Re: "Achievements"
Posted July 21st, 2008 by Isobelle
Whoever cooked up the idea behind achievements and the Xbox Live “Gamerscore” system over at Xbox HQ needs a plaque and a raise. He single-handedly created a System of Stupid that consoles will undoubtedly replicate over and over from now until the end of time. Grats on lowering the bar, and stepping backward in time for the good of gamers. While I’m sure there are people in the world who are upset that they don’t get to enter their initials on the HI SCORE chart at the end of every gaming session, I was kinda glad when games moved away from “keeping score”, and moved towards something more intangible.
I remember specifically thinking how silly it was at the end of each level in the original Wolfenstein 3d when it would tally your total points and time taken. Already, at that point in my young life, I was thinking that the gameplay element itself was more about making it to the end of level alive rather than how many points I got. It felt trite to tack on something like a numerical value to busting out of a prison and shooting my way to freedom.
Even with the old school shoot-em-ups like 1942 or newer iterations like Ikaruga or Radiant Silvergun, I always felt that making it out of the level alive was the big point. Extra lives are awarded based on score achieved, so at least there’s a point to it all (see wat I did ther?), but aside from that, it’s just a number in the upper corner of the screen. Certain games intrinsically lend themselves to keeping score… baseball, dominoes, Yahtzee, Wheel of Fortune. Without a point total attached to these games, there’s no way to know who’s winning. Tacking a points system onto something like chess or sudoku seems ridiculous, though, and yet here comes Microsoft trying to suggest that everything from UNO to Halo should count towards your one universal HI SCORE.
The part I find saddening is that people actually buy into this crap. They want so bad to inflate this arbitrary number that they’ll rent horrible games to suffer through them for achievements. Forcing yourself through a shitty game? Isn’t that what they pay the guys at Gamespot for? They have to do it, it’s their JOB. There’s a book you can buy that is a guide for how to unlock the achievements in 20 of the most popular titles. There are a slew of websites out there that list all the new discovered achievements, and how to unlock them as fast as possible. Apparently there is a user, StripClubdj, that had the highest score in the world, but many are convinced that he “hacked” the system to reach the top. He says “…I started buying everything Xbox made ... I own every 360 title made from every country. I own 4 Xboxes: 2 American, 1 Japanese and 1 PAL, so as you can see, I sunk a lot of money into an addictive hobby.”
Way to go, champ.
Meanwhile, the rest of the gaming industry is scrambling to implement the same idea in all of the platforms. The Playstation 3 is doing some hastily slopped together ‘trophy’ system, and now even WoW will be implementing achievements come Wrath of the Lich King. These range from revealing the whole world map, to winning ten arena matches in a row, to “…getting a haircut or defeating a member of each race in your opposing faction in PvP. Others involve a progress bar and require you to do something several times -- such as give out 10 hugs.”
There’s one in particular I have my eye on, the one where you get 50 points for making it to level 15 without dying once:
Can you say “Grab a 70 rogue, train 20 mobs onto noobs and /vanish?”
Hmmmm... maybe these achievements can be fun, after all.
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quote from blizz site about WOW achievments: "
- but you'll certainly stand out when you proudly display them. "
LOL YEAH , As someone will be proud of being /played 400days achievement or travel all the fucking map for hours, thats stupid, achievements means how much your real life sucks, and how much time you are sit on your ass.
It shows that you have no fucking life
while i won't say the opposite is true; that we as MMO players are the paragons of an outgoing lifestyle, i think that achievements are kind of a sad way of expressly wallowing in it. : /
It seems that every new idea that anybody at anytime happens to come up with turns out to be something ridiculous in your mind.
While I enjoy reading your stories because your writing is hilarious, it grows rather tiresome when I type in "notaddicted.com," only to read another article about how much you hate whatever the newest thing is in gaming, life, or warcraft. (I know that I am not obligated to read your articles.)
Do you like anything about gaming? By your weekly ariticles it doesn't seem so. My question is, why continue in it if it is such a negative bother in your life?
Here is a compiled list of what I have seen that you hate or have made fun of:
-WoW Achievements
-WoW Housing
-Diablo
-Warhammer
-Age of Conan
-The Iphone
You did say that you liked a game that makes "WoW feel hollow," which I am sure is very fun for you. But, from what I gather, you don't even enjoy playing WoW too much.
Do you need a hug Iso? I will gladly give you one.
:) did you play the game i liked? download it, it's worth a peek!
hidden in between the lines of my articles, you can find certain things i do actually enjoy about everything i tend to write about. I rarely just write Hate pieces. okay, i think player housing and siege warfare offer no redeeming qualities. so, yeah, there's that.
but!
the iPhone, for example, i would love to own and play around with, but the fact that it forces you to accrue an additional 70$/month crappy 3g internet contract when i already pay for broadband at my house is stupid.that you can't just buy it, and use it as a phone that also plays MP3s is silly. it has to be an Always On Internet Wondertron. lame.
Age of Conan i ran to with open arms, and praised its 1-20 destiny mode, but then realized after leaving the starting island realized the game is in no state to be made available for subscription. I basically wrote two pieces on AoC, the OMG IT"S AWESOME one, and then a week or two later the followup of OOPS I SPOKE TO SOON.
WoW, i constantly praise as being "the best game money can buy at the end of the day". that they choose to rip off pointless xbox360 achievements to cater to the Halo crowd disappoints me. I'm on the fence on a few things that made others cry, though, so i know everyone can't see eye to eye on the game. that's actually one of its great points. people love arena; i probably would too if i could actually find a decent team to consistently play with. people hate the removal of attunments, no complaints from my camp. artificial time-sink cock-blocks to reach the "fun" part of the game being removed is A-OK in my book. i'm actually really looking forward to the "optional" 25 man raids that can be done with 10 man groups. since moving to japan, i find it hard to scrape 25 people together.
9 times out of 10, i'm complaining about something because it has the opportunity to be great, and then the developers for one reason or another (usually for MONEY, surprise surprise), decide to release unfinished crap, or charge too much, or smother any originality in a title with AND PLUS WE'RE JUST LIKE THOSE GUYS.i know the world needs money, it's not that... it's just the blatant ham handedness of the implementation. things like in-game ads that don't lower the end user's purchase price just seem kinda like a middle finger at the end of the day.
;) /hug
Hey, it worked for Badges in City of Heroes... right?
People still care two years later that I made it to the top of some large building? Right? Maybe? Please?
Personally, I think these achievements are an insideous design that was shameless ripped off from competitors but will be extremely popular nonetheless. I've seen what achievements do to other games: they cause players to want to do things they wouldn't have otherwise done. Hell, they make the player feel obligated to do so. It's like completing all the minigames so you can unlock "the secret special ending". Once you know about "the secret special ending", the normal ending becomes "the crappy half-assed ending". It's only marginally better than stopping the game halfway through.
BTW, I'm pretty sure Steam beat Xbox Live to the achievement concept, although Steam's implementation in this case (and in general, for that matter) is much more elegant, IMHO.
Lesson25 I agree, as far as achievement or watever mechanism makes people play more and spend more hours in their asses, its efective and reasonable that blizz put this shit and make their subscribers over 20million
Yes, I also agree. Personally, I welcome the new addition, along with the housing and seige battlegrounds. I think that they will be a fresh and familiar addition to an already great game.
Sure, we could sit here and gripe about warcraft all day long and find things that we do not like about it, but heck, nobody is holding a gun to our head to play, and we choose to support them by paying for it each month.
I think that being awarded for things such as "world-discovery" is nice and makes the player feel a sense of accomplishment. Being able to display it is even better. It was one of my favorite aspects of LoTRO.
Good old kill 300 crawlers for a extra point in Valour and then finding out the area is void of crawlers (the original Trollshaws)
If it's a permanent bonus to my stats I dont mind killing the same thing for ages, when it's just a title it is not as impressive.
I always thought Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga were about getting freaking awesome super weapons then putting myself into an epileptic episode when I fire them :)
That was always the joy of those games to me ;)
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