Who could forget Dispatch’s release and subsequent explosion of popularity, as hordes of gamers gathered to run and romance their own superhero squad; not me. But months later, after stumbling on a new upcoming medieval narrative RPG, those memories came flooding back.
Sovereign Tower’s Steam demo released a couple of months ago, and I loved it. It follows the same format as Dispatch, except you play as a newly-appointed sovereign who’s managing the realm with the help of some loyal knights who you look after, kit out, and send off to do quests.
The more they complete, the higher level they’ll become, becoming more efficient at completing certain tasks. You can also give them trait boosts with varying items, like smelly cheeses and swords imbued with magical power.
Clearly, the meat of Sovereign Tower is nothing like the superhero managing game Dispatch, but the skeleton beneath is still familiar enough for the devs to have taken a look at Dispatch for inspiration, giving some things a second thought.
“There were a few mechanics that we wish we had, and obviously we couldn’t add any more,” Antoine Tabouret-Loudeac (“Gobert”), creative and art director tells me. “Then there were some of the mechanics that we were hesitating on that we had planned, and when we saw it done on Dispatch, we’re like, we need to have it, we cannot cut this mechanic because it’s working too well. So it was very useful to us because it’s a super useful way to see what works and sticks and what doesn’t work as much.”
Initially, Sovereign Tower’s devs were umming and ahhing about the level up mechanic, which Dispatch clearly cemented. Then there were the character traits, Sovereign Tower’s knights originally had long lists of traits, but after playing Dispatch, the devs whittled them down quite a bit: “It was much easier to remember what your character has and to identify what each of these tags does.”
But Dispatch didn’t just affirm game mechanics, it also showed the studio that there was a real audience for a game like this. “It comforted us in the direction that we were taking,” Tabouret-Loudeac says. “Before [Dispatch], when I made the concept for the game, there was nothing like it at all. Then a few months after I started working on the on the gameplay side of things, I saw the first trailer for Dispatch, and I sent it to Courto (Laly, co-founder and director of Wild Wits Games studio), and I told him, ‘look, this might be a game that’s similar to us, maybe we should take inspiration from it’, and Courto told me ‘this doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re doing’, and then it really did and so I often make fun of him for it.”
It’s also just an easy comparison to make for marketing purposes. “It’s very easy for people to understand the concept of the game now that Dispatch exists,” Tabouret-Loudeac adds. There’s also been enough time between Dispatch and Sovereign Tower for fans of the former to try the latter out as I did. It would perhaps have been a lot harder to contend with Dispatch had Sovereign Tower come out at a similar time.
Thankfully that’s not the case, and fans of this style of narrative management sim can now enjoy yet another fantastic game—talk about the best of both worlds. “We’re happy that Dispatch exists,” Tabouret-Loudeac ends with. “And I hope that the Dispatch devs also play our game.”
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