Dispatch vs The Wolf Among Us: When Telltale’s Writers Made Their Own Successor

Telltale spent seven years failing to ship a sequel. Meanwhile the writers it hired to make that sequel walked away, built their own studio, and shipped a hit first. That is why Dispatch vs The Wolf Among Us is a stranger fight than it looks. One game is a beloved 2013 classic still waiting on its follow-up. The other is what happened when its would-be authors stopped waiting.

Dispatch vs The Wolf Among Us: the same people, twice

AdHoc Studio started in 2018. Its founders, Michael Choung, Nick Herman, Dennis Lenart and Pierre Shorette, came out of Telltale, Ubisoft and Night School Studio. So the pedigree is not a marketing claim. These are the people who made the studio style famous in the first place.

Then the story turns odd. Telltale asked AdHoc to help build The Wolf Among Us 2. The team wrote an 800 page script for it. After that they left the project, frustrated by a lack of creative control. In other words, the sequel fans have waited years for was partly written by the studio that went on to make Dispatch instead.

The wait has not ended either. The Wolf Among Us 2 was announced in 2019, slipped from 2023, then from 2024, and now carries a 2027 window. It has moved off the old Telltale Tool engine onto Unreal Engine 5 and will run five episodes. A remaster of the 2013 original arrives before it, in late 2026.

One is noir, the other is a workplace comedy

The tone could hardly be further apart. The Wolf Among Us casts you as Bigby Wolf, sheriff of Fabletown, in a grim detective story drawn from Bill Willingham’s Fables comics. It is rain, neon and bad decisions.

Dispatch puts you behind a desk. You play Robert Robertson III, once the superhero Mecha Man, whose suit gets destroyed. So he takes a job at the Superhero Dispatch Network, assigning reformed villains to call-outs. AdHoc calls it a superhero workplace comedy, and that is exactly what it plays like.

That difference matters for who should buy which. If you want atmosphere and moral weight, the older game still delivers it. If you want jokes, office politics and characters who irritate each other, Dispatch is the one.

Dispatch actually gives you something to do

Here is the real gameplay gap. Telltale’s formula was dialogue choices, light exploration and quick-time events. Dispatch keeps the choices but adds a management layer on top. You study each hero’s stats and traits, pick who fits a given call, and juggle their cooldowns so you are not left short-handed.

There are hacking mini-games too, built on fast navigation and timed prompts. As a result the moment-to-moment play has more friction than a Telltale episode, and that suits people who found the older games too passive.

The release model also changed. Dispatch ran eight episodes weekly across October and November 2025, so the wait between parts was days rather than months. It reached PS5 and PC first, then Switch and Switch 2 in January 2026, with an Xbox Series X and S version on July 29, 2026.

Which one should you play first

Play Dispatch if you want the modern version of this genre, and if you want to finish a complete story. It is finished, it is well reviewed, with a Metacritic of 89 on PS5, 87 on PC and 85 on Switch 2, and it has sold over four million copies. You can read more about it on the official Steam page.

Play The Wolf Among Us if you care about the craft that started all this, and you do not mind an ending that leads nowhere for now. The remaster later in 2026 is the sensible entry point, because the sequel is still a year further out.

Ultimately these two games answer different questions. One asks what a Telltale story feels like when the studio finally modernises it. The other asks what those same writers do when nobody is holding them back. Right now, only one of them has an answer you can finish. For another look at how a classic ages against its successor, read our coverage of Clair Obscur vs The Legend of Dragoon: The Evolution of Timed-Combat RPGs.

Dispatch vs The Wolf Among Us: quick answers

Frequently asked questions

Did the Dispatch team really work on The Wolf Among Us 2? Yes. AdHoc took a co-development writing role on the sequel and produced an 800 page script, then left the project over a lack of creative control.

When is The Wolf Among Us 2 coming out? It currently carries a 2027 window, after slipping from 2023 and 2024. It runs on Unreal Engine 5 and will have five episodes.

Do I need to play one before the other? No. They share no story, no setting and no characters. Only the people who made them connect the two.

Is Dispatch on Xbox? Yes, from July 29, 2026. It launched on PS5 and PC in October 2025 and reached Switch and Switch 2 in January 2026.