I’m more satisfied with the achievements fewer people have accomplished than just getting achievements. I still have a couple of Spiral Knights ones that less than 1% have reached that I did with a couple SB dudes (@drobe, were you one of them?). I’ve lost the screenshots we took before we got wrecked by the end boss.
i like how switching off cheerios on the 360/PS3 made it less obvious when and where you got g-score.
On the PS4, they kinda rub it in, on that recent-activity-page that the PS4 comes with.
otoh, some are quite nice (e.g. reaching 1000°C brake temperature)/make you try out weird things just to see if the devs thought of that.
alas, am undecided 'bout them.
i liked that bullet witch had an achievement worth one point for completing the hardest difficulty
i can’t remember any of them specifically, but mushihimesama futari had achievements for tons of absurdly specific things
Pretty sure he has never been able to go back and actually play that game again after that. It was rough times for him.
My instinct to collect loves achievements, but I can’t stand when predominantly single player games mix a few cursory multiplayer ones in there as well.
It feels like the achievements should almost be in separate categories; single player and multiplayer in that case.
Yeah, this is probably the greatest sin in achievements, especially if said multiplayer is online only in a dead game.
that is the damn truth
Achievements are so far removed from the conditions of the game, like action-reaction, or cost-reward, I ignore them. Or they amount to a normal outcome of playing the game. So who cares. They don’t have the immediacy of doing something, getting a reaction, figuring out a game a lil bit more. They lack the investment that comes from making a choice, spending a resource, then seeing a result later on.
In comparison, I do like the unlockable cheats in Goldeneye 64, the devs show off a pretty deep understanding of exactly how far they can push their players. Achievements have the potential to be just as fun, just as challenging, but they’re so separate from the game that I don’t think they really encourage this kind of design.
With cheats, it kind of logically follows you only get a cheat after you display a pretty deep understanding of the game. You can’t reward a cheat to someone before they have a frame of reference that let’s them appreciate it. Achievements though don’t necessarily need that tangible connection between mastery and achievement to serve their function. There’s nothing implicit in their structure that necessitates understanding.
It brings to mind the pigeons in GTA4. You have this opulent city, but nothing to contextualize it, nothing to make one area more interesting over another. You reach the end of a path, you find a pigeon collectable, a stat deep in your menu changes one inch. Achievements for sure play their part in formalizing this kind of design structure, actions without consequence.
Overall I see achievements as periphery gaming culture stuff, like pre-order bonuses. There’s maybe even an aspect of social manipulation there, making your friends and other people want to play games so that they can “be part of the conversation”, the same tactic a lot of big release movies use. When I put it all into words I guess I am not a big fan.
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I have a strong dislike for achievements,
this was a beautiful moment.
I’ve had random people sending a friend request on psn then asking for my help on achievements a minute later, without even attempting a human conversation. This was always mildly infuriating for a few reasons:
- it satisfied my mother’s psychotic prophecy that people only ever talk to you if they want something;
- they want something right now;
- the something they want I heavily despise;
- it’s just fucking rude.
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If they lay down the path in front of me I will go for it. I have to stop myself. It can be the number going up in the menu or the BLEEP of a meaningless icon going up. If anyone was going to make the Cheevos mean anything, that ship has sailed. It’s been too many years (10?) . They will always mean nothing.
I do like them as a listing of when people stopped playing a game. I’ve talked about it before but Murasaki Baby gives you 3 acheivements within 15 minutes of starting the game (and the only game is less than 3 hours long.) Pulling up the page on Vita/PS4 that lists % of people that played the game have different achievements and you’ll see it just drop drastically. Oh hey a handy link . That’s 15 minutes!
Cheevos and Trophs will hold no value forever. They are only their to convince us to do a thing we would not do otherwise.
Torchlight: I can’t remember if I clicked on a horse 100 times to get an achievement or if I clicked on a horse 100 times of my own volition and was surprised that there was an achievement.
Anyway it’s my rarest achievement on Steam, and I am unreasonably proud of it
Obligatory:
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