Whether you love them or hate them, there is no denying that achievements have had a major impact in gaming. With the apparent success of Microsoft’s Xbox achievements everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. We now have PlayStation 3 trophies, Steam’s achievement system, achievements in World of Warcraft, and various other achievement systems in games. If achievements are used correctly they can add both fun and challenge to a game, but what makes for a good achievement system?

Before we get into individual achievements, I want to go over two important things about achievement systems. The first thing is that there should be some quick and easy gauge of a player’s achievements, such as a gamerscore. The concept of a high score is something that is intrinsic to video games. It gives gamers both a goal to work towards, as well as a means for competing with other gamers. The other important part to an achievement system is the ability to show off your achievements. After all, these are accomplishments that the gamer should be proud of and want to display.

One thing that most systems should consider is giving rewards to the player for achievements. Some games make use of this in a way already, by having a certain goal (beating the game for example) both give an achievement and unlock something for the player. However, these could also be used to unlock things outside of the game and could tie in with other systems. For example, perhaps unlocking a specific achievement (or set of achievements) in a 360 game would allow you access to special avatar costumes or gamerpics that are related to that game. Another way to do it would be to use the gamerscore to “buy” special rewards such as access to a beta or new themes. It is important to note that if these rewards are something functional (such as beta access) and not just cosmetic then there should be alternate ways to access them to prevent people from having to grind achievements just to get some special reward.

The main problem with achievement systems now is that we seem to be lacking in any consistency between achievements. I am going to specifically refer to the Xbox achievement system here, but all of the ideas can be applied to any system. Microsoft requires that developers add achievements to their games and regulates the amount of points per game, but they don’t specify how the achievements must be used inside the game. While some developers put a lot of time and effort into making sure their achievements are something fun and challenging, others seem to toss them in randomly leading to plenty of “bad” achievements.

There are a lot of factors that go into determining what makes an achievement good or bad. A good achievement should be something that can add fun and/or a challenge to the game. The best achievements require some sort of player skill to acquire. An achievement should never be something the player has no control over. They should not be based on time, and should not be something that requires a ridiculous amount of time to accomplish. A good achievement might also promote the player going outside of his normal element to accomplish something, either requiring the player to use an item/weapon he might not normally use or do something in a way he might not have thought of before. Now that we have an idea of what makes an achievement good or bad, we can examine the different types of achievements individually.

First, we have the “not really an achievement” achievement. These are bad achievements. They require practically nothing from the player, and thus they add no amount of fun or challenge to the game. My favorite example of this is Soul Calibur IV’s “Start of a New Era” achievement that awards the player for watching the opening cinema. The Simpsons Game even parodies this type of achievement with their “Press START to Play” achievement. These should just be completely avoided.

Similar to the above, there is the “tutorial” achievement. These simply reward the player for completing a tutorial. Again, these require little to no skill on the players part, and they do not really add any fun to the game. However, I would advocate these being added to every game with a multiplayer component as a zero point achievement, just so you can tell who actually tried to learn the game before jumping online.

Next up is the “you will probably never get this” achievement. These show up in various ways, but the most popular seems to be adding achievements that require a player to play against a developer online. These achievements are random chance and require nothing from the player. These might be fun to add as a zero point achievement, but should probably be avoided for the most part.

The next achievement is the “I have no life” achievement. These are achievements that award the player for time played. While some of these achievements might be relatively low amounts of time (such as 10 hours for Viva Piñata’s “Longevity” achievement), they really don’t add anything to the game. The more time required for this achievement, the worse it is. The only thing it shows is that you have more free time than everyone else. These should just be avoided completely.

A slightly better, though still not that great, achievement is the “you played the game” achievement. These show up typically as achievements for completing an unavoidable game objective, such as simply completing a stage or completing a quest. These are not all bad, as long as they are used sparingly and not for every stage. The worst offender that I can think of is Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion where every single achievement is simply a reward for completing one of the quests. If these are going to be used, they should be used sparingly.

Related to the “you played the game” achievement is the “you beat the game” achievement. As the title implies, these achievements are awarded for beating the game. In a lot of cases, there is an achievement for beating the game on each difficulty. These are decent achievements. They don’t add anything new to the game, but beating the game is an accomplishment that should be shown off. These can turn into bad achievements if beating the game on a harder difficulty does not unlock the achievement for the easier difficulties. If you beat the game the first time on hard, there is no reason that you should have to go back and beat it on easy to unlock that achievement. These achievements would be good for most games, and especially for single player games.

One of the more fun achievements can be the “outside of the box” achievement. These award players for doing something unusual or not directly related to the game’s main objectives. These can even create Meta games for the player. These can be used in most games, but work best in open ended games. Dead Rising makes some good use of these with achievements such as “Stunt Driver” (Jump a car at least 33 feet) and “Frank the Pimp” (Simultaneously escort 8 female survivors). Most games should probably try to incorporate at least a couple of these if possible.

Another fun achievement is the “check out my stats” achievement. These achievements are directly related to some sort of stat, typically over the lifetime of play. Some examples of these would be the Gears of War 2 achievements “Once More, With Feeling” (Perform 30 active reloads) and “Seriously 2.0” (Kill 100,000 enemies). These don’t always require a lot of skill on the part of the player, but they do give the player a goal to work towards and it can be entertaining to keep track of these stats. There is a point where these goals can take way too long to accomplish though, such as the case of “Seriously 2.0”, which makes them more annoying and less fun. There should probably be at least a few of these in most games.

Next we have the “gotta catch em all” achievement. These achievements are similar to the “check out my stats” achievements, but different enough to warrant their own category. These achievements are for collecting things in a game. A good example of this is the Gears of War achievement “For the Fallen” (Recover all of the COG tags). These give the player something to work towards and, depending on the game, can be pretty challenging. These are good for any game that has collectibles that are not part of the main game.

The final, and my personal favorite, type of achievement is the “I got skills” achievement. These achievements award the player for some act of skill. The best example would be a multiplayer achievement awarding a player for so many kills in a round or, even better, for so many kills in a round with a specific weapon. They could also take the form of performing a specific action a number of times within a short period. These give the player a goal to work towards, show off the player’s skill, and give the player a real sense of accomplishment when acquired. If they are something really hard, they can let other players know that you know what you are doing. These should constitute the majority of achievements, as they truly are accomplishments.

Well, it is quite obvious that there are plenty of both good and bad achievements in use right now. Achievements are still relatively new though, so the use of bad achievements can be forgiven for now. Hopefully we will start to see an improvement in the overall quality of achievements soon. Regardless of how they are used, one thing is for sure… achievements are here to stay.

 

-Mike Lattanzia

 

Tags: achievements, featured, Game Design

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