Find all previous editions of the PCG Q&A here. Some highlights:
- What's the best game you ever received as a holiday gift?
- What's your favorite line of dialogue in a game?
- What TV show would you make interactive?
We've already had Minecraft Classic, and World of Warcraft Classic is on the way, with a closed beta currently in progress. There's obviously interest in going back to the way things used to be.
That's why our latest weekend question is: What game would you like to see a classic version of? Do you want to play Team Fortress 2 before hats, when every class had a unique silhouette and a single loadout? Do you want your favorite MMO to go back to the way it was when you first started playing? Do you want competitive games to go back to how they were before they got complicated by bonus stuff and everybody got good at them? Let us know.
Wes Fenlon: Star Wars Galaxies
Galaxies is dead and gone, but I can't think of an online game better-known for controversially changing midway through its life. The infamous New Game Enhancement dramatically changed Galaxies, and as a result anyone and everyone could become a Jedi, so of course they did. Galaxies had been an incredibly ambitious game, and it certainly had its problems before the NGE, but it could also be wonderful, as Chris Thursten passionately wrote about for PC Gamer. It strikes me as the kind of MMO that will probably never be made again, at least with that kind of scale and budget. So I guess I don't necessarily want Galaxies exactly as it was in 2003, but a reborn version that retains its core ideas and designs and fixes up its most glaring flaws.
Joanna Nelius: The Matrix Online
Like Wes' said about Star Wars Galaxies, I don't want to see an exact recreation of The Matrix Online from the early 2000s, but I want its best features to come back. Combat was unbalanced, missions would often break due to an NPC glitch or a bugged item, and the fashion did not age well, but the storytelling and the roleplaying was robust and interesting enough to make up for all that ten-fold. Players could directly communicate with storyline characters, like Morpheus, in scripted interactions created by the game’s live events team. That team controlled major storyline characters and did things like meet with guilds and provided specific players with clues to solve some of The Matrix's mysteries, so they were roleplaying along with the players, and that provided the players a huge incentive to influence the trajectory of the story.
Early on in one of the events, Morpheus put some of the Zionists at odds with Commander Lock, which caused a split in the faction that trickled all the way into outside guild forums. What ever happened in-game became canon to the entire Matrix world. I don't think there has been an MMO since The Matrix Online that has approached storytelling in the same way.
James Davenport: Fortnite
Season 3 was the best. Some are more partial to Season 5. Or Season 7. Or Season 2. Fortnite is a game in constant flux, with Epic adding and removing items every few weeks and completely changing massive swaths of the map with every new season. The original Fortnite Battle Royale barely resembles what it's become today, which is why I'd love to see Epic find a way to take snapshots of every season and roll them back out as part of a limited-time mode every now and then. I don't know how technically feasible it is, but it'd be fascinating to play one season after the next at will. I actually hated Battle Royale when it first released and I'd love to relive the redemption arc. If only we could roll back player skill, too. Back in Season 1, no one knew how to build.
Jody Macgregor: GTA San Andreas
If we're dreaming here let's go for something truly impossible. Let's have a version of San Andreas that not only has all of the original music that had to be removed thanks to the limits of licensing, let's have a version that doesn't have to be downgraded to a pre-patch 1.0 before you can mod it. Although if you do get tweaking, there's a mod called Classic San Andreas that brings over a bunch of features from the PS2 version that were missing on PC, so at least someone out there's looking out for us. Grove Street for life.
