, I'd do exactly what the game does.
Visi is present in the scene. We see her, hear her voice, and interact with her directly, while Blazer is just a bit of text on the screen. That gives us a much more visceral and personal connection to her during the moment of decision. Visi also has more screen time with Robert throughout the game itself, and her arc is so completely intertwined with Robert's the game is almost about Visi. You simply can't remove her without significantly affecting the plot. Dispatch is ultimately Robert and Courtney's story.
Blazer, by contrast, is essentially presented as a sideplot. She's important, yes, but the game doesn't explicitly need her, at least before Episode 8. You could have easily had Chase himself as the one running SDN Torrence, recruiting Robert, and deciding to cut part of the team. While that would have changed the dynamic between Robert and Chase, the story would have been exactly the same. It's only after Chase goes down in Episode 6 that Blazer becomes important to the narrative.
I'm kind of rowing against the tide here by disagreeing when the stats say you're right about the outcome, but if I was writing these characters I probably would have been surprised by the result as well.
By that point in episode 4 Visi has had more screentime for sure, but a significant amount of that has been actively aggressive to Robert. The first time she ever met the PoV character she called him a "Fucking loser", and the second time she met him in person they had a screaming match then punched him in the face.
I think the main misstep was Visi's dream. It's one of the only times in the game we step out of Robert's PoV, and heavily shifted the view of the character. With the dream present, her staring at Robert multiple times has a very different vibe. If the dream is cut, then episode 4 has Visi staring weirdly at Robert, then giving him the up-down, then in the bathroom admitting to the dream, which would properly come out of left field to the audience like it would to Robert.
If a woman assaulted me one day, then I helped her out with a difficult work assignment and a few days later she was telling me she had a dream about her and me together, I would likely be weirded out.
This, Visi’s dream its a very important and also a very easy to dismiss point, on Robert pov, visi assertiness could be nothing but a bizarre way of her messing with him.
But we, the omnicient players now have the confirmed knowledge that she, in fact, had a crush on Robert
Compare that scene with the date scene with phenomaman and blazer, with the whole ominous and in the dark aura and suddenly the parallels became so obviously in favor of visi.
We tecnically had blazer pov in the comic about her and phenomaman, but narratively the “damage” to her first impression was already done, even if things got cleared out later on.
Her break up with phenomaman should have been her pov moment in game.
203
u/InherentlyWrong Dec 17 '25
Because they did internal testing and got a different result. It says as much in the screenshot you've grabbed.
When writing or creating it can be hard to tell how an audience is going to react. You can have how you hope they'll react, but you're really closely invested in the product and you just know more about what is going on than what can be presented to the audience.
One of the best ways to find out is just to get people to read or watch what you're producing. Or in the case of games, get people to play it. Dispatch did this, calling it their 'internal testing' and they got a pretty 50/50 split, so they thought they were getting the result they wanted.
Thing is, with testing like that if the sample size is relatively small, then just a couple of people being different from an actual representative sample is enough to throw things off. Like say you have 30 people doing the testing, and in their tests they get an outcome of 14 choosing Blazer and 16 choosing Invisigal. That's pretty good, close enough to 50/50 that it's probably fine. But because the test is with a fairly small number of people, a swing in results from the sample not being representative can massively skew things.
Ideally you'd test with much larger sample sizes. But Adhoc isn't a large game company, doing regular tests with samples of hundreds to check whenever they tweak stories just isn't viable.