How To Make Better Achievements
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- Опубліковано 27 вер 2024
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In this video, I look at achievement types. Taking examples from many different games, I determine which types should be used more often and which types should be stricken from the earth.
#achievements #gamedesign #tierlist #analysis
I like how on PlayStation when dlc adds achievements they're typically in their own section and not part of the main achievements
Nice vid. Here's my two cents:
- Missable achievements are fine if the game encourages you to do separate playthroughs for a specific reason. For example, Infamous/Infamous 2 with the good vs evil path, there's essentially a separate achievement list for each, so this would be considered "missable". However, the game essentially puts you on Track A or Track B, where each track's achievements aren't missable within that track. You're supposed to do two playthroughs in the Infamous games, one on each track. Pentiment also has this and it's great.
The worst are missable achievements that are missable for no reason (i.e. you didn't find the one random item in one specific level, and have to replay the entire game to get it). They just add stress to the initial playthrough.
- DLC achievements would be better if Steam was able to differentiate. Feeling like I'm forced to boot up Terraria, a game I've played to death, because they added new achievements is a bit annoying.
- I like that you differentiated Completionist and Grind. Completionist achievements are great because they encourage the player to do everything the game has to offer. Grind achievements most of the time are annoying and pointless (i.e. Doom Eternal multiplayer)
- I generally find that if I enjoy the game itself, I'll enjoy the achievement list, although there have definitely been instances where I do like a game and hate the achievement list. Hollow Knight is an example of this.
- Skill achievements are too rare these days. Crash 4 is a great list because it's so skill based, and I'd argue that skill achievements are the only achievements that actually provide "bragging rights".
- Multiplayer achievements are fine if the game's primarily based around multiplayer. Some of the best achievement lists I've worked on have been in multiplayer games, such as Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Overwatch. Games that have annoying multiplayer or are primarily single player, with multiplayer achievements, are the worst. Doom Eternal *cough cough*.
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Loved your writeup and I agree about the missables split into 2 playthroughs being ok. The witcher 2 just annoyed me cause it did have a lot of that annoying missable type you mention (off the top of my head, theres one where you have to craft a specific trap and cut off the act one boss’s tentacle with it. Idk how people are meant to get that without a guide!)
Thanks for watching!
@@tin_sensei If you want good example of missable achievements are in FNV(and many other Obsidian games) where you don't have to experience every single choice, just experience some of the best content and 4 main factions. Also there are save files so you can always save your game before choosing which faction to work for 😅
So I think missable achievements are super niche in that they can mostly only work only for Roleplaying games where picking different choices is the point and developers put a lot of time into developing said choices, another example I heard is Mass Effect although I haven't played those games yet but if they are good, it makes sense to add achievements for both paragon and renegade Shepard
My favorite achievement is The Secret of the World from One Way Heroics. A game where you're certain you've got it figured out and then you come across one particular item and think "wouldn't it be funny if I...?" then you do and you realize just how limited your perspective has been this whole time. I still feel great looking back at that one.
If Nintendo is planning to introduce achievements on the Switch 2, this video should be their bible.
Exactly, NO limited time achievements(not even multiplayer, because they can make them eat able via lobby with bots), No grind achievements, use missable achievements very sparingly(only for RPG games and only for huge choices like picking 1 out of the 4 factions, like how FNV did it), don't do DLC achievements or make them have their own achievement list and it's own trophy
Grind Achievements are completely pointless. If a developer wants to have one they should just tone it down significantly example: L4D2 kill 52k common zombies -> kill 1000 common zombies. It's really sad how you can be gatekept from 100% by achievements like paid DLC example gunfire reborn achievements are very tame and fun to do but there are multiple DLC's locking you away from 100%. Hell there is one for completing the base game. I liked the video.
One way to fix grind achievements is to have a tame first tier, but as you get bigger numbers it changes by either increasing the number beyond what the achievement lists or have the achievement graphics change as you get more and more. It technically gates 100% but it makes the mega grinds less important and makes them more likely to work as they intended as alternates to play time.
Most complain about the crab achievement in gunfire and will do dozens of fire runs only to never get crab event.
Seems more common on normal difficulty, and you can alt+f4 to reset from the beginning of stage 3.
The one way I see them making any sense at all is if they tend to all start topping out at the end of a "typical" playthrough, making them a little more like progress achievements. The problem is that, once you get to that level of granularity, there is no "typical" playthrough, as small differences in gameplay style magnify greatly over the scope of the whole game.
In my experience, I find that I either unlock them way too early or that I'm only 80% of the way there at the end of the game. Both are demotivating.
I could write a whole book on this subject, but I just want to say that the intro song is a bop, your little achievement icons are great, and your use of background music is perfect (particularly the Fable music at the beginning, Fable Anniversary being the de facto standard when talking about achievements in games).
1. Chapter-based achievements are great, especially for tracking which of your friends beat which bosses in various Souls games.
2. Hidden Lore are top-tier for me, as long as there is some sort of clue to how to get it within the game or the achievement.
3. Mechanics are good, especially if they encourage using items or abilities that you might not otherwise use or even try.
4. "Fire Arrow" in Outer Wilds. "Tubular" really wasn't that bad though. Maybe among the worst in Outer Wilds, but really not that bad overall. Anything to give me a reason to play more of that game is a good thing. Imagine them releasing a couple dozen achievements like that all over the game... a DLC that's JUST achievements, yet somehow actually good, just to spit in the Eye of the Universe and this nice UA-camr... ahh, but I digress.
5. I completely agree with what you say here, and Pantheon 5 breaks all these rules completely. I love Hollow Knight to death, but that challenge can go nail itself.
6. This entirely depends on the numbers and the things. If it's 20-50 kills with 5-10 different guns, fine. If it's 1000 kills with one gun that sucks, no thanks. Also, they need to gather a lot more data on how much of what stuff happens, because I'll have some of these achievements that pop right away, and others that take hours... after I've done everything else... in the same game. Balance, or at least slightly less unbalanced.
7. A staple of achievements. The "Fable Anniversary" of achievements, if you will. If your game has collectibles, then getting all of each of them gets an achievement. That's just the rules.
8. As someone who's 100%ed The Witcher 3, it is nerve-wracking, to say the least, even with multiple save files. Another good example of this is, again, Fable Anniversary, that has a number of achievements where you can do one or the other (become completely good or evil, for example), and you get the same achievement (say in Steam), but in the game, you can also perform the opposite task to get both icons. Hollow Knight does this well too with the Zote, Nailsmith, and Troupe achievements.
9. The "separate achievements for separate DLC" idea is great, like how Prey: Typhon Hunter is separate from Prey (but Mooncrash isn't... Mooncrash is great though, play it).
10. These and multiplayer achievements, I usually don't even bother, and try not to get games with them in the first place.
Told you I could write a whole book on this.
Glad im not the only one who feels like that about dlc achievements, ive watched my "perfect games" number go down and then i have to search for what game got some new update. i think having multiple new ribbons is a fantastic idea. hope valve takes care of us achievement hunters one day
I would add one category to the achievement types:
- Alternate game modes: achievements that require playing a secondary game mode to receive them.
A good example are the multiplayer achievements in Doom 2016. I have no desire to grind the probably dead multiplayer just to increase my achievement percentage.
Those are technically limited time type of achievement since it's online multiplayer which is ded.
Thought if the game has alternative gamemode that is singleplayer and not online, I think maybe it can get it's own category.
Especially the local co op one's, because technically they're achievable, they just require friends who own the game or are inside yo house lol
As Bruce Lee said, "I fear not the game that asks me to do 10,000 things once, but I fear the game that asks me to do the same thing 10,000 times."
Don't make Bruce Lee afraid of your game.
Yeah, online only achievements suck. It becomes pretty much inevitable that they will eventually become unobtainable.
limited time achievements are the worst. i remember when i was a kid i was so into littlebigplanet that i tried to 100% the trophy list. the only trophy i couldn’t get was linked to the amount of likes your levels got and i wasn’t a creative enough kid to create a viral enough level and didn’t want to resort to spamming other people’s comments to like my stuff. since then, servers have permanently gone down for the game so i can’t ever 100% that game anymore even if i wanted to. a huge bummer!
What's worse is that since it's a console and not a Steam game, ya can't even use sneaky program to give yourself limited time achievements so rip 😢
every time cookie clicker updates, my gut response is "damn, my 100% status :c"
Great video!
Bonus category that I don’t know how else to categorize, and I don’t think really fits into any other (even if on paper it seems to fit into ‘grind’)
I’ll call this the ‘F#*% you’ category, and I have two distinct examples from TF2.
First, the grind to kill 1,000,000 robots. WeezyTF2 has done an entire video about how awful this grind actually is. The analysis and stats he gives at the end are wild. Should you check it out, please be aware that those stats are assuming extremely optimized conditions, to the point of incredible boredom.
Second, the four achievements for reaching a certain number of UA-cam views on one video produced with the in-game replay editor. Not only is that an absurd requirement, it’s also become literally impossible to unlock (without cheating) because “UA-cam has deprecated the application programming interface (API) that the game uses.” -credit to the Team Fortress wiki
I wish there was a way I could see reliable stats on how many people have legitimately achieved these, but the number of people who used cheating tools to unlock them appears to make that next to impossible.
First one is a grind achievement, it's literally in the name. And if you think some grind achievements deserve their own category due to being "practically impossible due to number of hours required" oh you sweet summer child, 1 mil TF2 bots isn't even REMOTELY grindy in comparison to some of the other grind achievements like "Pure Poker" game that asks you to grind even MORE. Also TF2 bot grind achievement is gainable without grind or using S.A.M. program, the way to do it is by simply creating your own MvM mission and playing it. You can make a mission that adds endless scout bots and you can just kill em. I don't count this as cheating because 1) It's Valve's fault for allowing us to get their achievements on custom servers, we are just using the legal tools given to us 😂(this way you can get other grindy achievements like parachute one)
Second, this one I actually do think deserves it's own category, but not the grind or fck you category, I'd call them either "Social media" or "Help from outside" achievements basically you have to do something outside the game to get it, aka get 100k views on YT video instead of playing the game, or Stanley Parable achievement for literally not playing 😂. Also TF2 replay achievements are also gainable semi legitimately, you don't need S.A.M. program, all you need is a YT video with X number of views(however you want, maybe you don't want the 100 thousand views achievement cuz it looks Sus, and you just want dope replay hat) and you have to put it somewhere in TF2 folders, then enter the game and I think you get it(I don't remember the guide well and if this method still works)
I say it's semi legitimate method since I doubt you can get 100k views on YT legitimately(unless this is your alt account and you're famous TF2uber) also this achievement doesn't differentiate between TF2 video getting 100k views and say any other famous YT video. But I mean, if you ARE famous TF2uber I think you should get ZERO hate for using this method, this is just fans fixing the issue Valve refuses to.
Finally I have found a video ranking all achievement types!
I think yours is the only one doing so 😅.
As for your video, I actually mostly agree, I wanted to type my suggestions for achievement type to be added but I realised most of them are just sub categories of types yoy already mentioned. For example there are two sub categories of skill achievements I hate immensely, those being the "no hit/perfectionist to the T" achievements and "do million of handicaps for an ENTIRE PLAYTHROUGH" achievements.
The first subtype is basically either no hit runs, or slightly less annoying variants like no healing. I just hate them because usually they don't even necessarily make game harder but they make the game such a slog to play, you basically have to camp the entire game, the game feels like a walking simulator with slow speed. Again I don't mind handicap type achievements but not when you have to never experience a negative(like never getting hit). Another infuriating type of skill achievement is the one that requires you to do all or near ALL handicaps in a single playthrough. Say no healing no getting hit no hitting allies no missing an ammo shot etc. These "compound" achievements can just be waay too unfun and restricting when they don't have to. A clever way to do this is to divide those super hard skill achievements into several one's, aka make "no healing" it's own achievement, no allies hit it's own achievement. Why do that? To give player a choice in modifying their experience, if you still want super hard perfectionist playthrough, you can still do it, but now us slightly more casual players can instead do several playthroughs with different handicaps or mix and match what we take. A good example of this is Deus Ex Revision a mod for Deus Ex 1 on steam, it has several handicap challenges for entire playthrough but they're all divided into seperate achievements, so you get to decide if yoy want to do all of them at once or one for seperate playthrough.
Anyway here's my ranking:
Type 1 Progress. I agree that's it's a mid tier, it's just nice to see progress and see how far gamers have come in this achievement.
Type 2 Hidden Lore. Ehhh not sure with your rating since arguably they can be almost as annoying as missables, where you basically forced to look at achievement guide and play specific way. I assume collectibles fall into this category? For example Amnesia Dark Descent has achievement to collect all notes and those do give you lore knowledge but idk man, it kinda took me away from experience sure I'm glad they weren't misseble so I only had to do one playthrough, but that one playthrough did became slightly less scary and overinflated in time spend due to me constantly checking on guide. I'll rank them as mid tier, but I acknowledge some of them can be good.
Type 3 Mechanics. Absolutely agree, they're an S tier achievements, IF they're done interestingly because sometimes they feel like more of a checklist 😅.
Type 4 Emergent Gameplay. Also agree with you here, I think I've yet to find truly infuriating achievement of this type. Even gnome I grew to love in my EP2 playthrough.
Type 5 Skill. Yeah I'll put them at A tier, because look, while there are some truly bs achievements that require perfectionism, I still think those are the least bad of all bad achievements, at the very least having low % clearance because achievement is hard is better than because it's grindy or missable etc plus I do see a lot of good skill achievements, e.x. being Deus Ex Revision achievements, speaking of grind...
Type 6 Grind. Honestly I can almost see the argument for the lowest tier, but I'll agree with you to put them at D tier, but only very slightly, because I genuinely think they deserve high spot in terms of bad achievements, even the one's that aren't too grindy are just boring. I've yet to meet one grind achievement that was actually fun and ngl, if you can't organically get it from doing 100% completion playthrough then they shouldn't exist at all.
Type 7 Completionist. I mean, I guess A rank works, kinda hard to say that its own type of achievement when it's 99% of the time literally all achievements in one. I'd probably put them at C tier. Completionist achievements are only enjoyable or infuriating depending on achievements required to get them, so they can't get a tier ranking higher or lower than mid.
Type 8 Missable. Hot take, but I don't think they deserve lowest tier list. What I do agree with you is that far too many of them are done poorly, a good example of missable are Fallout New Vegas one's for joining one of the 4 main factions(they also sort of count as progress achievements as well). I think why FNV missable achievements work is because it's an RPG, a very good RPG where tons of choices have consequences, plus the game doesn't force you to, say, play Legion route by killing all other factions etc, what I'm saying is that FNV has enough content to justify 4 playthroughs and even those 4 playthroughs have enough freedom to do them in whatever way you want. So I'd rank missable achievements as Mid tier. Sometimes they can be done poorly if you have to save/kill Boris nobody npc, but I think missables work if you have to, say, join one of the four big factions(also I think you wouldn't hate thek in FNV because you CAN make a save right before making your choice so Ig they fit your criteria for good 😅)
Type 9 DLC. I agree that you shouldn't be robbed of your blue ribbon after DLC achievements come and I like the idea that buying DLC adds DLC achievements and if you don't have it, you don't have DLC achievements, wish Valve would do it, because I have Little Nightmares 1 game I got for free but DLC cost money so I can't 100% it 😢 oh btw, this isn't exactly the same, but Deus Ex Revision is also an example of "DLC" achievements done poorly, DLC in quotation because Revision didn't have DLCs and yet, they kept adding achievements, that's apparently why the achievement completion rate is so low for some of the easiest achievements in gaming 😂 I got super lucky to start playing Revision when they stopped adding more achievements 😅
Finally Type 10 Limited Time achievements are truly the bile of all achievements, although I think if the game is online only or mostly known for it's online game then they're fine(for Example if Blizzard ever added PvE to OW2 I don't think achievements are suddenly bad). I do think Limited Time achievements also have so many sub categories that are so bad, like "You had to play beta or pre order the game to get this achievement" or "You had to find Fred at Fred n George game before he died/left gaming or you never get it" or "You have to be pro of ALL time to get it" but I think they are only truly despicable if they're online achievements in mostly singleplayer game, it's a GAME CRIME some companies still do this sht, those achievements MUST be gainable after servers are down, a good example of the online achievements done well in singleplayer game is Unreal Tournament 3 Black edition, you can get ALL online achievements in a lobby of bots you made(or at least guide says so) that's super cool, especially since Unreal Tournament games are also known for it's online multiplayer and yet they let you get achievemets with bots
Very nice writeup! Just to clarify what you said about the hidden lore thing: its true that many “hidden lore” ones could also be considered “missable”, so why rate hidden lore so highly? I think it really all comes down to how missable they actually are.
Going back to a Josef Fares game like “It takes two”: it has many achievements like this, but it also has a chapter select, and the achievement names and pictures kind of give hints to what they might be about. So in that game I would consider them fun because you can backtrack easily and its kind of like a treasure hunt.
Compare this to Psychonauts 1 with the Mr. Pokeylope achievement. This is also a treasure hunt of sorts, where you have to find each kid in the camp, but the window to complete this is so outrageously small because you’re only meant to have him with you for about 5 seconds if you didnt look anything up. Because who in their right mind would climb down the asylum and hang out at the camp for no reason at that moment in the story, when Lily has been captured and youre right at the end? In the context of the game you would just progress the story instantly and hand over the turtle. And if you forgot to save (and why would you), well, that’s a lot of backtracking or restarting the whole game. So the annoyance factor with this achievement is so extreme I would categorize it separately to the first example, which is what I did in the video with types 2 and 8, even though as you correctly pointed out, there is some overlap.
Thanks for watching!
@@tin_sensei Fair enough, I guess I can see your point more clearly now and the difference between hidden lore and missables 😅.
Hope you'll read my second comment I left in comment section about additional types of achievements you could've added! 😊
Back on the Xbox 360, there was a game called "Chromehounds" which I loved very much. I'd gotten all but 5 achievements and the servers got turned off many years ago. After I lost my old account, I started a new one in 2021 with a renewed interest in the console and many more titles to play due to having an Income. Unfortunately for me, although I've beaten my old gamerscore, I'm only able to get the Achievements from CH's "Tutorial Campaign" and it really pains me that it basically says "this guy missed this much gamerscore" instead of "earned 100% of what is currently possible to earn".
With that in mind, I'd like games to have their achievements segregated as "Single Player", "Multiplayer" (that would include both online and local Co-Op achievements) and "Legacy" which be anything a player achieved before the time limit expired or the servers got turned off.
You could also display the total number of achievements or gamerscore as 48/25 (but not with percentages) and give players the option to hide any category of achievements from themselves if it irks them.
*sees thumbnail* damn I hated that gnome, especially in the car segments.
About the Tubular achievement:
I actually thought that that was more of a skill achievement than an emergent gameplay one. Sure, you _can_ find that by just playing the game, but who did that? Also it fell into the trap of the skill-based achievements that you mentioned, it showed that the boating mechanics were simply not up to snuff for that type of achievement.
Still agree on the set-up time tho, but I think that it is quite specific to a time-loop mechanic game in that sense.
I was about to go into a rant about why the Witcher 2 does the things it does, but I guess you get it already hahaha. Do agree on the necessity of some quality of life things there.
And I totally agree about the timed achievements, make it an in-game thing only or something. Like a custom profile thing for your in-game profile if you participated in the beta.
I think that you missed the most important extra bit of information that you should have started the video with: You are a completionist/achievement hunter.
For someone who (almost) never does the whole 100% thing there is almost no difference between a completionist achievement and a grind achievement, as both require extra effort from a casual player to get. The biggest difference from a casual point of view being that the grind achievement is probably going to make them not go for the 100% and the completionist achievement will just make them go "*sigh* okay".
But fuck DLC achievements in Steam, completely agree hahaha
Oh man. I'm planning a game that's supposed to be achievement-heavy (we're calling them "feats" and I admit a big reason it's it's just easier to type repeatedly).
It's not going to be a Steam game so Steam's achievement system isn't a factor.
The plan for our game is it's a sort of text-based open world RPG and you're encouraged to start multiple characters, and some feats will unlock character creation settings, buffs, or even some game content. The game is really encouraging you to make multiple characters to try new things out. Which I think helps with some of your issues with missable achievements? You actually can't 100% the game on one character. Some feats are intentionally mutually exclusive.
It's a fairly unusual system but hopefully future players will have as much fun with it as me and my co-dev will.
"Okay I'm getting bored with this character I'll start a new one and aim for getting these 3 hard feats on her and a few of the related easier ones."
Thanks for giving us a neat categorization framework for discussing our feat plans as we work on our game. :3
Interestingly, some games like Cookie Clicker also has secret achievements, in the sense you are not expected to fulfill them; stuff like absurd grind, absurd luck, cheating, impersonating the dev, et c’...
I think your DLC opinion is fair, but I think that's easily solved by the game and DLC trophies are simply separate, i.e treat them as separate games. Let me keep my 100% in the core game, and if I want to 100% the DLC too that's great, or if not then that's fine too.
...and then there's the Monster Hunter series.
Amazing!
Except that most TF2 achievements were brocken at some point of time
A big no-no for me are achievements who requires bad gameplay.
For example "Die 500 times" in Castle in the Darkness. I had to die several hundreds of times after I had 100% completed the game and all its other achievements. Could be included in the "Grind" type of achievements but that's incredibly bad achievement.
There are also "Finish the game in easy / normal" achievements in some games that are not earned when you finished the game in hard, requiring you additional uninteresting playthroughs if you want them...
When a game includes DLC achievements without the DLC's being allready in the package ... it will not be bought. Screw that.
Limited time achievements are the worst achievement types in my opinion
It really seems like your problems, every single one mentioned in the entire video, comes from deciding you want to get all the cheevoes. This leads you to play in a way that you don't find fun. It's hard to believe that's worthwhile, that the enjoyment from catching them all outweighs the hours where you weren't enjoying the gameplay.
"I want the cheevo that says I won a thousand matches, but I don't want to even play a thousand matches".
"I want the cheevo that says I got a billion kills with the plastic spoon, but I don't like using that weapon".
"I want the cheevo that says I am unreasonably skilled at the game, but I have a mere mortal's skill level".
"I want the cheevo that says I got to chapter 7 of the story, but I don't like the story mode of this game at all".
"I want the cheevo that says I collected all the busywork items, but they're obviously just filler and feel like work to collect".
"I want every cheevo that says I got one of the various mutually exclusive outcomes, but I don't want to play the game enough to get all of those".
"I want to have every cheevo in the entire game, even if there are some unattainable ones, or new ones are added".
There are some games where I have a lot of these cheevoes. I think there's one or two games where I'd only need one more to reach 100%, and quite a few where it's below 5 remaining. To my knowledge, I have never had 100% of the cheevoes in a game, and if I ever have then I don't care enough about that fact to remember which ones.
Hi, thanks for watching. It's a fair perspective you've brought up here, allow me to clarify.
Essentially, I do achievements because for me, it's fun to be a completionist. The struggle is necessary, because without it, you wouldn't feel that good feeling at the end when you've overcome it. So I'm not asking for them to be easy or handed to me. Some of my least favorite achievement games ARE ones like the walking dead where they just give them to you by going through the game. I'm just asking for them to be fair and respect my time. Replaying an 80 hour game, no matter how good it is, for the specific purpose of changing one choice or picking up one item, is not a reasonable use of time, in my opinion. Or during my research, there was an achievement that said something like "Be in the top 1% of the leaderboard". That doesn't feel fair, and although I welcome that kind of statistic to be rewarded, perhaps as an in game cosmetic, it doesn't belong in an achievement list, which are meant to be completed.
Allow me to give an analogy. Let's say there's a new restaurant in town, and they have a bar inside. You can get anything you want on the menu, eat any food at your table, but to get a drink from the bar, you have wade through 3 foot deep mud to get it. Well, just don't get the drink then. It's optional, you don't need it for the full restaurant experience, and you get everything you paid for without it.
Now let's use that same analogy, but instead of having to wade through mud to get your drink order, you have to land a ping pong ball in a glass from 10 feet away. Still optional, still takes effort, skill, and practice but much more fun and satisfying when you complete it.
It's not a perfect analogy but my point is, why would developers even put it in the game in the first place if it's either unobtainable or unbearably obnoxious? Achievements can be challenging and fun at the same time. There's a certain point where it crosses over from "I'm too lazy to get it" to "This is bad, unfun game design", and that's what I'm trying to identify here.
Thanks very much for watching!
@@tin_senseiYou’re totally valid in wanting to be a completionist, but I feel like viewing achievements as something you MUST get is… the opposite of their original point. In fact, I think achievements were not originally meant to be 100% completed!
(to clarify: I don’t think wanting to 100% the cheevos is Wrong. It’s very satisfying to get them all! I just think that wasn’t the intention when they were first introduced.)
You’re interpreting them as a checklist to fill out, instead of each one just being an acknowledgement of a thing you did in a game. No matter how grindy or out of the way an achievement may seem, I am sure that almost all of them can be gotten- without knowing about or trying to get them- by at least ONE dedicated or skilled or adventurous player just Playing The Game (There definitely are cheevos made with completionist guides in mind, and it would be very unlikely for somebody to meet the requirements for those by accident, but I believe that the original intent was to discover achievements organically and not meticulously hunt for each one using a guide).
In other words, I see achievements as: “Oh wow, you did a difficult/time-consuming/hard-to-reach thing? Here’s a small token of recognition that you can show your friends.”
Instead of: “You want to see that 100% next to this game title, don’t you? Go do these specific things that you find extremely tedious or borderline impossible at your skill level.”
That said… now that achievement hunting is a thing and it is normal for people to want to 100% complete game achievements, I think it IS completely fair for you to want developers to respect people’s time and abilities, and make achievements challenging but still possible!!
DLC are fine if you play the game after it was released or seperate like on playstation
And multiplayer achievments are the worst thing of my life especially in old singleplayer games that did not need to have them
The DLC achivement is the worst. The Steam ribbon thing really gets on my nerves. I've recently had my Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night achievement ribbon taken away when the developers added a new game mode DLC, which is practically a whole standalone game within the same engine. I'm not interested in playing that game as it's too different than the main game, so I'll never have my ribbon back. This seems like a cheap way of creating FOMO or to force established players of a now old game to buy a new piece of DLC. This has only made players aggravated with the developers since after they've spent countless hours collecting every single item in the game, killing the same monsters over and over to upgrade their Shards and amassing 500K gold - their ribbon is taken away because of a side game mode that plays completely differently to the main game. This is made even worse with the knowledge that the developers have released a ton of free bonus content for the game over the years, none of which was tied to achievements. So there's zero external incentive to play the game as other characters, or play Classic Mode or Boss Rush mode, but there are achievements tied in with the new PAID DLC. That was infuriating.
I don't care all that much when a game has Limited Time achievements. It feels like the developers rewarding players who've adopted the game early on and have stuck with it through most of it's lifetime. Games that have Limited Time achievements also usually have insane amounts of achievements tied to them with many of them tied to competitive multiplayer, so I personally tend not to get too attached to achievements in those games anyway.
The Grind achievement type can be really annoying at times. My wife and I have unlocked every single achievement in Kingdom: Two Crowns in both of our accounts with the exception of the achievement tied to dropping and picking up your crown 300 times. This achievement really makes no sense since it requires you to spend an incredibly long time playing the game, which will unavoidably increase your skill, which will reduce the chances of dropping your crown. So you have to start losing on purpose. I've actually grinded this achievement for an hour or two at one point and realized there isn't even a visible counter for it, so I ended up giving up on it. What's even more ridiculous is that the game has a challenge mode with in-game trophies that aren't tied to achievements in it, so there's no external incentive to playing that mode at all. The in-game trophy helps a lot, though. When you browse through the challenges, it shows you which ones you've completed and with what degree of success.
This makes me think that there's an 11th type of achievement. One that is only seen within the game and not on your store profile. Something like a private achievement. This can be sometimes good and sometimes bad. A bad example is how almost the entire Steam Community page for Rocksmith 2014 is filled with screenshots of the post-song screen, showing 100% mastery of a song. People wouldn't bother taking those if they just had achievements for reaching 100% mastery for each song. Unfortunately, this would mean someone would have to buy every single DLC song and master it to get the ribbon on Rocksmith 2014. And it's not the type of game where a player is expected to buy every single piece of DLC, unless they're a streamer.
Ha hee!
type 11: removed achivements
"you basically wasted your time doing these, because now you have nothing to show for it"
example: every cs:go achievement, because they were removed when the game was replaced with cs2
Did they really? I hundred percented csgo. That is ridiculous. Cant believe they would do that considering they own the achievement platform
@@tin_sensei they did, and the only achievement there now is awarded for just opening the game
i was kinda mad too and i only had a few of the old achievements, i can't imagine how i would feel if i had all of them
your tier list is exactly how i would’ve done it, i wish that all game developers could see this because the two you pointed out are definitely the best
I've never thought about how achievements make me go out of my comfort zones in games and truly experiment. Whenever there is a game without achievements I usually just B-line the story and ignore everything else. Awesome video btw.
Yep, a good examples of how achievements enrich the experience is Deus Ex Revision a mod for Deus Ex 1 that has it's own steam page. It let's you experience even more of what makes DX1 great by providing several achievements. Another example of Revision good achievements is how they handle skill achievements, they didn't make one single achievement requiring you to accept all handicaps, they made several achievements that ask you to do *one* handicap per walkthrough, I like these type of skill achievements because they give player a choice in how hard they want to make their 1st/2nd playthrough, either do all handicap achievements at once, or do one per walkthrough or mix and match wish more games done it this way 😊
Although Revision achievements were guilty of being like "DLC" achievements, Revision doesn't have DLC but they CONSTANTLY added more and more achievements, every time you think you finished blue ribbon for Revision, they'd add more achievements 😂 thank God I finished Revision in an era where they finally stopped adding more 😅
Loved ya video and while I think 10 types is mostly enough to categorise 99% of the achievements I do believe some more categories can be created(feel free to use this comment as an idea for a sequel, I don't mind 😅)
Type 11: No mistakes achievements. Basically a sub category of skill achievements but I do believe they deserve their own spot because they alone drag skill achievements into bad category, it's fine if skill achievements are "don't die"(rewarding player for mastering the game) or "don't use x items"(again, reward for mastering) but it's insane when game asks you for literal perfection "Oh one bullet hit you? START AGAIN!" It's just not fun, you aren't mastering the game, you are playing a camping game with enemies.
Type 12: Social media/Requires outside help to do. Not sure if those are distinct or same but here's a few examples. You mentioned TF2 but never mentioned one of it's most infamous achievements(not counting grinding 1 mil robot kills on a niche pve gamemode), the replay achievements. It requires you to get 100 or 1000 or 10 000 or even 100 000 views on your TF2 replay. People might say it's technically limited time, but I think this deserves it's own category because companies are sadly slowly trying to force you to do stuff outside of your game to get achievements(also TF2 replay achievements can still be gained without using cheat engine, you just have to insert the video with x amount of virws into one of the TF2 folders and do sumn else and it'll unlock) Another example is Stanley Parable games with "Don't play game for 5/10 years", again doing stuff outside the game to get it isn't fun.
Type 13: Alternative ganemodes. I'll admit, I read this idea from one of the comments and I think this type deserves it's own category, now I'm not talking about online gamemode, I'm talking about, say, Caravan mini game in Fallout NV or witcher version of a card game, aka basically any sort of game or mini game inside your game counts, or say hoarde gamemode in mostly linear game etc.
Type 14: Co Op achievements. Technically they can be online as well, but usually they are local as well, but even if they're online, you usually CAN play with your friends after many years of the game being irrelevant. They also deserve their own category because they provide their own unique challenges, 1) Having friends 2) Having friends who own and willing to play co op with you 😅. Of all types you missed, I think co op has to be the biggest missed category because they genuinely don't feel like online or limited time achievements nor feel like other types.(also if DLC got it's own category then co op should as well and maybe multiplayer seperated from limited time, trust me there are some good multiplayer achievements like in TF2 and some games like TF2 and Unreal Tournament 3 Black Edition do allow you to grind multiplayer achievements with bots)
Type 15: LITERALLY impossible (not hyperboly, LITERALLY impossible, well, literally Impossible to get in legitimate ways). This type of achievement might only have one achievement in the entire world, what I'm referring to is Where the water tastes like wine achievement for a game with same name. And, it's literally impossible. Well, impossible to legitimately get, apparently S.A.M. cheat engine can give it to you but I didn't want to get achievements illegitimately. And yep, you heard me right it's literally impossible to get legitimately, it's not limited time pre order bonus achievement or finding Dev achievement, no you can't get this achievement, it's so bsd that console stores demanded the dev to remove this achievement because nobody could get it, so he did, but Steam version kept this achievement 😢. Apparently dev said this was done to "send the message" but I just find it too preachy, seriously he could've send his message inside the game(which he alr did) why was there a need to make an impossible achievement? Only silver lining is that I guess you can use your abstence of this achievement as proof you don't use cheat engine to 100% all games but still sucks nonetheless.
Also fun fact, I didn't give this it's own category but there are some limited time achievements that are so impossible to get that even S.A.M. program doesn't work, there's a game called Super Monday Night Combat and I wanted to get 2 promo TF2 hats from it but it eventually got shut down and I didn't want to use sam engine but I still googled and apparently even cheat engine can't give you those achievements even though the game is dead and you'd think all security would be broke but nope... So technically THIS is Truly, zero hyperbole, impossible achievement because you can't even get those 4 SMNC achievements even WITH cheats 😮(Although maybe this isn't the case I remembered that I found one guy who said there's a discord group for SMNC and they run private servers where you can grind those TF2 hat achievements, I never actually explored to see if this was a scam or not, if it is or discord server group is gone, this will be truly impossible achievements)
****SPOILERS****
The only game I have 100% is half life Alyx.
Carting the gnome all the way to the end was amazingly fun and the fact you have to hold it and can’t store it made it great but also frustrating (had to reload a few times do to grenades) Also the way I accidentally kept a bottle of vodka in storage all through Jeffs level was such a fluke lol for the bring a bottle for Russell!
Reporting in for vids on cheevos
This is actually really helpful to me as a Hobby-Gamedev :D
Really nice Video, well done!
My favorite "Grind" achievement is easily the one in LOTR: Conquest where you have to kill 300 hobbits in the Hobbiton level. I probably spent an hour just rampaging, I thought it was hilarious and actually still pretty fun, it didn't really get tedious until the very end.
That is to say, if you're gunna have a grind achievement, make the thing you're grinding fun.
I'd argue that's almost a missable type of achievements because you almost didn't grind for it 😅
It's weird to think back when I was gaming, achievements weren't really as important as the story and the gameplay itself. I was always the one afraid to experiment because I would break not only the game, but also the console as well as the computer (akin to getting computer virus's on the computer). So for many years I didn't really care about achievements as I was used to more completing missions. But as time went on, I found achievements to be more of an "Out of the way, get it done as soon as possible" type of thing.
goated vid
No mention of Dead Rising? That game had the best achievements...
12.52 Like GTA5 you mean? Yeah agree.
Very well put. An example I ran into; I got "WHAT THE GOLF" on Steam a while back and ran into some of these types of achievements. It has achievements from categories 6, 9, and 10 (and 8 due to a bug) which turned a silly little golf game into a chore I have to constantly watch, and this seriously reduced my enjoyment of it. I'd also say that 4, 5 and 7 can easily turn into 6 if devs aren't careful; some games completely change how they're meant to be played or give you such lofty goals for skill (like DBFZ's Power Level achievement) or collectibles (like BotW's Korok Seeds) that the grind to do it overshadows everything else.
BotW Korok seeds shouldn't count because they were never meant to be an achievement goal, they're so many of them to make sure each time you explored you got a reward.(Although I don't own PS/Xbox consoles is BotW on those consoles and they have achievement to get all seeds, because if yes that's stupid, Nintendo knew what they were doing by never adding any achievements and keeping Korok seeds plentiful)
Amazing video.
The one you missed was the PURE RNG achievements.
Which can fall into grinding, since you just keep going at it until the rng gives it to you, be it 1 hour later or 20.
Usually hoping for multiple miracles to line up in a roguelike.
And some may still require specific circumstances after getting said RNG to happen, making the rare event missable.
4:22 what game is this?
It’s called Patrick’s Parabox. Really cool puzzle game.
I 100%ed Witcher 2 and it took me 120hrs and like 6 playthroughs or something.