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PS3 Has No Achievements, Replaceable Controllers
So, there is bad news and good news. The bad news is, despite the popularity of the Gamerscore and Achivements on Xbox Live, the PS3 won't offer that. Despite earlier rumours on the subject, developers will have to pick and choose if they want to have a system like that. Sony says first party titles will offer 'entitlements' ... but none of the launch titles will have it. There is good news for PS3 fans, though, as Sony says it will replace controllers if the batteries wear out. The lithium batteries the company is shipping the controllers with should last 'for many years'.
There's no vibration in pads. Because of new batteries. They're better - when you get hit - they explode!
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
If we're lucky, Sony will put some of those non-exploding batteries into the controllers. Who knows, it could be a selling point for them.
Thats one of the 3 things that I found a huge turnoff of Xbox Live. THe big epeen war over who has achievments. The other two are the voice chat (I want to chat with my guild, and only with my guild, not with random 12 year olds. I leave that to members of Congress and Micheal Jackson. Luckily, there's always outside teamspeak servers, and my TV is by my computer) and the fact it was for pay (pay extra for something that should be a feature of the game? No. Just no. I'll pay for a dedicated server if I get to set the rules, but no way in hell I'll pay for the ability to play MP at all).
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Some part of human nature demands that we know where we stand against, well, everyone else. We're built to be competitive; that's a part of our survival instinct. Not having a system-wide ranking system (or at least an achievement system, as the GamerScore could more accurately be called) I think will hurt the overall popularity of their Live counterpart and will leave the users with a segmented ranking system, just like the last generation, Live on the original Xbox, provided. That's not exactly a leg up on the competition. Also, 12-year-olds everywhere won't have a number (read: ePenis) to brag about.
If all my base are belong to you and I attempt to retrieve my base, does that mean I'm freebasing?
Batteries in controllers? Do we have to crank the system before it'll turn on, too?
"There is good news for PS3 fans, though, as Sony says it will replace controllers if the batteries wear out." They havent taken into account the crazed gamer types out there that play forever. I guarantee quite a few will run out within a year. Unless their controllers are so crappy people will end up breaking them before the batteries wear out.
No explanation of what achievements in this context even means in the description, and the title makes even less sense. So it doesn't have achievements or replacable controllers? Wait, now they will replace them if the batteries die? Odd.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
Sure, they'll provide a service to replace your batteries or whatever.. but you'll probably be able to get a new controller on eBay for less than they're going to charge you for a replacement.
So, when they say they're going to offer a replacement service for the controllers, is it going to be something like: Send us your old controller and $50 and we'll send you a new one?
It's my experience that Li-Po batteries don't suffer from a memory effect, but they do wear out after a number of charge and discharge cycles. In particular, the "battery conditioning" that most laptops do (slightly draining and recharging the battery constantly) seems to wear them out pretty fast. We'll have to see how these controllers stand up.
I read the internet for the articles.
That's great! I always wanted to wait four to six weeks to be able to play with my game console.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you read the article, the PS3 will have achievements on a per-game basis - just not with launch games, and no overall gamerscore.
Although I as a gamer would like to see achievements in every game as I think that's a great feature of Live, I never did get the point of an overall gamerscore which as the article notes is a really meaningless number. You only care really about how you are doing in relation to other people in the same game.
So for this inaccurate and oddly worded title, I say award this story the coveted "zonked" tag.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Will they replace my batteries if the controler goes on fire ?
I didn't found something funny to put here.
Forget playing the game....the vibrating controllers were nice....now if they were just washable...
2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
Anyone notice how few people bother to read or comment in Slashdot gaming stories anymore? Not that Slashdot ever was anyone's first choice for console gaming news, but it still used to have large and good gaming discussions.
Zonk has pretty much put an end to that. Slashdot needs something better than the gaming equivalent of Ted Kaczynski.
$10 says a 35d party market appears around this much like it has for iPod batteries.
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
They'll replace the batteries if they wear out? Given Sony's recent reputation with batteries (Apple recall, Dell recall, et al), I'll wait to hear what their replacement policy is on exploding batteries...
Considering how much those controllers are going to cost, $50, they better replace it at no cost.
-Shawn "If the Name Don't Rhyme It Ain't Mine" Conn
Hmm... giving publishers the "flexibility" to create their own achievements systems, which none of the launch titles will feature.
In other words, it's all up to the developers what they want to do, because Sony isn't going to provide any help. The nice thing about 360 achievements is that you can figure out your trigger conditions, call an API once, and be done. Anyone can add achievements to their game with relatively little effort (a huge improvement from Xbox 1).
On the other end, you have the completely open ended system. You decide the trigger conditions, as usual. You implement their storage. You implement their display. You manage any sort of in-game rewards for these. You add more screens and menu options to your flow. You debug. Not Easy. And even then, other players won't be able to see it.
I can't imagine most game developers seeing the tradeoff and deciding that it is worth it. They'll just keep whatever in-game rewards system they have deemed useful over the years.
Microsoft really learned one thing from the Xbox 1... and that is if you want something from the developer, you have to make it really, really simple to do. Or else it isn't worth their development dollars to do it. MS gets this now. We'll see about Sony.
The ______ Agenda
Good news would be if batteries were replaceable, which is hardly an unusual feature.
Linux has no Outlook, Microsoft Windows has no AIGLX, and Mac OSX has no Rhythmbox!
"Max" (yes, they gave it a name) is Sony's condescending, annoying and buggy voice menu system.
If you yell "agent" at it long enough, it should route you through.
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Zonk - seriously - is English your first language? Hopefully not, because your article titles are almost always poorly worded. I always get this mental image of some guy juggling chainsaws while also reviewing /. submissions, writing headlines, etc. There's just no way you could be devoting 100% of your attention to what you contribute here..
Some games just plain aren't suited to the achievements. Developers then go out of their way to use up their allotment. This results either in inane achievements, or in-game tasks that don't fit the game genre. It also encourages and rewards unhealthy gaming habits. For example, one of the achievements in Dead Rising requires you to play for at least 14 hours in a single session. That's if you do it perfectly the first time...
Console manufacturers should impose as few requirements as practical on game makers, and that should include allowing them to choose if they will have in game achievements or not. I would still hope, though, that many game studios would choose not to use them for the reasons above, and since they are essentially a tool to get gamers to provide free advertising for their game.
The lithium batteries the company is shipping the controllers with should last 'for many years'.
...Or will explode trying.
Achievements are just a cleverly disguised way to make people play through mediocre games. While some achievements actually acknowledge videogame prowess, most of them are just awarded by playing through the game. When it comes to Xbox achievements, people need to stop and think if they are playing the game for fun, or just playing to get the achievements.
I refuse to play a lot of online serivces, including battle.net and Live, in large part due to the score. Not all of us are competitive, and not all of us are competitive all the time.
That's pretty odd you know! You certainly seem to be worried about what other anonymous people on the internet think (people who by all accounts, are jerks).
Anyone who knows the first thing about the score knows it doesn't mean that much (especially when you have people buying titles like King Kong or Fight Night just because it hands out easy points - not that Fight Night isn't superb). More than anything, it's a general reflection of how much someone plays their 360, though I know people in my friends list who share the account with friends and familer members who come round (and of course, they have the highest scores of anyone I know, no ones ever brought it up though).
I'm far more likely to use Sony's system than MSes due to the fact there is no score.
Sorry, but that's weird. I really don't know why you would care. I think you might be looking at games in a way that might prevent you from getting the most out of them.
FWIW, my gamer score sucks, it's about 730 or so (would be about 930 or so, but not all the achivements were unlocked on the same account). That's pretty sucky, especially as I've bought something like 20 titles so far (so in theory, it could be something like 14,000). I play my 360 a fair bit, I play quite a lot of PC games too - I have a great setup for both environments, which I've invested pretty heavily in (AMDFX CPU, SLI graphics cards, 24" TFT for the PC, 50" HD Plasma for gaming, etc - I definately spend most of my disposal income on gaming) I just suck at most games (I'm only noticeably good at team based FPS games).
I can live with that though, because I still have a shitload of fun playing them. Don't get me wrong, I don't like to lose (especially when it's down to being on the Worst. Team. Ever.), but most games these days aren't just 2 player, so as long as I manage not to be last I'm happy. I play games primarily for fun and immersiveness rather than any sort of challenge (for me, something like Ghost Recon on Normal mode is just perfect in terms of gameplay, difficulty and length - plenty of great gameplay and there were no stupidly difficult end levels).
If I unlock an achievement it's because it was really easy to grab with only a little effort, or as is the case 9 times out of 10, it's just part of normal gameplay and it happens without me expecting it. I unlocked the 'kill 30 enemies in one round of multiplayer without dying' award in GRAW this week, that was a nice surprise, but there is no way I'm going to try and do something crazy like try and get the 'kill 1500 people in multiplayer' award just so I can get 25 points or so.
I actually like the Live system, because I can see how much of a game someone has actually played, so I know if they are talking out of their ass or not, though that's a situation that rarely arises because other people know they can see if someone else has actually finished a title or gotten to level X - so smacktalk is cut right down. It's also so nice to be able to see what people in your friends list are playing and how much of it they've played (or, conversly, if they've not played it at all since they first got it). Lastly (and this has been said before regarding Live), the only feature of keep score that is any use, is in knowing that you are "offically better" than your friends, at least one particular game.
I can almost understand where you are coming from, in that if I'm playing BF2 and me or my squad has just spent the last round solo defending vital flags that won the match for the team while other people went on stats padding killing spree's and are score is pretty crummy at the end of it, that's frustrating (especially if you've got a bunch of solo-artists bickering about who is the leetest in chat), but, I've never heard anyone say anything disparaging to anyone on the basis
I don't think it's that the games aren't suited to achievements, it's just that this whole notion is still new to developers, so there are still a lots of achievements that are done better than others.
I'd actually have to say that Dead Rising does a pretty decent job handling them, compared to other games. Every achievement is worth only 20 points (which is miniscule, seeing how every full game can dish out 1,000 points). So that survival achievement you mentioned, isn't worth all that much. If you're a perfectionist, sure, you'll try to get them all. Or if you're like most folks (myself included), you'll just play through the game, grab most of the normal achievements along the way, and maybe try for a stretch one or two. The good thing about achievements in DR is that it encourages you to try things you might not normally have wanted to do, and actually enjoy doing it.
For those that don't care for the achievement systems (and I know there are quite a few), it's simple enough to just ignore the whole thing. It's the same with any other platform feature you don't like (such as rumble). That's why I think it's silly for people to argue that system shouldn't be offering something that a lot of people do enjoy. If you don't like it, don't use it. I would have preferred Sony do something similar with the PS3, to maintain some sort of feature parity, and it's upsetting that they've chosen not to do so.
-- jchenx
Provided they don't EXPLODE.
/., I'll be all like "hmm. My Wiimote hasn't exploded yet. Huh.
First exploding controller story I see on
Let's make batteries that Just Work (TM) shall we? And by Work I mean "not explode" and "not kill people".
Here's to the rabid Sony fanboys.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
No, it's a stupid move for several reasons.
First of all, you have to admit that your preferred playstyle, is rather rare. The reason why there are rankings in almost every online game is because many gamers are competitive by nature. So it's a silly business decision to ignore the competitive majority. Sony has already acknowledged that they want to have some sort of achievement system, although tweaked so its a bit different (at least per game instead of system-wide). I imagine the main reason why the PS3 launch games don't have Entitlements (Sony's name for achievements), though, is because there just wasn't enough time to add them in.
Secondly, achievements are something that's easily just ignored. I equate it to the rumble feature. Some people don't like it, so they can just turn them off. With the 360 achievements, you can either ignore them, or just never get a gamertag, or don't sign into Xbox Live. The gamerscore is nothing more than just points to "show off". It has no impact on affecting game play (which is something that some people actually want to see). So you can safely play your same game and not give the achievements any consideration. But you should consider the fact that there are a lot of those who DO like said feature (perhaps a bit too passionately).
Personally, I can relate a bit to your situation. I often don't like playing online games, simply because I'm not as good as a lot the kids online, who have far more time than I do to practice any given game. Even though I don't play multiplayer, I still have to acknowledge that it's a play mode that a lot of people do enjoy, so it'd be silly for me to declare, "I don't like multiplayer, so it's a stupid idea for X company to put it in their game", especially since it's something I can just ignore. Yet, I like the gamer score system since that gives me a way to fuel my competitive nature just a little bit, merely by playing a game the same way I mostly would have played it. I don't compare my gamer score to the kids online, who again, have far more time than I do. Instead, I compare it with my friends and co-workers, who are primarily in the same situation I am, so our scores are actually competitive.
-- jchenx
Not supporting achievements, is not FUD. It's a real feature that a lot of people (myself included) were hoping to see, especially since Sony themselves talked about it some time ago.
Have we come full circle? I admit that some of the articles Zonk posts can be rather FUD-ish for Sony, especially when they're just rumors, or just dupes of the same bad news from Sony. But it's gotten back to the point where everything that Zonk posts is already assumed that it's just anti-Sony FUD, when it's not the case. Believe it or not, bad Sony news does still exist, and it's not just "anti-Sony hype".
-- jchenx
Karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
I would argue that Achievements are one of the best things to happen to gaming since its inception. Right next to online multiplayer and the D-Pad. Not only does it allow you to set personal goals and gains, but everyone else can look at them and compare as well. Gaming without them is just a bit more bland.
I don't consider achievements to be a matter of seeing who gets the highest score but a way to look at what you have done in each game and look at what other people have done and to use that as an object of discussion. I think I'll get my brothers xbox 360s for Xmas and this will be fun.