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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."
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You just read my comment.... here is your... oh wait I'm all out of achievements better go kill your self.
Fuck achievements.
They're so fucking shitty.
I don't want a chore list.
I don't want notifications popping up whenever I do something (note that on the 360 you can turn them off, but not on the PS3 or in Steam).
I don't want my online games to be filled with people who are standing near the spawn point shooting each other in the foot 5000 times.
I don't want to see 54ad0w5n1p3r's ePeen achievement list.
I don't want people looking at my achievement list and knowing that I play Super Faggot Noob Game 2.
I don't want developers adding meaningless tasks and grinding in lieu of content.
I don't want some "score" attached to me that's simply a measure of how much time I've wasted. I have a clock, thank you.
Achievements are shitty.
But at least they're not as shitty as the other things to happen (or become far more prevalent) this generation:
$60 standard price
Paid Additional Content ("DLC")
Shitty PAC that is an unlock key for content already in the game
PAC that should have been included with the main game, but intentionally (time, money or both) wasn't
Retailer-exclusive content
Games shipping with unlock codes in the box to kill off used sales
Game saves locked to individual systems
Ship now, patch later mentality
Overpriced accessories (I'm looking at you, 360 wifi adapter and hard drives)
No transfer model for downloaded games (I'm looking at you, Nintendo)
Removing features people paid for, or patching ads into games that people already paid for (I'm looking at you, Sony)
Paying for multiplayer (I'm looking at you, Microsoft)
Getting free multiplayer but having it be a piece of shit (I'm looking at you, Nintendo)
The ruthless "Fund, Hype, Whip, Release, Cull" development cycle for AAA games (I'm looking at you, Activision)
All in all, we may have fancier graphics and new control schemes (fuck you, shitty developers who use them in shitty ways), but the basic "playing games" thing? It's much shittier.