Achievements, cheevos, trophies. Do we need to go back?
I can't help but feel these fucking things are making games worse. Instead of playing games however you please, some games shoehorn you into certain paths to get them sweet cheevos. Along with some Anons a long while past making claims that suits use trophy completion stats to justify cutting down on content budget, I can't help but loathe them.
What say you, Holla Forums?
I dont give a shit one way or another, i just play the game and thats it.
such as?
Protip: stop playing shit games.
Never played a game that does this.
Half right. You can't only blame the suits for this. Devs themselves are just as guilty. My favorite example of this is Infamous. On top of a host of other problems, Infamous used its trophies to disguise how short it was. In particular, one trophy had the player searching out something like hundreds of tiny, invisible items hidden all over the game world. Instead of fleshing out the rushed as fuck game, instead of getting an intern who knew how to show rather than tell in narratives, instead of having new areas or powers, the developer just threw in those items without modeling them (remember, they're invisible ;^)) and made a trophy for getting them all.
They aren't.
It's entirely up to the player.
The kind of person that ONLY plays games to get platinums is the kind of person that didn't give a shit about video games past just beating the game as fast as possible, this mentality would've dominated that person regardless of trophies.
Some of the games i got all trophies for are:
-Dead Space 1
-Dead Space 2
-MGS 3
I didn't do it because i wanted the fucking trophy, that's retarded, it's beside the point.
I did it because i wanted to explore those games as much as possible, and trophies were an useful checklist of things to do to reach a point where you feel like you've squeezed as much content out of a game as you could.
This is how achievements should actually be used, as a checklist of things you can do in a game if you want to 100% that game.
And you should only 100% games you really enjoy.
Really this is all pretty obvious shit i can't believe i even have to explain.
you should only have achievements for
that is it.
What are you even talking about? There's no invisible collectables in those games. 2 and Second Son pretty much give you the locations for the collectables anyway (2 makes you do a bunch of sidequests to get the power to locate them, SS pretty much just tells you where everything is).
Maybe there was something like this in Festival of Blood, but that was a downloadable game and it's not really unexpected for it to be short.
Developers padding out games isn't something trophies created anyway, it was around well before that.
They're frequently used for data mining, which can then be used to justify that. What these suits don't get that is that the people who did all of that content will tell everyone else that the game is shit.
A checklist of "what I want to do to feel like exhausted a game" and what objectives the trophies want you to do don't overlap perfectly. Sometimes this can be a good thing, since you might get someone to try a fun challenge they wouldn't otherwise do. But when you get a few trophies that the player doesn't really want to do but feels obligated to because they're otherwise exhausting the game most people are still going to go and do them and that's usually a bad thing. Completion counters aren't limited to trophies but I think people feel more compelled to get a missing trophy than a missing percentage point or whatever.
I had to dance around the wording in order to avoid mentioning any particular games to avoid the usual fucking chimp out when any game is ever named. When I say shoehorned, I mean a wide range of things from buffing unwanted skills, to extremely vague missable choices, weapons etc.
I understand what you mean and generally I agree with you. The few games I've "platinumed" were done naturally because I genuinely enjoyed the games. Thankfully, said games had relatively sane goals for their cheevos. I can think of a particular game recently that had the most bullshit trophies that involved replaying and combing the game finely in order to find slightly better equipment towards a completion trophy. No thanks, fuck you.
On the other side, I can't help but feel slightly disappointed with myself when I see percentages that aren't a 100% in my lists. It obviously goes without saying that most games don't deserve to be played to such extent, I can't believe you thought you had to explain it.
Are garbage cheevos/trophies correlative with shit developers?
Achievements are crap designed to artificially lengthen a shitty game. Another reason is to convince the person playing that he/she is accomplishing something (since the game itself cannot hope to make that person want to continue playing).
Achievements can be interested in something like Civ where they encourage you to play in different ways than you normally might and explore different things.
The problem is when they became a unified system, and the idea became 'More cheevs=bettererer'. Also pointless grind shit.
I knew a 30 year old man who would buy children's games for the 360 and get all the achievements in them to raise his gamerscore.
...
It's weird how few of the trophies I have for games I really liked, but how many I have for games that I either didn't like much or thought were just okay. I've got like 65% of the trophies in Asscreed 2, but only 20% or so in Demon's Souls. This is because Asscreed 2 just throws them at you constantly while you play the game normally, while DS requires some bullshit involving fully upgrading a weapon of each type, which I don't really want to go out of my way to do, no matter how much I enjoy the game.
I do like looking at them to see what percentage of people have done something basic in a game though. Like only 60 or so percent of people who started Demon's Souls enough to register the trophies in their account beat Phalanx, the first boss.
I'm not sure I buy the whole "challenging you to do something you wouldn't otherwise do" thing either. While there are certainly a few games that do this, the vast majority of them are just rewarding you for doing things you have to do to actually play the game, like beating bosses, or something arbitrary and tedious, like collecting all the thingamajigs. I feel like a lot of the time when there is something interesting in an achievement list, it's hidden.
Plus, I have no friends, so I can't show them online that I beat the game.
Achievements have always been an analysis tool, as devs used it to see what players were doing in their vidya. It leads to situations like this:
Repeat until all games are shit.
Any stealth game will have a trophy for killing, using all weapon and ghost it.
Strategy usually have it for doing a battle in a certain way
We now know for a fact that devs use trophies as benchmarks for "no taksie backsies" in case of trying to get a refund on digital games.
I evade that by buying games I actually want. If I'm playing a game thoroughly, chances are I'm going to 100% it regardless of what trophies are present.
Ateliers and Dungeon Travelers 2 are an excellent example to this.
What I want are achievements that actually matter in the game.
You do something in a game worthy of an achievement ? You get something in the game to congratulate you from it, be it either things that help you in a game (higher chance to have things, items or weapons) or bonus things (like Goldeneye's cheat list).
Achievements are useless the way they are, for gamers.
The only game I've ever gotten every achievement in has been Dark Souls III, and that's just because it's literally impossible not to.
There's only two games in which I've liked the achievement system.
Crystal Bearers. There was all sorts of fun secret goals and challenges in each region to do and the achievement board gave you hints about what to do.
Minna de Spelunker Z. You get free shit for reaching certain milestones.
In fact this is what achievements/trophies should be. I don't want an e-dick measurement to compare with strangers online. I want an in game benefit. Even if it's purely cosmic.
Yeah, I miss when achievements actually had some sort of in-game reward, that made them feel completely worthwhile to me.
Meanwhile the kind we have now are kind of a no-win situation- if I ignore them that kinda bugs the completionist in me, but some of them are absolutely fun-killingly obnoxious and either way feel like a waste of time to the practical part of me since there's no real reward otherwise. There have been several games now that I enjoyed alright initially, then decided to go for all the achievements, and in the process came to HATE them due to how horrible the absolute toughest last few were to get. If I were a dev and it were up to me, I'd limit achievements to just finishing the game and not particularly tedious side goals to avoid games leaving a bad taste in player's mouths like that. In some games getting them all isn't much harder than beating the game and that's how it should be.
And of course, I'd make sure achievements also trigger something tangible in-game.
It's bullshit if that's what is going on. There are a handful of games where I don't have the trophy/achievement for beating the game.
Not because it was "too hard" more like it was boring so I stopped playing the damn game.
I've heard of something like that but I didn't keep track of where exactly. I think it was mostly from the perspective that the developers wanted the players to complete the game and see the story and the ending through. Since I heard about that I've felt an unwanted pressure to accomplish what I had no interest in doing. I have the same opinion of statistic tracking.
It doesn't bother me terribly, but I've gotten a preference for games with no achievements. Or just not buying a game with achievements.
Lots of games do this. The items, Blast Shards, give you EXP you can use to buy new moves. I 100%ed the game without having enough experience to get all the moves, so if you don't look for at least some shards you'll be more underpowered. Also, they aren't invisible, though they are pretty hard to find. Frankly, I like it, because it gives me incentive to explore the city more thoroughly. Sly 3, the previous game made by Sucker Punch, suffered tremendously for not having the hidden Clue Bottles that Sly 1 and 2 had. In Sly 2, it was fun to use them as an excuse to explore every nook and cranny in the level, even if the last one in each level was always frustrating as fuck. It wasn't as annoying in InFamous since you get a short range radar to help find them.
But that said, all the alternations of Hidden Packages in San Andreas and GTA IV and V are fucking bullshit. There are so fucking many of them, and IIRC in IV and V you don't even get anything for them, while in the earlier games your safehouse gets filled with weapons and shit when you get them.
Achievements and DLC have combined to almost completely eliminate unlockables. Before, doing obscure or difficult challenges would unlock new features in a game. Now, you get an achievement and then they sell you the feature for real life money.
Childrens' games are usually better anyway. I'd rather play some mediocre nickelodeon tie in than the latest SJW garbage pumped out by AAAs or indies for "adults."