I’ve been playing Pokemon Go since it launched a little over 5 years ago. I also played Ghostbusters World almost daily when it was around.
Playing both games a ton, I have some insight into both. I can say without a doubt, and setting aside my Ghostbusters fandom, that Ghostbusters World was a better game than Pokemon Go. Ghostbusters World is still the better game, even a year after the shutdown.
To this day there are features that Ghostbusters World had, that Pokemon Go could use to improve the quality of the game. Here are some of those features, and my reasoning for them.
Personal Dimensional Doors / Pokestops
In Ghostbusters World, you could place your own personal Dimensional Door wherever you want (and move it for a small amount of the in-game currency). It took twice as long to reset as the primary doors around the game, it counted for your daily collection, but it did not bring any extra ghosts nearby.
Other people could also see and use your dimensional doors, which was cool.
Pokemon Go could have a similar feature: a personal Pokestop that you can place at your home or office.
To keep it fair, it could come with several limitations: either you alone, or you and your added friends could be the only ones to see the stops that you have placed. So if you have a family who plays, there could be a few personal pokestops at your house, but that doesn’t have to break the balance of the game. They could limit the number of personal stops within a certain range, for one thing. Another is to not allow lures to be placed on these personal pokestops. They’re there just to help you get some extra pokeballs, and other items such as gifts, and perhaps a rare egg.
Story Mode
This might be controversial since the story in Ghostbusters World was somewhat lacking, though I feel like the story would only get better as it went along. We only got the first chapter of the story before the game shut down, unfortunately.
That said, being able to assemble different teams and go through a story with teams of Pokemon that have multiple attacks and strategies would be great fun. You would assemble a team of four pokemon who would gather side-by-side against teams of other pokemon. They could make it work pokemon style, with trainers behind each of the Pokemon, or they could do it like Ghostbusters World did, where they didn’t have trainers. In this mode the Pokemon would have hit-points like they do during raids and PvP.
PvP Arena and Gozer’s Tower
The Story Mode gameplay could lead naturally to these two features. PvP Arena could be handled either as a live battle between your team of pokemon and another player’s, or it could happen like it did in Ghostbusters World: asynchronous battles, with a leaderboard. You would control your Pokemon in the battle against an AI-controlled team of Pokemon that the other players used to get where they are in the leaderboards. Each week the winners would get prizes.
And Gozer’s Tower would have to be adapted, but that’s pretty easy. Just have 50 sets of 3 group battles that progressively get more and more difficult. These battles would reset every month. They also have their own leaderboards as well that lead to additional prizes on top of the prizes for each set completed.
Ecto-Goggles
These worked fairly differently from the incense in Pokemon Go. I would say that the enhanced incense in Pokemon Go that would bring you a new Pokemon every minute is really good, and way better than it used to be (only 1 every 5 minutes for a total of 6 per half-hour, unless you walked at a good clip). The Ecto-Goggles would always bring you a total of 16 ghosts, so long as you caught or defeated every ghost that it gave you. You’d be given 8 ghosts in the first 15 minutes, and 8 ghosts in the next 15 minutes. And it wouldn’t always, but it would frequently bring you one or two very rare ghosts. I don’t know what Pokemon Go could learn from this feature, now that they’ve enhanced the incense. If incense goes back to the previous state, however, then it is broken and needs work. They should either bring back the higher rate of Pokemon appearance, or adopt a particular number of Pokemon that you can get while incense is running, so long as you catch the ones that appear (or the Pokemon flees).
Bonus (just for fun): Ghost-Type Event
Run a massing event where our goal is to bust as many ghost-type Pokemon as possible, catching them, raiding for them, etc. Give us a clue that maybe Niantic is making a new version of Ghostbusters World on the Pokemon Go engine? Maybe? Please? It would be a dream come true.
What do you think?
What are some features from Ghostbusters World that I missed, that Pokemon Go should use?