As franchises go, Ghostbusters is an odd one. It’s a franchise that, by all rights, simply shouldn’t be a franchise. It was one movie made in 1984 that feels like a (really quite good) extended SNL bit, which happened to do well enough to spawn not only a sequel but a full fandom thanks to a 1986 cartoon.
The franchise was revived (if that’s even the right word for a franchise with fairly consistent games and tie-in media) in 2016 with a poorly-received Ghostbusters reboot before it was brought back again in 2021 with the original cast in Ghostbusters: Afterlife and its sequel Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. As previously mentioned, a fair amount of video games surround the Ghostbusters, yet not one single MMO, and that’s a mistake.
Before I discuss why I think we should have a Ghostbusters MMO, I want to break down two existing games in the franchise and discuss how they could be used in the creation of an MMO. The first title is the most recent game, Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed. Spirits Unleashed contains many gameplay choices that could easily be used in a potential MMO.
In it, players are allowed to play as both the ghosts that are haunting each location or play matches as a ghostbuster trying to capture that ghost in an asymmetrical multiplayer environment. By simply modifying these matches to take the form of raids (think boss raids in Destiny 2 or dungeon raids in World of Warcraft, and you’re on the right track) that you play with other people to get new loot, parts, and outfits, you can create the ideal Ghostbusters MMO combat system.
The fact of the matter is that if you’re going to do a Ghostbusters game, then there are two things you need to nail: the humor and the combat. While nailing the humor is a different matter entirely, nailing the combat has already been done, so why not take inspiration from games in the past? With just a little modification, you can make an extremely functional Destiny-like game that still puts the humor first and foremost.
The second game that is worth talking about is the 2009 Ghostbusters: The Video Game. For the longest amount of time, the game was treated as the third movie in the Ghostbusters franchise and puts the player in the shoes of a recruit to the Ghostbusters team. Through that lens, you’re given tutorials in-universe, and you’re taught the ropes of being a Ghostbuster. It’s a pretty engaging and interesting way of putting the player into the world, and combined with the fact that the original Ghostbusters lend both their likenesses and their voices to the game, it’s understandable why a lot of people see this as the official third movie.
But how is this at all relevant to a hypothetical Ghostbusters MMO? Well, you’re going to need quest-givers. All of the original Ghostbusters are fairly old now (or in the case of Harold Ramis, sadly no longer with us), so they’ll probably not want to spend a lot of time in a recording booth. This rules out the possibility of them reprising their role in a large-scale MMO campaign, but it doesn’t rule out them voicing the characters as quest-givers who are instructing new Ghostbusters on what to do, where to go, and what their next mission is. You can also take that basic idea of being the new Ghostbuster and make that the overall crux of the game, allowing players to customize and create their own character from a range of options, along with changing their load-outs based on what they manage to pick up throughout the course of raids and missions.
There’s also something really interesting you can do with classes here. With the fact that you can’t really have a melee fighter in the Ghostbusters factored in (what are you going to do, punch a ghost?) it might seem like it’s lacking in player choice, but you can easily have a healer for the team. Perhaps the way that damage works in the game isn’t that a ghost causes you to do physical damage, but instead it causes mental damage and essentially injects fear into the player. The healer calms the user, making it so that they don’t just entirely flee the scene.
However, it’s really difficult to come up with other classes. Of course, almost all of your Ghostbusters are ranged, with their proton packs strapped to their backs. Within both the movies and the animated show, however, the team also uses proton traps that are essentially landmines that are waiting for ghosts to actually float or move near them. So, you could make a ‘trapper’ class that is entirely centered around this mechanic and that rewards thinking about the placement of traps over the way that the main Ghostbuster class would work. It’d be a heavy departure from the existing classes, and might be one for people who prefer to plan out their attacks carefully rather than just rush in, all proton packs blazing.
Obviously, beyond that, you’d have to work out a decent business model, given that the thing that really pulls down a lot of MMOs is finding an audience in a market that is fairly swamped. While Destiny 2 does well by being free to play beyond expansions, developer Bungie is also owned by Sony, one of the biggest corporations in the world, so they can afford to do this. And while Ghostbusters is a fairly big IP in nerd culture, in the grand scheme of it, it’s not as big as some other things that are out there, so it might be a case of using a traditional subscription model, such as the type used in World of Warcraft for any characters that are over level 20.
I do think that instead of having a rolling treadmill of content, similar to the aforementioned Destiny 2 and the expansions that Blizzard releases for World of Warcraft, it might be worth taking the same approach that Ubisoft’s The Division did, making a massive open-world New York with missions galore and ghost hunts that you can repeat. Expansions can still be made that add new story elements and new missions, but once you have that base of the city of New York itself, then you can really start nailing down anything else that you want from the game.
I’m not a game developer, and I’m not a game designer. If you’ve made it to the end of this article then you’ve probably already realised this fact. There are likely a thousand different things wrong with what I’ve suggested, and there are probably issues that would crop up in development. Still, I do think that a Ghostbusters MMO would be one that could be relatively successful, and find a place in the hearts of the many Ghostbusters fans who have either been around since the original movie was released or since the new movies started releasing a few years ago.
