Does anyone remember the Giant Bomb Achievements?

I feel like I'm experiencing the Mandela effect.

I very clearly remember the site having their own achievements, or trophies (whatever they called them).

To unlock them you would visit different pages on the site. Like one might be "Visit 12 games with vampires" and then it would unlock an achievement on your profile.

I can't find any videos demonstrating it, nor any images of it, and the feature seems to be long gone from the site. Does anyone remember more details about this? Have any visual proof? I brought it up to a friend who didn't remember it at all and I couldn't find anything on google.

I think when they moved to CBSi, they had to port the site to a different platform and that features didn’t make the transition.

Nah you're right. The site used to have Quests.

In addition to the platform change it was also mostly done by Sean Coonce if I recall, who did not come along with the move.

Yeah, totally. One of the quests was “get the first comment on a video, without using the word ‘first’”, which meant that for years, the first ten comments on every video were like “I’m never going to get this quest...”. I also think the idea was to use these with sponsorships and stuff.

They never really amounted to much or added much to the site. I don’t miss them.

@gkhan: They had a place as a cool gameified tutorial of certain parts of the site, but other ones were just time wasters or grind. And the achievement for getting first comment, like you said, made the first mess of comments completely useless.

Yeah, they were awesome.

Gamification of a website about video games was a great idea. I pitched something similar at work years ago, showing Giant Bomb as an example.

They said no, at the time. Fast forward a decade, though, and gamification has become normalized in my workplace.

The shit people do to make a number go higher is amazing.

@gkhan: I got this quest like 2 weeks before the site changed! Wasn't even trying but I remember feeling rather stoked about it then subsequently bummed. Man, remember giving a shit about achievements? Those were the days.

Press F to pay respects to quests.

@gkhan: I know there's a very old Bombcast where they mentioned that they were kind of annoyed with how many "FOR THE ACHIEVEMENT/QUEST" comments because the site traffic had spiked over the previous months and now everyone just waited until the first second a video was posted and they'd just post a one-letter comment, just to get the achievement.

I honestly don't blame them for removing them. It was a fun idea, especially right after achievements became a thing and (almost) everyone on staff was obsessed with them, but it quickly became a little obnoxious.

I just remembered having a pickle of a time with an RPG starter enemy quest because I'd never fought a bugbear. Too young for the site back then.

Yeah, I remember those. I liked some that made you explore the concept pages or familiarize with old games.

I also remembered I almost got banned for engaging in a list of tips and solutions, not knowing answering them in public was against the terms of services.

i remember you could link your psn account and xbox tag and get some achievements for getting all cheevos or a plat trophy

It was fun - I also enjoyed the general stat tracking like how many reviews you wrote factoring into some sort of badge I think.

I miss achievement and trophy tracking. Was lost in the 2013 rebuild along with quests but I fucking loved that feature.

I really miss the site quests. In addition to what others have said, the quests were sorted into sets and each set had a theme like E3 or the forums. Some of them gave clues that you'd need to solve by visiting the wiki page that served as an answer, others were about encouraging people to interact more with the community, and some went into different territory entirely. Each quest also had some charming cartoony art with it, and there was even once a competition in which the first 2,000 users to beat a quest had a chance of winning prizes.

As someone who was cleaning up the site at the time, the quest which asked people to get the first comment on a video resulted in a lot of a spam and was a bit of a mistake, but I want to emphasise that quests were not removed because of that single objective. That was an issue with one quest, not the system as a whole, which was fantastic.

I really did like them and it was a fun little trivia/riddle game at times trying to find the right wiki pages.

I miss those so much. On top of that the achievement/trophy tracking was so much fun. And on top of BOTH of those was my favorite thing, wiki bounties.

I don't miss the site quests, but the achievement/trophy tracking was great. God that was back when Binding of Isaac (BoI) first launched on Steam and I remember getting the platinum or whatever. For a short time I was in the #1 spot of BoI achievement points for this site and that has somehow been one of the fondest memories I have of that game now.

As people mentioned, I really liked the chained or quest type rewards. And, the riddles at least made the site interesting to explore.

I remember "Quests" on the site, and also "Achievements" on the site. I had an S rank on a few games which was aces

Sqoon, anyone?

:)

Yes, and I miss them!

I remember them, and I do kinda miss them. The first comment quest was a little obnoxious as others have said, but there were a lot of cool and interesting trivia-based quests that I thought were awesome at the time. I don't really pay attention to achievements anymore, so I doubt I'd engage with them on GB if they made a return. Better to remember them fondly I guess.

The ones that drew interest to the wiki were a brilliant way to flesh out the site. Quests were cool!

Quests were great, and whenever the new ones went live the site would grind to a halt with everyone furiously searching around. Good times.

I remember them, but i never really interacted with them.

I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed the sponsored quests

The quests were a blast! I also loved how they would have a "featured user review" back in the day at the bottom of the site. I remember being psyched when mine was chosen once.

Pretty sure I was the only person who ever got to see this screen.

@marino:

Wait, that says 247 quests of 248.

Correct. Because one of the Christmas quests was bugged. They pushed out a newer version that worked, but the old one still existed somewhere on the back end even though it didn't count towards completion. It was like that for several years.

Didn't know this was a thing. Cool. I remember being obsessed with the GameSpot badges for watching all the E3 conferences. I'd leave it running on my PC just to get them.

Yeah they existed, that damn first comment quest was poison, "FIRST!".