The developers behind Dispatch, AdHoc Studio, revealed at GDC 2026 why they removed the option to stay silent in conversations: data from their time at Telltale Games showed that fewer than 1% of players ever chose the silent option – whether intentionally or by accident.

Dispatch creative directors Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart – both former Telltale veterans – laid out the reasoning behind the decision at their GDC 2026 talk. While the developers themselves enjoy playing as an unresponsive weirdo who stares blankly at every question, the numbers made it clear that almost no one actually does this.

“From our time at Telltale, we knew the numbers behind the scenes. Silent options were triggered either intentionally or unintentionally less than 1% of the time across all users globally,” Herman said. The team still considered keeping the feature: adding a silent option to each of Dispatch‘s roughly 120 dialogue choices would have amounted to nearly 15 full minutes of the protagonist saying nothing.

The issue goes beyond sheer volume, though – silence is never free when another character has to react to it. “We still had to write other characters reacting to that silence. We have to record voice. We had to storyboard, animate, light, and polish all of this – all to support less than 1% of situations. Especially as a new studio, it really felt not worth it. So we killed it,” Herman said.

Dispatch sold over 3 million copies in 2025, and writer and AdHoc co-founder Pierre Shorette said in November that the studio was going to have to at least think about a second season. If it happens, perhaps the awkward silent playthrough will get another chance after all.

Source: PC Gamer