Good vs. Bad Achievements
By Mento 23 Comments
Achievements, eh? People like those. They are some okay things. But, after recovering from reading an opening that strong, GBers might wonder why I'm singling out such a perfectly benign feature of modern gaming. Well, because like any other design decision that goes into a game, there's an issue of balance; what's "good" and what's "bad". And unlike many other design decisions, achievements are still relatively new and haven't really been set a precedent yet.
So what exactly is the point of achievements? Well, I tend to liken them to the checklists you find at the back of Where's Waldo books: Ostensibly, the goal of these books is to scour a very detailed, elaborate collage of interesting characters and set-pieces, find the red-and-white striped dork and move onto the next page. The artists who put all the work into those images would suddenly think, "Hey, hang on. You found Waldo after like a minute of searching. Did you even see this dude up here running about on fire like a loon? What about this little guy down here who's about to get beaned by an anvil? Come back and look at what we did, assholes." And thus the checklists were born: A whole list of stuff to find after you'd found Waldo. Achievements work on almost the exact same principle, only replace "finding Waldo" with "beating the game" and "artists" with "game developers".
What I've thrown together here is what I call the desirability hierarchy for achievements. Now, I'll be the first to point out that these are generally subjective opinions, but I feel like I've hit the consensus with the overall list more or less. Agree or disagree at your leisure.
#1 (Most Desirable): The Unexpected
These are the achievements where the game will actually request that you try a different approach. Sometimes they're just so people will try out a new gun, a new power or a new method of getting past an obstacle. Ideally, these achievements will ping after one (or maybe 5-10) use, just so the game knows you've given a feature that they've painstakingly included and balanced a shot, which you might've ignored completely in any other circumstance. Occasionally, these achievements will ask you to do something so crazy it completely changes the game experience. These are what the achievement system were made for: To bring an extra level of creative longevity to a game after the main objective has come and gone.
Example: Bringing the Gnome with you in Half-Life Episode 1 (my mistake, Episode 2. Episode 1 was the one bullet thing). Man, that was crazy. Occasionally annoying, but it made you consider how to proceed while also in the possession of your pointy-headed companion. Hell, I got pretty attached to the thing after not too long. This might be apocryphal, but I believe Valve added this one to the 360 Orange Box version after noticing that a bunch of weirdos on the Steam servers were doing it.
#2 (These are pretty good too): Difficulty Modes and 100% Completion
Not to sound too obvious, but before the time of achievements these were the sort of things the "hardcore" completionists tended to go after. If a game has additional difficulty modes, then it stands to reason that they were the next port of call after beating a game on its Normal setting. If it was more of a large RPG or platformer or sandbox type, then there was usually some sort of percentage-based score to tell you how much of the game you had conquered. Giving players large achievement point bonuses for fulfilling the type of goals achievements replaced seems like a perfectly natural progression and the sort of thing they should still honor.
#3 (Sure, fair enough these are here): Story Progress
There really isn't a reason to give players achievements based on reaching points of the story they can't possibly miss. But what this does is mete out some minor rewards to convince players they've just passed a milestone and should keep playing for more. It's the sort of Skinner-esque behavioral reward system that shouldn't really be necessary if a player is enjoying the game - though if they aren't it might convince them to keep heading towards the end of the rat maze anyway.
#4 (Maybe not include these on your achievement lists? I mean, I guess it's fine either way.): Scavenger Hunts
Now, Scavenger Hunts are something we're all familiar with, especially in Sandbox games and occasionally First- and Third-Person Shooters. You have a task to collect a series of TACOs for backstory, or occasionally unlockables, or usually for no reason at all. That's why they're Totally Arbitrary Collectible Objects. In order to not fall into the dreaded Black Hole territory (below), a scavenger hunt needs a couple of requisites, ideally meeting both of them: A) It needs some in-game way of detecting these things, perhaps unlocked towards the end of the game. B) They need an actual in-game purpose - unlocking concept art does not count. Adding background flavor text is fine, but giving players an actual boost in health or something would be preferable.
#5 (Seriously, these kind of suck. Why are they so common?): Black Holes
Nothing escapes a black hole. Not light, not matter, not Mr Domino, not The Blob and, importantly for this article, not even time. Well, I don't know about time. I really should've read that book by that wheelchair guy. But essentially, what I mean by a Black Hole achievement is one that will suck all the free time out of your schedule if pursued. The sort of achievement that demands you kill 500 stormtroopers with Force Lightning when surely a tenth or a hundredth of that number would suffice for getting across the point that you can use Force Lightning on stormtroopers to kill them. It's asking that you play the game for 50 hours when you were done after 30 minutes. It's asking that you beat the main game ten times for whatever warped reason the achievement-makers could think of. It's beating an optional, 100-floor dungeon full of procedurally generated fun for no benefit. Any of the above achievement types can fall into this category if they're not careful, and this sort of thing needs to be stopped now before people get antsy and rise up in rebellion, murdering the entire industry with pitchforks. It happened once when E.T. came out, and it could happen again.
#6 (Oh hell, these things. I hate these things. They are not so great.): Time Trials and Undefeated Runs
Now these things are just major pains in the ass. They're the dark equivalent of the aforementioned "force players to play the game in a new way" type of achievement. The soon-to-be-very-apparent downside to these is that if you accidentally fail them, they're out of your reach until you start over. You might be playing the game, hoping for a S-Rank when suddenly your character jerks spasmodically in some ragdoll nightmare because of wizard reasons. Suddenly, you've lost access to the 100 point "don't die" achievement and need to restart the entire game if you want it. Ditto for getting to the penultimate dungeon and seeing the timer roll over to one second past You're Fucked O' Clock. Unless the timed or undefeated run is isolated to a very short sequence that you can bear repeating over and over, you'll rarely find an achievement more frustrating.
#7 (Least Desirable, or: FUCK FUCK FUCK A BUNCH OF MULTIPLAYER ACHIEVEMENTS): Multiplayer
Now this seems entirely subjective initially. If you've bought a game that's pretty much intended for multiplayer gaming, it might strike you as fair enough that most of the achievements reflect that. However, what including multiplayer achievements does to your game is instantly date it. After a point, you won't be earning those achievements because people will no longer be playing it. They'll have moved onto Shout of Obligation: Avant-Garde Combat 3: 3DS: Red World Edition and left the old and busted version you're playing completely free of all but the most hardcore of the "they changed it now it sucks" video game hipsters, who are no fun to be around at all. Other than setting up private matches between you and the few friends you have left that don't hate you yet for making them play old shit, those are some achievements that are almost always going to be closed off forever. Protip for designers: KNOCK IT OFF WITH THESE THINGS. Or at least allow you to get them with bots. Sweet, nonjudgmental bots.
So that's a blog entry I wrote. I do that sometimes. Here's the fun interactive part for you people at home: What achievements do you love/hate? Anything I've missed off the hierarchy that needs adding? Are achievements a good idea or largely pointless? When was the last time I went outside? If a tree falls in the woods and no-one is around, does it still get the achievement for falling over?
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