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Anatomy of an Achievement
Whether they annoy you or fulfill your nerdy collection habit, achievements have spread across the gaming landscape and are here to stay. The Xbox Engineering blog recently posted a glimpse into the creation of the Xbox 360 achievement system, discussing how achievements work at a software level, and even showing a brief snippet of code. They also mention some of the decisions they struggled with while creating them:
"We are proud of the consistency you find across all games. You have one friends list, every game supports voice chat, etc. But we also like to give game designers room to come up with new and interesting ways to entertain. That trade-off was at the heart of the original decision we made to not give any indication that a new achievement had been awarded. Some people argued that gamers wouldn't want toast popping up in the heat of battle and that game designers would want to use their own visual style to present achievements. Others argued for consistency and for reducing the work required of game developers. In the end we added the notification popup and its happy beep, which turned out to be the right decision, but for a long time it was anything but obvious."
I find achievements the most interesting to hunt when they're asking you to play a game in a new way or try out new and/or interesting things. Geometry Wars 2 had some very interesting achievements, like the ever so hard "Wax on/wax off" where you need to touch every inch of the four walls twice without dying. Like TFA says it's a nice motivator to explore the games or to add replayability ("Pacifist": Mirror's Edge without shooting a gun). The other side of the coin is of course the ones giving you "achievements" for nothing. There are games giving you "achievements" basically for starting the game. Guitar Hero: World Tour really takes away the prestige involved in getting those achievements: playing the tutorial, completing a song, perform as a drummer/vocalist/guitarist, download a few songs, complete an online match (win or lose). Achievements could hardly get less interesting.
I... sort of like achievements. I try not to get obsessive over them, and generally think that I succeed. However, I do wonder whether there's a bit of a slippery-slope effect. I don't have the largest Xbox Live friends list - just a few people I know in real-life - but it's hard not to get a bit competititve. Given that I tend to only give most games a single playthrough, there's a great temptation to be moderately completionist on the first playthrough, just so you don't miss any low-effort achievements. This does mean I tend to use walkthroughs more than I used to. It also means that as an owner of a 360 and a PS3, if there's a cross-platform game and both versions are functionally identical, I'll plump for the 360 version. Yes, the PS3 has trophies now, but they don't all add together into a single big, clearly visible score.
The weird thing is that I recently went back and played a PS2 RPG that had been sat on my shelf for about 18 months without being touched. At first, the lack of an achievements system felt irritating, but the further I played into it, the more liberating I found it to be able to just sit back and enjoy the game without worrying about chasing down achievements.
So yeah, on balance, they're kind of a mixed blessing from my point of view.