Fans shouldn’t get their hopes up if they’re hoping to see a Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed Stay Puft fight or any alternate modes where they take on a giant ghost or deity-type entity. Developer Illfonic is focusing “on the day-to-day ghostbusting thing” with the new Ghostbusters multiplayer game, so there’s just one mode for now – and that might not be a bad thing.
All of the Ghostbusters movies end with what is essentially a giant boss battle – often, very literally. The original movie’s Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is the most famous, with the 2016 reboot ending on a fight with a kaiju version of the team’s own logo. Ghostbusters: The Video Game included multiple fights with minor gods – including Stay Puft – but Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed won’t, nor will it have any other modes beyond the main 4v1.
“You need to build an asymmetrical game from the ground up with one mode,” IllFonic’s CCO Jared Gerritzen tells PCGamesN. “To get that balance really good, you need to be focused on one element. We’ve played other modes where we’ve tried adding other variants of things, and it was too frantic.”
“We really want to be pure to the Ghostbusters franchise, “Gerritzen explains. “When we started working on the game, it was all about that hotel experience in the OG film where there’s that cat and mouse and you’re focused on that one ghost… there’s one ghost that’s easy to hunt down, but they have so many abilities that throw you off that, if there are multiple ghosts, it just feels really weird.”
As for Stay Puft or other big fights, Gerritzen tells us that the team at Illfonic wanted to focus on basically “the highlight reel of them just ghost busting” – which happens in the middle of the first two movies – rather than the big fight at the end. “The amount of time and engineering it would have taken to make that Stay Puft experience as good as I feel that we would need to make it, I just felt that you would probably do it five or six times, and then you would be like, that was cool – but I want to go back to the replayable stuff that I could do hundreds of times.”
“It is a matter of getting that balance of time and effort,” Gerritzen adds, “so we really focused on the day-to-day ghostbusting thing versus the every 20-some-odd years fighting a major deity.”
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Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed is an Epic Games Store exclusive on PC, and it’ll be out in Q4 2022.