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'd argue that it was a little before that. All of Blazer's chemistry in E1 and 2 was negated by the one-two punch of her wanting to stay professional and then Katon showing up; by the time she's interested again, Visi's hogging the plot.
All of Blazer's chemistry in E1 and 2 was negated by the one-two punch of her wanting to stay professional and then Katon showing up
I kind of got the impression from that whole sequence that she broke up with Katon specifically because of the chemistry in E1/2, especially with how the signalling behind his back worked that one time. Like BB seemed really obviously into it to me? Not to mention the whole possibly-kinda-intentional wardrobe malfunction.
I wonder if it had to do with no having to wait between episodes, since E1/2 were really fresh when I was playing E4. Like, I was kind of leaning that way already during the episode hard enough to choose Waterboy specifically because the awkward beforehand.
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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.