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[InsaneTiger]

In the piece he does argue to the contrary about this, using CS: GO as an example of how using achievements in these contexts actually takes away from what would otherwise be a cool and unique moment that the player just discovered themselves:

He doesn't like them, okay, so what? He biased.

 

[Toadthemushroom]

Gotta agree with this. His claim here is based entirely on his own bias. While he may be right that many game designers don't like achievements, he has no proof of that, and is almost assuredly wrong when he claims that the audience doesn't actually enjoy achievements. People are very vocal about how much they enjoy achievement systems. This kind of argument comes off as pretty pretentious and insulting to the audience, basically 'you think you like this thing, but I know better than you and you don't actually like it'. If the audience didn't want achievements, they could make that very clear to developers already.

While I agree that that part comes across like you say it does, I think it has a point in that system-wide achievements systems are addicting systems that utilise Skinner's techniques, and often players who haven't realised they are in a Skinner Box (maybe they are collecting Platinum trophies to up their count or trophy level like I used to years ago) won't think they are a bad thing until they reach a point where they do.

If you think about the many ways in which games can be compelling to players, achievement metagames are probably going to be seen as one of the laziest compared with other mechanics and narrative in games.

See: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c

 

[Symbiotx]

Aaaah yes, I see what's going on here. Achievements are bad now that the Switch doesn't have them. *sigh*

 

[Alienous]

I'm not seeing the design problem. You reward players with trophies/achievements at increments of general progress if you don't want them to influence player behaviour. 'You solved your first puzzle'. 'You completed level 1'. 'You completed level 2'.

 

[Drencrom]

If only you could disable/hide them. Oh well. Maybe one day.

You could just turn of the notifications and ignore them, that's what I do for most games.

 

[Lothars]

The worst part is that games are mandated to have them. Why should Sony and Microsoft have a hand in someone else's game design? That's bullshit imo.

It's not, They are a great part of both Sony and Microsoft Platform. It's far from bullshit, The only thing is multiplayer achievements shouldn't exist anymore or it should have multiple ways to get it.

I've bought and played games because of easy achievements over the years, and in many cases the side effect was opening me up to new experiences and new games (or in some cases entire genres) that I ended up loving, which led to me buying other games I would never have considered before.

Who loses in this situation?

We all do didn't you know? We are in the wrong for liking achivements and only companies that don't have achievements and trophies are the correct ones /s

systemic achievements are bullshit and I can't wait for them to die off.

I hope the systemic achievements never do because they are a great part of any system. I want nintendo to start including them as well on the system level.

 

[Neil_J_UK]

As an player who likes achievements, I do agree with some of the points he's making, however this one feels a bit contradictory:

My Suggested Replacement: Variants!

...

What's the big difference between variants and achievements? A variant would be a new goal that you actively choose before the game begins, and only that single chosen "goal" is active during this session. One of the fundamental aspects of "a game" is that the rules and goals are agreed upon before the game begins. It doesn't make any sense to allow players to choose what their goals are on the fly, in the middle of the game. This will just allow them to choose whichever goal is most doable based on "how things are going". Worse, if you allow all the goals to be active at once, goals are going to be met by accident.

It sounds like he's referring to a multiplayer game here, like CS:GO which he makes an example of, so in that case this seems even worse. Instead of having a number of achievements that can be gained naturally through normal play, he wants people to select one particular 'variant' to solely focus on? Surely that will just promote people to alter their behaviour to meet said criteria even more?

 

[Vital Tundra]

Makes great points and offers another way to the current system.

 

[jelly]

I don't mind them being there but would prefer they add fun and make you play the game differently or achieve a cool moment. Ones that you have to grind or collect a thousand things are complete crap, multiplayer ones are the worst by far, it like watching lemmings sometimes and you figure out, oh they are doing some stupid achievement instead of playing the objective or whatever. I have great respect for devs that go all in with single player achievements in a simple, fun way with no grinding or at least make multiplayer ones inconsequential like win a few games if they want to have them. There is good and bad achievements, simple as that.

 

[Lord of Ostia]

Seems a bit obtuse here. He spends the article pointing out examples of poorly done achievements and says if the developers implement really well done content you dont need achievements, but it apparently doesnt occur to him that developers could just do a better job of implementing those achievements and putting more thought into them.

Yep, this is very true. He also doesn't seem to want to address the limited resource problem, in that the solutions he is proposing on the whole require more time and effort to produce than the current achievement system, even when the achievements are well done, and that the biggest reason some developers don't want achievements is because they take time and effort to implement and test. His solutions don't address that.

 

[Keinning]

As an player who likes achievements, I do agree with some of the points he's making, however this one feels a bit contradictory:



It sounds like he's referring to a multiplayer game here, like CS:GO which he makes an example of, so in that case this seems even worse. Instead of having a number of achievements that can be gained naturally through normal play, he wants people to select one particular 'variant' to solely focus on? Surely that will just promote people to alter their behaviour to meet said criteria even more?

Good point
Forcing people to choose one not-achievement at time will only force behavior changes even more. And imagine the nightmare of playing a session and having several dudes chasing the "kill 999 people with the backhand slap only" in the same team as you

 

[benicillin]

I like using achievements to mark when I did something or when I played a game. Sometimes they get me to play the game in new ways or give me a reason to do another play through that I might not have otherwise.

Other times they're really frustrating or encourage me to play through super slowly and look for all the collectibles because I'm only going to play the game once so I might as well get everything on the first run-through.

Honestly the most rewarding achievement system I've experienced this year weren't even GS or trophies, it was the record books in Destiny because they give you longterm goals and reward you with cosmetics so you can show off your achievements to other people in-game.

Anyway achievements are great, I love getting them.

 

[Bedlam]

What this thread shows is that most people, even on this forum, don't understand game design.

Great article, fully agree.

 

[LordRaptor]

Aaaah yes, I see what's going on here. Achievements are bad now that the Switch doesn't have them. *sigh*

Yeah, you got it.

Meanwhile here's a topic about a GDC talk from 2010

 

[Spirited]

Aaaah yes, I see what's going on here. Achievements are bad now that the Switch doesn't have them. *sigh*

You serious? No, that's not what's going on.

 

[Toadthemushroom]

He doesn't like them, okay, so what? He biased.

It's a valid point people are going to have. It's another perspective that bears mentioning.

 

[InsaneTiger]

Achievements hurt nobody and if devs think Sony or MS are messing with their design, they can easily do the bare minimum and just have them pop for stupid easy chievos and move on.

 

[JohnnyFootball]

I like achievements and for better or worse they're s permanent fixture in console gaming.

However I do feel that multiplayer achievements are bad and need to go. So much boosting goes on.

Also achievements that are so poorly thought out that they ask the player to do ridiculous/pointless things that they would likely never get playing naturally.

The most recent examples I can think of are: 50 crossbow headshots in Witcher 3 and destroying 5000 objects in AC: Syndicate. Ubisoft is notorious for including blatant time wasters in their games.

 

[JCX]

Aaaah yes, I see what's going on here. Achievements are bad now that the Switch doesn't have them. *sigh*

People have been calling achievements shit for almost decade now but ok.

 

[Lord of Ostia]

What this thread shows is that most people, even on this forum, don't understand game design.

Great article, fully agree.

Right, people don't understand game design at all because they disagree with one designer's opinion. You figured it out and are one of the only illustrious people here to understand game design. Good job.

 

[LordRaptor]

Achievements hurt nobody

Except they do; GAF inherently skews heavily into the Diamond quadrant of Bartles Player Taxonomy, but other player types exist

 

[Keinning]

Now, one thing i can agree is that achievements shouldnt be an enforced thing with a strict rulebook to follow like "you must have x achievements and they all must amount to y gamescore". Let devs implement them as they want (and if they want) and give as many points as they feel necessary (with a max limit to stop 9999999GS achievements for walking forward if you want). I think this was a limitation during the earlier days where they wanted to stop cheap games from being sold only on the premise of ludicrous gamescore, but that never stopped people from buying crap like legend of aang to get easy gamescore anyway so might as well drop it, people will still buy crap cheap games to get score whether you want it or not - might as well be reworked.

 

[Xion_Stellar]

It's important not to fall into the trap of thinking that just because we've had achievements for over half a decade that we will always have them.

This guy is completely full of sh--

Now, I'll definitely acknowledge that there is indeed a chance that we will always have them, at least in some form, but it's worth noting that Nintendo has made a point of not using such a system, and that hasn't seemed to affect their commercial or critical success. As I've pointed out, there are a number of flaws with the achievements model, and as time goes on, what I am certain of is that they will either change drastically or disappear.

Yep that's right backpedal on this nonsense you were just saying.

I'm not going into the argument of asking if Achievements/Trophies are good or bad but I will say you must be completely delusional if you think they are ever going to go away. Just because Nintendo once again refused to implement what's at this point an industry standard feature that isn't an indication that the Trophy/Achievement system is going away.

 

[NervousXtian]

Trophies and achievements are terrible.. and he lists a lot of the reasons why.

It was novel at first but within a few months I stopped caring because they didn't add anything typically and a lot of times had the reverse effect of making you do things outside of just playing to achieve them... for a pop-up.

I turn them off. But even if you do, like he said you can end up tailoring your game somewhat to accommodate them even if they really add nothing.

 

[Lord of Ostia]

While I agree that that part comes across like you say it does, I think it has a point in that system-wide achievements systems are addicting systems that utilise Skinner's techniques, and often players who haven't realised they are in a Skinner Box (maybe they are collecting Platinum trophies to up their count or trophy level like I used to years ago) won't think they are a bad thing until they reach a point where they do.

If you think about the many ways in which games can be compelling to players, achievement metagames are probably going to be seen as one of the laziest compared with other mechanics and narrative in games.

See: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c

I don't disagree with the notion that achievements are a 'lazier' way to get engagement from a player compared to well-designed gameplay, satisfying mechanics, a powerful narrative, etc. That said, we do not have an epidemic where games are only popular because of the achievement metagame. Games rise and fall, and are judged by the audience, almost entirely on aspects unrelated to achievement metagames. They are an extra component that many enjoy and many others completely ignore...just like his proposed solutions would be.

 

[autoduelist]

Driver: San Fransisco did a lot of good things towards 'trophy' related exercises.

For example, instead of your standard 'collection' trophy [find the pigeons/feathers/whatever], you had to find ramps to jump! That's already cool, it's something fun to do. Then, they offered a late game perk that helped you find all the ramps! Even better! You can now find them on your radar, easily. And then... every 10 you found unlocked a special new race based on a cool movie [Blues Brothers, Bullit, etc].

That's how I want to be rewarded. In game. Sure, give me a trophy when I'm done, but the journey itself should be well designed in game.

Meanwhile, many games make us do incredibly -unfun- things to get a trophy. 500 kills. Play through every difficultly level separately. Etc.

 

[alt27]

Wait, who makes the achievements? Reading some replies in this thread seems to imply sony and microsoft have a hand in it? Are they not decided by the dev?

 

[Strings]

What this thread shows is that most people, even on this forum, don't understand game design.

Eugh, don't be like this. Dismissing the opinion of the wider audience helps no one and goes nowhere.

 

[Kinyou]

I could really do without the achievements you get by just playing the game. Maybe some have some worth in marking a milestone but you don't need to pat the player on the back for clearing chapter 1.

 

[*Splinter]

I mean I've played alternate game modes and multiplayer because of achievements so it could be argued that achievements can help get people to try out things.

This is exactly what the best kind of achievements do, encourage you to explore different characters/equipment/playstyles that you wouldn't otherwise have used.


I strongly disagree with... pretty much everything in the article. It's all old arguments so I don't want go into detail but:

Unavoidable trophies: these are pointless, but harmless. He tries to make them sound worse than they are and I don't think his argument was at all convincing. Games can be more than Skinner boxes... but they don't have to be.

Trophies that change how you play: as noted above these can actually greatly benefit a game. People can easily be set in their ways and no amount of clever game design can move some people out of their comfort zones. Trophies on the surface seem a lazy way of achieving this but in reality they are just one of many tools at a game designers disposal. Bizarrely he even admits these are good later on with his variants idea.

That variant idea... it already happens in some games I think, but to suggest it as a replacement to achievements is just bizarre. Make your trophies this way if you like (e.g knife only in Resi already exists), no need to place massive restrictions on what a trophy has the potential to be. What about games that don't well suit multiple playthroughs? A 100 hour open world RPG like Witcher 3 or even a shorter puzzle game like The Witness. I'm not replaying these no matter how much I enjoy them or how interesting your variants are. Truly awful idea.

The team fortress example... Without specifics I can't tell if the achievement forces medics to play in a way that isn't beneficial to their team (in which case it's a bad achievement) or if there are multiple playstyles/strategies available to medics and the player in question just sucked. Either way, it fits the rest of this article in that it describes a worst case scenario/bad achievement and used it to disparage ALL achievements. Bad trophies exist =/= all trophies are bad.

Oops I went into detail. Oh well. At this point I might as well list an example of a good trophy I saw recently.

Amplitude (2016), achievement for completing the campaign (including all bonus tracks) without failing or restarting. Now the first time you do this on expert you unlock the final difficulty level, but there is absolutely no in-game reason to attempt this without retrying/failing. It took me several days to unlock this and felt extremely rewarding to finally accomplish. But it wasn't the *pling* of the trophy that gave me the feeling of accomplishment, it was the practicing of difficult songs/sections for a few hours each day until I was finally able to pass my goal. This trophy took my appreciation of the game from "gg 7/10 bit short" to "10/10 best rhythm action game I've played". I ended up enjoying it so much that I continued playing after unlocking the platinum trophy, and even posted a LTTP for the game here on GAF.


Rambled a bit, sorry. This guy is Wrong.

 

[BigBoss007]

There is one thing I don't know: is the game designer the one who implement trophies or achievements to the game, or someone else? The director maybe?

 

[LordRaptor]

I will say you must be completely delusional if you think they are ever going to go away. Just because Nintendo once again refused to implement what's at this point an industry standard feature that isn't an indication that the Trophy/Achievement system is going away.

Acknowledgement of in game tasks long predates "Achievement systems"; character unlocks, weapon unlocks, new game plus unlocks, new difficulty mode unlocks, additional endings... all of these things are "achievement" related, and long predate any systemic method such as that intriduced by MS with the 360 and copied by Sony in the PS3, and if (when) such a systemic approach ends, will continue to be added by developers, as will tangential things like stat tracking.

But "Achievement systems" - as in mandatory systemic and public tracking systems that all players must participate in whether they want to or not so that a minority can measure themselves against that data?

Its for the birds. Its not going to survive.

Google Play doesn't have mandatory achievement systems.
Apple Game Center doesn't have mandatory achievement systems.
Steam doesn't have mandatory achievement systems.
Battle.Net doesn't have mandatory achievement systems.
Even Origin doesn;t have mandatory achievement systems.

 

[Fuchsdh]

I was hoping the article would have some hard data to back it up beyond the sentiments in the excerpts, but no.

This is all just "I don't like achievements because I don't like them."

Also, his point about Nintendo and iOS games not having achievements misses the point. They don't have achievements because Game Center is not maintained properly and Nintendo doesn't understand goddamn voice chat, let alone achievements or parties or anything online Microsoft and Sony figured out a decade ago. There's not much of a point to a specific achievement system if it's not tied into some kind of infrastructure.

Acknowledgement of in game tasks long predates "Achievement systems"; character unlocks, weapon unlocks, new game plus unlocks, new difficulty mode unlocks, additional endings... all of these things are "achievement" related, and long predate any systemic method such as that intriduced by MS with the 360 and copied by Sony in the PS3, and if (when) such a systemic approach ends, will continue to be added by developers, as will tangential things like stat tracking.

But "Achievement systems" - as in mandatory systemic and public tracking systems that all players must participate in whether they want to or not so that a minority can measure themselves against that data?

Its for the birds. Its not going to survive.

Google Play doesn't have mandatory achievement systems.
Apple Game Center doesn't have mandatory achievement systems.
Steam doesn't have mandatory achievement systems.
Battle.Net doesn't have mandatory achievement systems.
Even Origin doesn;t have mandatory achievement systems.

But many to most of those platforms still have achievements. So....

 

[8byte]

I've always wanted a developer to use the achievement system as a meta game.

Like, getting clues or fragments of a a puzzle that lead you to something else inside the game. It's not totally revolutionary, but I think tying them into the game lore and adding some in-universe value to them would be pretty cool.

 

[LordRaptor]

But many to most of those platforms still have achievements. So....

They have achievements if someone wants to add them.
They have a prebuilt template for achievements if someone doesn't want to make their own.

They have no compunction to require any game to have any achievements at all, let alone in any specific format.

 

[dl77]

at their best, they do nothing at all. At their worst, they influence player behavior.

Funny, I think it should be the other way round. At best they can (positively) influence player behaviour and at worst they don't do anything. A well thought out set of achievements can encourage players to try out different things in a game and actually improve their abilities and enjoyment. Rubbish ones can just be ignored.

 

[Spirited]

Wait, who makes the achievements? Reading some replies in this thread seems to imply sony and microsoft have a hand in it? Are they not decided by the dev?

Developers make them but Sony/Microsoft has a decided amount of achievements that are a "minimum" that every game needs to have, don't know the exact amount.

So for example the devs of Don't Starve didn't want to add achievements but were "forced" to do it, same with the witness having too few achievemnts and were forced to add more.

 

[Phawx]

Wait, who makes the achievements? Reading some replies in this thread seems to imply sony and microsoft have a hand in it? Are they not decided by the dev?

MS and Sony demand that achievements must be included, and for some types of games a certain amount.

And some people do have a point that even if you disable the notifications, you are still getting achievements. So I think having the option of removing yourself from the *system* is worthwhile as well.

Re: Gamedevs *ruining* their games because of achievements, that is on the gamedev. The good thing about achievements for a gamedev is that it's *data* that could help them make more meaningful achievements or game design.

Has there ever been a game that sold worse because of it's achievements?

 

[Keinning]

And some people do have a point that even if you disable the notifications, you are still getting achievements.

But you're not seeing them. At most you see the GS number on your profile. You have to go to the achievements tab to see the rest. Does this really bother people that much?

 

[Bunga]

I can't make up my mind about achievements/trophies really. On one hand, they promote trying new things such as game modes you may not have ever touched. As an example, I vividly remember playing a game on PC with a few friends called Alien Swarm. It was a simple 3D top down co-op shooter (by Valve I believe, or at least published by Valve) but there were achievements for speed running each level and the sheer level of enjoyment we got from trying and eventually getting these achievements was astounding. It elevated what first appeared to be a simple game into a hugely strategic, immensely fun experience. We would never have experienced this if the achievements didn't exist. But this is an example of what I would consider to be a good, meaningful achievement as opposed to the kind the author of the article lists such as "25 kills with a shotgun".

On the other hand, this may be a personal thing, I quite often don't click with a game early on and will want to put it down, but the idea of a 1-10% trophy level on my PSN Profile drives me nuts. I'm happy if I see like 40%+ to put it into perspective, I'm by no means a completionist. Having these sit on my profile gnaw at my soul lol. I really, really wish you could delete them off, but you can only hide them from other players and not yourself.

Even worse is when I've really enjoyed a game and then discover I've only picked up a few trophies. The Last of Us springs to mind immediately as being extremely stingy with trophies by comparison to most games. I loved the game, felt like I'd really invested in the characters, the story, the gameplay and then I reach the end and it's like "oh, maybe I wasn't as invested as I thought?" It's a weird thought process. It made me feel like I'd failed to play the game properly to some extent and therefore retrospectively affected my perceived enjoyment of the game when, at the time the credits rolled, I was blown away.

I've had trophy notifications turned off for a long time on my PS4 and I don't intend on putting them back on any time soon. I truly wish the whole system could be disabled if you wanted to.

 

[chrominance]

I kind of agree with the article in some places, but I disagree that achievements and trophies are necessarily the Bedazzler rhinestones of game design, sprinkled inartfully atop a pre-existing game design. I do feel there are a lot of achievements that fall into the author's concept of variants (which oddly the author dismisses as the worst type of achievement, and then uses as the basis for his suggestion of an alternative system), and the issues the author brings up with having those gameplay goals remaining achievements is essentially "well, the player didn't set out to do them at the start of the session, so they are necessarily bad."

What? Why? Why are achievements you get accidentally for "emergent" actions a bad thing? Because a developer thought this was a thing that could happen in the game and made an achievement for it, they've ruined the discoverability of that action? That makes sense if you're the type to reach all the achievement descriptions beforehand and set out to earn them all. But news flash: you didn't invent the concept of blowing up three dudes with a grenade, person who is playing a game and got that achievement. Even if that achievement didn't exist, chances are someone on the development team thought that would be a cool thing to do, and perhaps even planned for it and encouraged that action in the game design.

And the idea that achievements are just arbitrary goals plopped on top of a finished game feels wrong to me too. To be fair, I think some game designers really don't care about achievements and do see them as a necessary evil rather than another game system to incorporate; my favourite game of last year, The Witness, is a good example. But not everyone thinks this way, and to lay the blame for poorly thought out or straight up boilerplate achievements at the feet of the system itself seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater to me.

I also think making variants that lock you into a specific goal is too confining. Sometimes achievements can overlap, or encourage different playstyles in the same session without being mutually exclusive. Under the author's proposed system, I'd have to quit one game session and start another with a different set of rules. And for what gain in the end? The knowledge that the player didn't do anything outside of the game rules you laid out for them at the start? Not every game is a straitjacket, and sometimes fast and loose play is encouraged. Locked-down variants would seem to discourage that type of play. It's especially interesting to me that the author says that allowing players to pursue multiple goals at once is bad because it just means they'll pursue the easiest one based on current game conditions. One, why is that a bad thing, and two, does that in fact always happen? Lots of people on GAF, for example, talk about adding extra challenge for themselves by imposing constraints that aren't even supported in the game itself, and require a great deal of discipline on the player's behalf (ex. one-life runs in games that don't care about lives).

Finally, I'd say that even the "mandatory" or easy-to-get achievements have some worth. Achievements, after all, are a social system as well; you can show them off to people, your friends can compare themselves to you, etc. On GAF, people have used achievement statistics to determine things like how often do people finish games, or how often do people drop a game at a certain chapter. With friends, it can be fun to compare how far each of you are into a game, or whether one of you did a thing while the other person didn't. That's all stuff that sits outside the game design, true, but I think that stuff has real merit for a lot of people.

I think ultimately this article comes from a perspective that says game developers should impose more authorial control (and more intentional authorial control) over the experiences they give to players. Given that the author is a game developer, that's a perfectly understandable and valid stance to take, and I don't think they're entirely wrong. But I think it might also be a limiting perspective.

 

[Lord of Ostia]

They have achievements if someone wants to add them.
They have a prebuilt template for achievements if someone doesn't want to make their own.

They have no compunction to require any game to have any achievements at all, let alone in any specific format.

If his argument was simply "don't require devs to implement existing achievement systems" then I would easily agree with his argument. Developers should not be forced to implement them. I don't agree that his proposed solutions are better beyond that, though.

 

[dl77]

Re: Gamedevs *ruining* their games because of achievements, that is on the gamedev. The good thing about achievements for a gamedev is that it's *data* that could help them make more meaningful achievements or game design.

That's a good point. There must surely be a ton of useful information that can be pulled from the metrics whether it's things like weapon preference or even how many people have actually completed the game.

 

[potatohead]

I am on the "doesn't do anything" part of the continuum. I don't care at all.

I prefer no achievements and just seeing the game, but I don't really care either that the ding shows up.

Doesn't really matter to me, but I also agree overall they don't contribute to games besides adding "quest" material. That can be fun to have extra miscellaneous goals, but I wouldn't consider it part of the core experience of any game.

And yes it's also true outside of achievements games needs to have their own sense of progression and without or with minimal tedium on their own merit as well.

 

[Nephtes]

I like Achievements in games.
I like knowing more or less where I'm at in a game's story compared to my friends who are playing concurrently. They let me know what events in game we can discuss without spoilers.

Also, I like it as a tapestry to see what games I played and which ones I finished.

That said, I wish I could delete achievements to games I never finished and never will...

Additionally, I made a topic about this a while back, "Achievements: the RP out of RPG".
I have similar complaints about games with achievements that alter the way the player would play by suggesting to the player that there is a correct way like Deus Ex's pacifist and foxiest of Hounds Achievements..

 

[Shadio]

Achievements influencing a player's behaviour is not necessarily a bad thing in a single-player game. It's entirely optional and doesn't affect anybody but the person who has chosen to aim for them. In fact there are many new enjoyable ways of playing games that I've only discovered thanks to achievement systems. Although as a trophy hunter, I've also experienced the opposite quite often. But in the end it's still down to me whether I go through with it or not for the sake of completion.

But the same can't be said for multiplayer games. He mentioned that he spent a crazy amount of time tweaking things to get player behaviour right where he wanted it, but then blamed achievement systems for making players act differently. Well I'd say that any achievements you decide to add to the game are simply another thing that should be factored into that balancing.

It's not the achievement system's fault when a developer introduces a reward that can be earned for playing the game badly in a mode where other people depend on someone playing well. Some people may place greater value on that achievement than winning the match, the same they would if it were a useful ingame unlockable instead. Creating achievements that don't force the player to choose between them is the solution for that.

 

[zelas]

What's so bad about achievements? The mother-problem with any "achievement" system can be stated like this: at their best, they do nothing at all. At their worst, they influence player behavior.

What's wrong with influencing player behavior, you might ask? Influencing behavior is a bad thing because you (ostensibly) just spent roughly six to 12 months fine-tuning a set of game rules to do exactly that. Let's remember that a game is a set of rules that limit and motivate player behavior. You just spent a crazy amount of time tweaking, balancing, and turning knobs until player behavior was influenced exactly the way you wanted, all around one central goal and gameplay mechanism.

Are we supposed to believe that all players are the same and that a game's core design caters to all play styles? Why can't achievements be considered one of many tools used influence player behavior just like the many others? Do we live in a world where devs have infinite time to fine tune a game in a way its possible to influence players, in a way they all view as fun?

 

[InsaneTiger]

Lord Raptor, how do chievos hurt people? How do they hurt people?

 

[Toadthemushroom]

That's a good point. There must surely be a ton of useful information that can be pulled from the metrics whether it's things like weapon preference or even how many people have actually completed the game.

Games already have telemetry data built into them which is entirely different to achievements.

Snake Pass, for example, uploads telemetry data at each checkpoint. It's a standard for most AAA games now too, and absolutely one for service games.

 

[*Splinter]

I'll agree that forcing developers to include trophies is stupid, I missed that point. You can understand why MS/Sony did that though, at least to begin with. These days I think it would be foolish to release a game without trophies on those platforms even if it were an option.