Question Of The Week [June 10th 2024]

The Xbox 360 changed the game in several ways with video games. One of them being “achievements” a task or goal that the developers coded in, so when you complete a specific task in a game, it pops off an notification informing you “you did this thing”. It was a brilliant move that really brought gaming to life in a social way. As achievements quickly became bragging rights across online and real life communities and between friends. Since it was a requirement for every game to have a total of 1,000 gamerscore points, each game had to have achievements equaling 1,000 points. Some games just made achievements like “get to the end of the level = 100 points. But others took the time to dive into some really cool challenges to get achievements in the game, allowing you to play the game differently to get all those points. But where are they still worth it, or should they go away?

Achievements became a gold standard to games at some point, where Sony finally implemented them into PS3 a couple years later in 2008, and even PC gaming, whether it was Steam or Ubisoft implemented them as well. It’s nearly universal (except Nintendo because they have to be weird and never follow the industry norm, even when they should), even Retro games can have achievements thanks to roms and emulators and websites being able to implement them retroactively. However, since 2005, nearly 20 years later, achievements, and gamerscores really don’t mean as much as they do. Heck, they never really did to begin with, but it was a fun “extra” thing that just boosted the game playing experience. Seeing those achievements pop, seeing if you really wanted to try for that weirdly odd achievement to squeeze more playtime out of it seemed cool back in the day.

But games quickly started implementing bizarre achievements. Some are kinda cool, like playing with the developer online, where during the launch of a game, you could find the devs playing the game online and you could get an achievement if you happened to be in a lobby with them. But that was more down to sheer luck, and pretty much impossible to get once the game wasn’t brand new. Same with “get 1st in the world on the leaderboard”, which was nearly impossible to get thanks to it only being a couple people who could devote their lives to an online game, and also when the servers get shut down too, it will become impossible. When the achievements became too niche or even ridiculous that it didn’t respect the players time, it diminished the meaning of them. I mean some achievements required the player to play a game for over 10 years of real life time, which is just not actually possible.

So the achievement arms race quickly dried up and most are just kinda forgotten and never cared about anymore, and I find that sad. Achievements were a really cool way to get you to play a game a different way and let you really dig deep into a game much more than most people would ever think about.

At the end of the day, it’s also a quick list that you can look back at and see what you did in a video game, and for someone like me, I think they are worth it. But I’d rather see a set of achievements that focus on the core game, with a handful of “off the beaten path” achievements. And then 1 or 2 that are for the hardcore that want to take an extra step to really conquering and master the game. A bit more uniformity of selections might be the best way to keep them around, without making people feel bad they didn’t get all of them, like removing Online only achievements for games who’s servers will stop working in 3 years.