One of the most widely enjoyed new features of this generation of gaming has been the addition of achievements and achievement-like challenges to games. Xbox’s gamerscore, Playstation’s trophies, iPhone’s game centre, everything seems to be jumping on the bandwagon to add what now seems to be a sure fire way to squeeze more value out of a game. But is this always a good idea?
On the opposing side to these adopters, Nintendo seems to be somewhat against their widespread use (the upcoming 3DS will not be implementing such a system). Their reasons are that the developers shouldn’t be the ones to tell you how to play a game. You should explore the game because you’re intrigued about what could lie ahead, not because you need to find the 50th mystical banana loop. Having a sense of discovery and fully incorporating the reward into the game itself is a much better approach. The full article on this can be found here:s .
Personally, I think these are very valid points and indicate that as opposed to getting rid of achievements altogether, they should only be used in ways that they can enhance the actual gameplay. This is entirely dependant on what the game is and what type of achievements there are.
Basically, the different achievements can be broken down into a number of categories:
Game Completion: These are achievements earned by playing the game as your normally would. They only serve a purpose in the wider scheme of things, such as gamerscore, so aside from people trying to increase their e-penis through normal gameplay, they are pretty much a waste of achievements.
Grinding: Widely regarded as the worst kind of achievement, these basically ask you to do a particular action over and over again. They artificially extend the length of the game for people who want to get all the achievements and they are very rarely any fun to get
Collection: These are a bit hit and miss. At best they encourage exploration to find many of the games secrets that you wouldn’t normally come across (although as mentioned above, this exploration should be encouraged anyway, without the need for a carrot). At worst however, they can actually remove value from the game itself. Before achievements, developers would still add collectibles into their games, but upon getting all of them you would receive some neat reward. Now most developers feel that the achievement itself is enough of a reward, so offer no tangible reason to go around collecting everything, meaning a steady decline in neat unlockables in games.
Challenge: In my opinion, challenge achievements are by far the best type. At their worst, with simple challenges, they can end up like completion achievements, earned through normal gameplay.. At their best, they encourage you to get really good at the game, utilise the gameplay to its maximum and try playing the game in different ways
Viral: There’s one of these on basically every online game. You get it for playing (or beating, or killing) someone with the achievement (starting with the developers). In my opinion, these are completely pointless as don’t seem to reward any activity other than going online a reasonable amount of time after the game has been released.
Therefore, in a game where you’re aiming for high scores is well suited to having a sprinkling of challenge based achievements, based on scores, whereas an immersive adventure game may want to get rid of the achievements altogether.
While their use on individual games is neat and can work well, I disagree with their use on a wider level, such as in gamerscore, because of how little it actually means. Gamerscore is horrifically unbalanced, there are some games in which you can earn all of the achievements in a couple of hours and there are others where only the people really committed to the game will perfect it. Even with systems like True Achievements , which rebalance gamerscore based on the percentage of game owners that have that achievement, there is still the issue that gamerscore is still a lot about how many games you can afford to play and how much time you spend playing, as opposed to how good you actually are (You’re better than everyone with a lower score than you, but everyone with a higher score than you has no life).
Basically, achievements and similar systems are a mixed blessing and developers need to take more time over deciding how they should be used to improve the game, as opposed to an add-on used for showing off.
My game, “the Cannon” takes a different approach to the “Medals” within the game. Most of the medals themselves are of the challenge type. Admittedly, there are a couple of grindy ones (couple being used in the literal sense), but I’d feel these would be acquired during the gameplay it would take to get good at the game and unlock the other medals anyway. In addition to earning the medals, once you reach certain numbers of medals, you will unlock new features, such as new backgrounds and a super secret mode once you’ve unlocked all of them. The list is pretty much finalized (as in the ones I’ve designed for it work), so I’ll publish the list up on the site soon.
tl;dr : Achievement type things are neat, but they’re used the wrong way far too much. I’d like to think I’m doing things in a good way with my game
Makes No Cents is a new article feature I’m starting up because I keep wanting to give my two cents whenever these types of discussions come up on websites. Most of the things here will probably end up being video game related and even more specifically things that have come up in the development of my own games, but we could end up with some other idea going around too. And hey, anyone on the internet with a blog can voice their opinion, right?
