Opinions on trophies/achievements?

They only signify an abundance of wasted time rather than skill, thus they should not exist. The fact that they are a mandatory requirement for certification is absurd.

I appreciate that you listed the pros along with the cons. I've never thought of some of them.

That's not true.
A lot of games are actually really hard to complete, and if you do that indicates skill.

Complete in what sense? Complete as in 100% complete or just get to the finish line?
Because truth be told neither is particularly difficult in a lot of recent games I've played.

I almost have a platinum trophy in several games of mine but there's one fucking thing that keeps me away: fucking collectibles. Wheter it's pure bladestone or the fucking birds in Assassin's Creed 2, it takes no skill for me to mindlessly grind or use a online guide to collect shit for a meaningless virtual achievement.
Completion is easy, it just takes too much time.

They can be good as objective proof for dickwaving, which is going to happen regardless of whether or not there's a digital badge for it, but more often than not it's just "kill 6 million Jews", "collect 200 bear asses", and other markers of time investment, rather than actual acheivements such as "kill the Bear God with your bare hands" or "complete the campaign on X difficulty without taking even a single point of damage".
Either way, I'd rather see in-game awards for such things.

Collecting faggoty shit hidden behind RNG isn't hard.

It's even more ass tickling when all the collectibles are already shown on the minimap, and they serve 0 purpose beyond faggotry. They don't unlock anything of value, they don't provide lore, or a challenge, or an adventure. They're just there because every open world shitfest now needs a shitton of collectibles to distract from how empty the open world is.

As in 100%.
Saying that some achievements are easy so they're not based on skill is like saying that since the first level of a game is easy the whole game is easy.
It's just a flawed statement.

Collectibles are trash, there's no doubt about that. But those aren't hard, I'm talking about shit like finishing all the Wipeout races with gold medals in the hardest difficulty and other shit like that.

I hope you do realise that not all achievements are collectibles, yeah?

Anyone have that infograph about how to subtly tell people about how many cheevos you have?

Cheevos are a way for casuals to feel good just like XP based progression systems and to remove shit like secrets and easter eggs.
Instead of a player realizing he got good at a game and that he is slowly getting better you just add these official online only pat in the backs and be done with it.

Its part of why 2007 and 7th Gen was so cancerous

There is a really shitty type of achievement, those that aren't about doing a tricky thing, but a trivial thing X times. I have similar feelings about unlocking stuff, it should happen primarily by doing a hard thing, doing a trivial thing a dozen times shouldn't be there or only as a secondary pity-unlock mechanism (better screencap this before somebody gets a patent).

I've been using achievements in my table-top games for years. If you survive the session, you get the achievement of earning experience points so you can advance in level and have an easier time surviving the next one.

I don't see what's so strange about it. ;)

Cancer. Much like this thread.

I remember hearing one of the FEAR games had achievement for getting 50 kills (or headshots?) in online multiplayer.

Also related when Team Fortress 2 had class updates and the first week would consist achievement servers and everyone playing as X class to earn them as fast as possible for the new weapons (minor exceptions for Sniper/surprise Spy and Solider/Demoman WAR! updates).

this is a pretty good sumation

I want to go back in time

Autistic. I wish I had never started collecting them.

Fuck you.

it really depends. like getting gold trophies in a racing game. scoring under par time in every level. something like that is useful.
its kind of cool when theres some hidden achievement you stumble upon and you might get to see how many other people found it.
mostly i just ignore them, i dont usually care about being a completionist.
collect every item? whats the point? well i guess its useful to know when you actually finished, if you set about to do a task like that. so i guess thats fine too.

the only ones i really dislike are "wow, you advanced the story or completed a tutorial, heres a trophy"

Shit and cancer.

going back in time isnt going to fix anything, you might as well just play ps2 games if thats what you want to do

wwwwwwwwww

I think it's more of a data harvesting scheme.

"Achievements" have existed for a long time.
Except back then you would unlock stuff, like unlocking cheat codes for Goldeneye and Perfect Dark.

theyre both true

Gameplay data harvesting that just so happens to have a special appeal to retards.

Never cared about them, and they helped ruin wow. After they implemented achievments, no one wanted to do anything for fun anymore. Every time I tried to set up a group for something, the only response I got was "I already have that achievment"

What's the opinion on Payday 2 achivements?
Half of the game's content can only be obtained by doing specific tasks which are usually annoying but satisfying

spot on

I'd rather have ANYTHING as long as it's in-game. Fuck this meta-game bullshit. Monster Hunter has "guild card tokens" that are every little bit as worthless fluff as achievements/trophies, but because they're actually in-game it's infinitely better than this meta shit.

Microsoft was the cancer that started this. Normalfags who don't play games LOVED the idea of playing a "game outside of the game" and collecting achievements, but look at where we are now. They've gone so meta that they don't even PLAY the games to get the achievements, they just watch some youtube streamers get the achievements instead. Pure degeneracy.

Achievements done right: Portal 1
A nice mix. Simple and rewarding.

Achievements done wrong: Portal 2
Just fuck my shit up.

I thought the ones for Revengeance were pretty solid, you get ingame rewards for some of them and most are so you can show off with having beaten bosses while taking no damage etc.

Daily reminder that achievements killed cheats codes and fun in video games.

Fuck achievments

Portal 2 achievements are meh.

I enjoy some achievements like in EU4 because it gives me a more specific, concrete playthrough goal other than "do well and make pretty borders."
Overall though they're a detriment to video games.

Achievements are a fucking joke and I can't really think of a single instance where they were needed. They are also often the things that spoil games before release.
It is good though that you can go to any game journo's profile and by achievents see how far he got into the game before making a review. Really shows how rotten it all is.

RIP

Another good part about trophy/achievement is that it serve as an indicator. Like to tell if someone actually played or cleared the game or not.

I'm okay with achievements because they encourage completing the entire game and becoming good enough to beat the game on the hardest difficulty and learn the mechanics of the game through that.

They're also good for completitionists

and

These comments sum it up really well.

Locking achievements in multiplayer when the game's multiplayer is dead is super annoying and lame, unless you organize with a bunch of other completitionists to get achievements and that's usually tedious.

It also encourages people to never do things once they have the achievment apparently.

On PS4:

It's sometimes fun to see how fucking shit gamers are today. Almost nobody seems to be finishing their games.

On Steam:

Set profile to private

On GOG:

Disable Galaxy overlay

Always hated online only achievements. How does any dev expect anyone who comes in late to get them? Oh, they only care about the initial sales so screw the late customers.

We already have achievements before this system. It was called creating your own challenge. It's mostly for e-peen points like a lot of speedrunners nowadays. A temporary high by achieving something small in accomplishment.

Nier was good and bad at this for different reasons. For a final ending, you had to do a lot of time wasting things like that planting field and maxing all your weapons by grabbing rare drops from places over and over again. I think I clocked about 10 hours alone just to get this one thing you find in that village with the orb boss.

Though, the grinding kind of fits thematically because to get the last ending, you have to make a choice that would delete all your save data afterwards. This game design choice was a well crafted choice to end your journey and have a conclusion but only leave with the memories of your accomplishments.

This was probably one of the best game designs I've ever seen using deleted save data. Most have been used for hard difficulties which seem like waste of time. It doesn't help that they aren't designed for a lot of games that use them. You could be 6 hours in and die to some bullshit reason and feel like you wasted your time than feeling like your trying to overcome a hard challenge. Beating a hard game in one sitting was better designed in the golden & silver age of gaming when those games were shorter in length. They were good that you wanted to play them a second or third time with a different challenge in mind each time.

Trophy list seem static because they don't allow much update room if someone thinks of a different way to beat the game. I think that mostly has to deal with the console manufacturers and having certain limits to how many points they allow for each game.

Trophy list need better balance between basic and expert level achievements. None of that grindy bullshit or an achievement that can only be unlocked if you had to look-up someone's video to find the exploit. Expert level achievements should have some degree of skill. Collectables are okay if they are built into the game and not those where you have to collect a certain number of bear asses to get a pop-up notification. They could be fine if there was more effort put into them instead of being accessory for longer playthrough work.

...

Achievements are in essence same as quests but more boring and without rewards. Maybe info from them could be useful but this is only thing they are good for.
Fallout 4 done it.

Forcing telemetry into games so that devs can see what players are doing.

Even then it could have been a good way to encourage players to see extra aspects of your game or try new things but eventually devolved into "Completed Chapter 1" " Completed Chapter 2" Shit. I remember when Valve was doing the class updated for TF2 and the achievements were actually good and were tied to in-game benefits. Then because lazy gamers wanted their class weapons without having to actually get good with the characters Valve dropped that and the whole thing immediately lost any appeal to me and later on loot crates became a thing.

Metroid Prime 3 also had achievements although they are not sent to any database. And your reward for getting them is concept art and videos. I like this style of linking achievements to in-game rewards but that was already a thing long before the current system.

I think achievements could have been a good idea but unfortunately most devs are really bad at creating them and since it's becoming mandatory for games to have them to be put on consoles I don't think the situation will improve. And it's not like publishers/devs are making better decisions regarding making games if PS4 trophies are any indication because people still aren't finishing them.

donkey kong country returns still does this. i think its made by the same studio, isnt it?

I don't really see the problem. All Mass Effect games had Paramour achievement for romancing somebody, although they never required a second or third playthrough.

Before:

Now:

This time they want you to have sex with 3 different characters and none of them are interesting.
you can meme 1488 Cora all you want but in the game she's larping as an Asari, she can't shut her mouth, always talking about "muh asari commando"

I like it when the snes platformers would give you 0/100% game completion score.

Yep all by Retro Studio.

I sure love achievements i cannot get anymore.( Without SAM at least.)

The character unlocking in Smash Bros. is like that, where you can either complete a mode to trigger it, or just play a shitton of matches.

They're worthless as data gathering, though. They wouldn't give you any useful data on how people play games - they'd only give you useful data on how people achievement hunt.

If they were for data gathering, they'd be hidden from the player.

I like them alright when you earn them for doing actually doing something. Things like getting a trophy for beating a boss in Bloodborne, completing a game on hardmode, or completing a chapter in Super Meat Boy without dying. I think it's a good way to give a player a little extra recognition for their skill at a game. Achievements for doing something dumb like completing the tutorial or dying in a particular way don't really add anything of value.

I do like that they actually have in-game rewards for a bunch of those achievements, even if half of them are just masks.

The trophies/acheivements that are simply

Are all very much used to track how much people play through the game. If 80 percent of people do not complete half the game, this is something companies want to know.

I would still question how useful that information is. Like how does knowing that X% of players finished the game and the point where people dropped your game in the largest number is between chapter 4 and chapter 5; cause companies to make better choices? I don't necessarily see devs making better choices with the games that I do drop. But I also don't play many modern games nowadays (Been on a PS2 kick for over a year now) so I can't really speak for modern games in general.

Dumb waste of time and padding for hollow games. Keeps people from having initiative to use critical thinking to find interesting things to do on their own. Baby casual faggotry tbh

I find it weird that Dota 2 still doesn't have achievements.

Done right they can be really good.
The first Dead Rising is my bar for achievements, and sadly none have managed to be as good since then.
Outside of the few small achievements you get for beating the game there were a ton that forced you to play in entirely different ways. Frank the Pimp forced you to plan out how to acquire bitches and do a weird prioritization for in game events that you wouldn't normally do.
And to top all of it off a good chunk of them caused cosmetic items or weapons to spawn in the base after you unlocked them.

There is objectively nothing wrong with them. There's everything wrong with people who sperg out against them and people who sperg out in favor of them.

Achievements were used to datamine so they could "streamline games", i.e. cut content. Knowing that the plebs didn't complete games was one of the excuses the kikes used to cut game content resulting in shorter barebones games. It is also a reason why modern AAA games lead the player by the nose for every little thing to ensure they do see every side quest and "secret" they did put in.

Yeah managers use that data so they can make financial decisions during development. If you are nearing completion and lack full funding, do you allocate funds towards bug fixing the beginning levels or the later ones? Its all for businesses to decide. It doesnt make better games though, just companies more money.

Well that's sad to hear but it does explain some things I've been noticing. Shame all this money has to go into graphics and not to making good dames

You can set your PSN to private too and nobody can see you trophies or activities.

Resistance is a good series to look at to see how cancerous trophies can be. Resistance came out when trophies didn't exist. It had skill points like other Insomniac games and they were great. Varied, made you play the game differently, gave you a reason to come back to the game. You got some rewards though I don't think they were anything particularly amazing. Reistance 2 threw away skill points and went for incredibly uninspired, boring trophies. Only maybe half of the trophies were for the single player, too. You can't get the multiplayer ones anymore. They tried to do something decent in Resistance 3, though I would say they couldn't quite get back to where 1 was. All the actual trophies were only for single player. Some of them weren't very interesting but a good amount of them were definitely worthwhile. A huge amount of them were bronze trophies so they could fit as many possible in. There was another system where you earned Badges (or something) from playing online. Both of these would give points towards unlocking rewards. Unfortunately, you can't get enough points just from trophies to get all of these rewards, so you're just fucked now.

when a company says they're going to track everything you do, online and offline:

when a company says they're going to track everything you do, online and offline, and you get points for it: