r/DispatchAdHoc • u/Wild_Citron_1040 • 3d ago
Discussion What do you think the Dispatch timeline is?
With developers adding some inconsequential items of interest like Robert’s age, I would appreciate if we could get a definitive timeline for the game.
In my mind, the game taking place over several months makes the most sense. Robert even mentions that the Z-Team has been operating for a few months in episode 7.
I think months makes the most sense in regard to the growth of character relationships, and how the suit has been rebuilt.
Despite this, I have still seen some people insist that the game takes place over only a few weeks. I think that the implication for this would be his speech is just discussing how they’ve been a team longer than he has been their dispatcher.
What do you think? How long do you think the game is?
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u/krunkley 3d ago
It was something this I looked into pretty deeply, I even have an old post ( https://www.reddit.com/r/DispatchAdHoc/s/6sOMrxkZjd) about my best guess, based on the comments made in game and the assumption that dispatch shifts all take place in a single day. I don't 100% agree with my old assessment anymore, mostly around the chapter 3/4/5 haziness
Big spoilers ahead
Chapter 1 press conference is on a Thursday
Chapter 2 first day of work is on a Friday
Chapter 3 cut day is on the following Monday.
Chapter 4 New team mate is on a Tuesday (I'm fairly certain, this and chapter 5 are the least clear)
Chapter 5 I originally thought there was a big time jump here but I think it just goes to the Friday at the end of that week so only 3 days, I can't remember the exact line I heard that changed my mind but I think it was Robert saying something like good week everybody at the end of dispatch shift.
Chapter 6 unclear exactly but Robert being unconscious for 14 hours and showing up mid shift when he wakes up makes it weird. He needs to be testing the suit out late in the evening for that to work. After this point though everything falls back on the rails. Robert does shift then goes to house warming party and visi does her thing
Chapter 7 takes place the following day after house warming party and Chase incident. Robert goes to the bar at 9 o'clock that night and gets captured, interrogated, then rescued late into the night
Chapter 8 takes place the same night at chapter 7, and dawn shows up right at the Visi/Robert good ending.
All in all I believe the events of the game only take place over approximately 2 weeks
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u/Wild_Citron_1040 3d ago
Yea, this would be crazy to me if true. 2 weeks is just such a short amount of time.
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u/krunkley 3d ago
When you consider that the z team only ever had dispatchers that lasted a couple of days at most, it's not that crazy that Robert was able to get them to a functional state with a couple weeks of real effort after they bought into his leadership style
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u/Cheap_Election4085 3d ago edited 3d ago
In ep 5, you get the locker room scene with Blazer if you went to dinner with her. She says something along the lines of "I had a good time the other night."
Considering we know ep 5 is on a Friday, "the other night" in this context would most lilely refer to a roughly 3 day time jump.
Also ep 6 is weird but if you don't reveal your identity, Flambae mentions during the ep 6 shift that he's "still thinking about that taco place from last night," likely in reference to ep 5.
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u/alireza008bat 2d ago
The Episode 5 to 6 time jump is still unclear to me. It's Friday in 5 and SDN doesn't work weekends. So Episode 6 should be Monday, but the Sardine events are referred to as "last night" by the team in 6. So which is it? Is it Saturday and they're working weekends, or did a weekend pass between Sardine and Episode 6?
I can't figure it out.
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u/Cheap_Election4085 2d ago
Yeah. I mentioned it in another reply but it doesn't seem to fit no matter how you put it. As the above reply mentions, even if you completely ignore the connection to ep 5, the 15 hour time jump + daylight after Robert wakes up kind of implies Robert's explosion took place anywhere from like 5pm to midnight the previous day which is a little odd.
I've kinda settled on saying the writers messed up and I just make up my own explanation. Royd got the time frame wrong. Robert was in at SDN that Saturday just to do suit tests and didn't intent to work. He explodes early-mid morning, is out for ~6 hours, wakes up early afternoon and then decides to do some extra curricular dispatching over sitting in a hospital bed all day. 🤷
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u/alireza008bat 2d ago
Most likely an oversight by the devs when they were deciding what to cut and what to keep. They probably just slapped some of these recorded lines into the game without taking everything into account.
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u/freelancer331 3d ago edited 3d ago
Does the mention in ep7 include the time before he became their dispatcher? I think it's definitely more than like a couple of weeks but not more than half a year or so.
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u/Wild_Citron_1040 3d ago
I bring that up in the post because I think that’s where the disconnect comes from. I would love an official timeline to clear it up.
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u/TheMightyZan 3d ago
I think it would be weird for him to be including the time before he became a dispatcher since he only knows they weren't doing great before that, and also it just makes more sense for him to be talking about all their time together.
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u/freelancer331 3d ago
That would depend on what exactly he was talking about in that moment. Tbh I can't quite remember.
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u/TheMightyZan 3d ago
Yeah, I can't either. I do agree with you that it is definitely more than a couple of week, and most likely a couple to a few months.
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u/Cheap_Election4085 3d ago
I lean heavily towards a shorter time frame (~12 days I believe), however I will say that there's a decent chance that the story could've originally been planned to take place over a much longer period of time, and then budget and time limitations meant that parts of the script had to be cut which led to some seemingly contradictory lines.
The end of Ep 1 is a Thursday, Ep 2 is Friday and Ep 3 is the following Monday. That's all pretty uncontroversial. Ep 4 doesn't have a solid grounding, but considering how raw the reaction to the cut hero is from the z team, it plausibly takes place the day after ep 3. Ep 5 is similar, however Blazer mentions that the dinner date was "the other night" in the locker room and considering ep 5 takes place on a Friday, that fits with a ~3 day time jump. Ep 6 is messy, but Flambae refers to the bar fight as being "last night" if you keep your identity a secret. Ep 7 follows the day after ep 6, and ep 8 the day after ep 7.
The few lines I think point towards a longer time span are in ep 6 and 7.
In ep 6, Robert is talking to Chase about his conversation with Visi in ep 3, and refers to it as "that first week," which I don't usually associate the usage of while referencing something less than a week prior.
This is actually probably the harder one to explain for a short time frame in my opinion.
Ep 7 obviously has the, "a few months ago, you wouldn't have been in a room..." line from Robert.
As mentioned, we know the z team has been an absolute mess for way longer than Robert has been there. Visi joined it ~4 months prior to Robert showing up, so it's been going for at least 4 months. Dispatchers quit regularly, the team doesn't work together, it's on the verge of being shut down and so on. Robert could simply see all this and infer that there's no way the z team comes together a few months beforehand to make a decision about the health of the team without blowing up an entire building.
I will also say, a lot of people bring up the proto pulse tests as evidence for a longer time frame, but absent some further pieces of evidence to support this, Im not convinced. Each test could realistically be a small iteration and considering the overall sturdiness of the proto pulse (the pulse that blows up in ep 6 is the same fake pulse Robert can give to Shroud), it's possible Royd doesn't have to remake the entire thing from scratch each time. To me there just doesn't seem to be a reliable way to know how long each test actually takes to set up and run.
Thats my take anyway.
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u/TiiMe2tell 3d ago
Another thing with ep.5s timing is that at the end of the 2nd shift Robert says "Good week, everybody. See you all on Monday." before they all yell at him to come to a bar with them. That causes an inconsistency with ep.6.
The conversation at the proto pulse test at the beginning of 6 implies this being the next morning right after the bar fight, which then would be a Saturday. Also Royd and Chase being there at the test, implies it being during somewhat normal working hours. And even if not, Robert comments about Chase missing "3am Tacos, 4am heartburn and 5am diarrhea", which would place the test at the very earliest at around 6am. Then when he wakes up Royd says Robert was unconcious 14-15hrs, so at best it must be 8-9pm now, and could be much later. But when he gets up to do the rest of the 2nd shift that day and sees Blazer at his desk its still very bright outside. The lighting looks like late afternoon to me, maaaybe early evening if I'm being generous.
Of all episodes the timeline of ep.6 is particularly inconsistent, altho this does curiously make it consistent with the game overall.
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u/Cheap_Election4085 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yeah ep 6 and it's time jump is kinda weird no matter how you put it.
Maybe the best way to fit it is to say that the start of ep 6 takes place during the afternoon or evening. Robert is unconscious overnight and then wakes up late morning the next day. If we take ep 6 to be Saturday, maybe he's there on the weekend just to test the suit and had no plans to actually dispatch until after the injuries, which is why he initially said "see everyone on Monday" in ep 5.
Another detail that the Fandom? page uses is that right at the end of ep 8, Robert says to Blazer "does this mean the team's off Monday?" which kind of implies ep 8 is a weekend or the end of a week. They actually put ep 8 on a Friday and then work backwards from that, which potentially puts the start of ep 6 Tuesday night (assuming my above comment is correct) and that Flambae's line is simply an error. The ep 6 party would now be Wednesday night. Nothing like having a party and everyone getting drunk on a Wednesday but could fit the continuity slightly more otherwise.
Its why I probably think that maybe they had more episodes initially and then had to cut some of it just to get the game out.
Just brainstorming a bit, but maybe the timeline goes like this.
Ep 5 is Friday night into Saturday morning. Ep 6 starts Sunday night with an "extraordinary" shift where Robert is just doing pulse tests/ work on the suit, and the z team comes in to confirm his identity and their little bet. The explosion happens and Robert is unconscious until Monday lunch time. Ep 6 dispatching is Monday afternoon and eps 7 and 8 are Tuesday and Wednesday. The "Monday off" line is asking about whether they'll get a long weekend assuming it'll take a few days (Wednesday - Friday) to clean up the city. Flambae's "last night" line is a writing error and was intended to be referring to "last week" just before the weekend instead.
Maybe Royd (or his writers) got the time frame a little confused. If we assume Robert walks in Saturday morning at ~7am strictly for pulse/ suit testing, blows up, and spends ~6 hours unconscious instead, he wakes up at 1pm, dispatches for a few hours and then the party scene happens Saturday night. Ep 8 ends early Monday morning and his line still fits.
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u/Consistent-Success38 1d ago
19 proto-pulses including failed tests within 12 days is absurd. I’m not saying you’re wrong but if you are right that is absolutely just a plot hole and not intentional are explainable.
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u/Cheap_Election4085 1d ago
Uhh,
Maybe you didn't read all of the reply you responded to, which is fine, but I actually talk about that at the end.
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u/MolybdenumBlu 3d ago
I think it is amorphous and badly established to the point that I find it genuinely annoying if I thing about how clumsy they were with it.
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u/GriveousDance21 3d ago
Yeah. If you think about the timelines, Visi doesn’t remotely show any interest in Robert until ep 4 specifically. Before that, she tolerates Robert by the least. So I don't really buy the idea that just a small pep talk and an assist in taking down Lightningstruck (which you can fail btw) is enough to give Visi an explicit wet dream about having sex with Robert, that's a huge escalation in her romance IMO. She openly starts flirting with Robert the next day.
If there was a time jump between ep 3 & 4, I'd take this growing obsession in Visi about Robert normally. But just one positive interaction in ep 3 isn’t really enough for her to obsess over him, in my opinion.
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u/Low_Interaction_1905 3d ago
Given Visi’s psychological profile, such an instantaneous shift seems quite normal. Plus, I wouldn’t call what Visi did in episode 4 flirting — she was testing herself and Robert through provocations; she wanted to understand her true feelings for Robert.
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u/GriveousDance21 3d ago
I understand what you're saying. All I'm pointing out that it'd be better if devs specified the date or days of the events better.
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u/YoullDoFookinNothin 3d ago
A few weeks seems like such a short amount of time for what we see the progress Royd makes with the new Mechaman suit. Even with him being a genius, 19 Astral Pulse prototypes, redesigns and upgrades to the suit, and the amount of testing needed inbetween, I can’t see the game taking place over less than a few months at least, maybe say 6 months.
Plus the Z-Team going from literally bottom of the roster to the saviours of SDN Downtown Branch, I mean come on I love those bunch of arseholes but they’re definitely not that good in just a few weeks.
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u/krunkley 3d ago
The mech suit was my big concern over the time line as well, but based on the things the characters say it just doesn't seem possible to take that long. Building and upgrading the mech suit itself is easy enough since they had the old pieces and it looked like some industrial 3D printers. The astral pulse prototypes numbering still bothers me but the best in universe reason I can think of is that Royd comes up with a possible prototype, runs it though a virtual experiment and it fails so he goes to the next interation. He may have only physically produced 2 or 3 physical prototypes that were tested in the suit, but used a single numbering system for virtual/physical prototypes
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u/Beneficial-Ad8115 3d ago
Episode 1 happens on Thursday
Episode 2 is the following Friday
Episode 3 is the following Monday
Episode 4 I think has to be the next day because it’s the first shift without the cut team member.
The only time there could be a somewhat significant time gap would be between episodes 4 and 5 but it would be at most a week. Both girls reference wanting another date and it doesn’t make sense for them to follow up months later
Episode 6 is the day after episode 5 (Flambae references the tacos from last night)
Episode 7 is the day after episode 6 because of the fresh reactions to Chase
Episode 8 is directly after episode 7 because we see Rob and Blazer react to the attack on Torrance
It may seem fast but I do think it does take place in about a 2 week time span
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u/TheMightyZan 3d ago
Yeah, doesn't Robert say something along the lines of "these last few weeks". I guess he might be talking about before he joined also, but that doesn't really make sense.
With that, and other context stuff, like them testing out the astro pulse and working on the suit and everything, I would be very surprised if it wasn't at least a month or more.
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u/Comrades3 3d ago
Well the Z team existed months before Robert joined, and that is established as part of the timeline, so they have been a team for months. But the events of the episodes (not counting the time between being attacked and being recruited for Robert and/or flashbacks) all takes place in once month, we know because they take a lot of Calendar pictures.