Playing Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition on PC and I hit one of those classic “Bugthesda” moments: last time this level crashed to desktop with no warning, and today my screen randomly auto‑adjusted mid‑game and threw my aim and immersion completely off.
I did the usual ritual: check for updates → Microsoft Store updates → verify game files → repair the library. You know the drill.
But honestly, that’s not the part that’s really stuck in my head.
What’s been gnawing at me is this: in 2026, are achievements still relevant in the way platforms treat them—especially when mods disable them anyway?
A few things bother me:
Mods disable achievements (even on consoles now in some cases), so for a lot of players they’re already meaningless mechanically.
There’s no way to opt out. If I don’t want a permanent public record of what I did or didn’t do in a game, tough luck.
Even if I uninstall or refund a game, the partial achievement list just sits there on my profile forever like a half‑finished diary I never agreed to publish.
What I wish existed is something like:
a “no achievements” mode where I can play purely for the experience, and my achievement list just shows as “inaccessible/opted out” to others
or at least the ability to hide or erase achievements for specific games if I decide I don’t want that history attached to me anymore
I’m not pretending I can change the minds of big companies who still design like it’s 2005, but I am genuinely curious what different types of players think:
Achievement hunters: Do you care if others can opt out, or does that not affect you at all?
Mod users (PC and console): Since mods often disable achievements, do they still matter to you in any way?
Everyone else: Do you ever think about the permanence of your achievement history, or is it just background noise?
Is it time for platforms to give us a real opt‑out or ephemeral play option, or am I overthinking something that most people are fine with?
Could be an age thing. 20 years ago on the 360, achievements I cared about. By the middle of the PS4 generation, I stopped caring about PS trophies. On Steam, never cared about Steam achievements. 20 years ago being a completionist was an interest of mine which included achievements. Today, I’m fine not finishing games
Definitely an age thing, I remember a time video games didn’t have achievements, you played the game 'cause you liked the game, game companies kept track by virtue of their sails, now these days it’s how long a player plays, what achievements have been unlocked etc. I keep thinking that it’s OCD, the permanence of the thing, something I can’t change, but maybe you’re right, maybe it’s old age.
I only achievement hunt for certain games. Granted, I’m not a hardcore gamer or anything. I’m probably the guy that most hardcore gamers hate. I’m old school, in my day, you could just pick up a game and go. You’d peruse the manual a bit on the ride home from the store and you’d have a pretty good idea of how to play it once you got home. Some games today are still that way, hell some are so intuitive that you just pick it up and you already know how to play(spiderman), some haven’t changed enough in decades to be a problem. (Gran Turismo, call of duty, Madden). However even if you understood HOW to play a game, some were just hard AF. Everyone understood how to play the stampede level on lion king, very few could beat it.
The point of that previous paragraph is to put a perspective to my response. There weren’t achievements growing up. In fact, many games were so hard, or so badly designed that it was nearly impossible to beat unless you were so ridiculously dedicated that you wouldn’t have enough time to get into other games. I played the original command and conquer games and absolutely loved them but tropico has like 45 fucking menus and I just can’t remember or be bothered to learn every single minute detail. However, Gran Turismo only got more detailed gradually enough that it came naturally, even if I skipped several iterations. My point is, I try a lot of games, especially the free stuff on PS+, that I like the idea of, but when I play it I’m just like nah, fuck this like tropico, I even made my guy look like trump lol. Or games that are too big that I’m just not gonna try to 100% but I love all the same like cyberpunk. I really like DayZ but I never played the arma games and have no idea really what I’m doing. It’s fun but I know getting platinum just isn’t happening but I have fun.
So I guess my point is, I don’t blame anyone for not getting platinum. Currently I only have 4. All the insomniac spiderman games and fallout 4. I want to play a game for the game. Hunting trophies feels like a job, unless I realize I’m pretty close just by playing the game. So if someone wants to play a game without achievements being shown I wouldn’t judge. I like fighting games but won’t play DOA because I dont want to catch shit from my friends for being thirsty.
Also sorry if my post is a little disjointed and rambling. I’ve been writing this during commercials while also getting progressively more buzzed.
I like achievements. I don’t compare them to anybody else, they just give me a goal and personal sense of accomplishment. The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth would have been a lot less satisfying to complete if I didn’t get to see 641/641 achievements on my profile.
In 99% of games I’ve played that disable achievements with mods, there’s a way around that on PC. In the aforementioned The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, as long as you beat the first “final” boss a single time, you can use mods freely. In Fallout 4 as you’ve mentioned… there’s a mod that re-enables achievements. So this is an irrelevant issue to me.
As far as your other question goes, I’d be more than happy to see achievements be opt-out. On Steam you can always hide your library or use SAM to get rid of them all when you’re done playing, but that’s obviously not ideal.
I saw one other person mention RetroAchevements and I second their love for adding it to older games-- in these cases, though, they’re a passion projects by fans and while they maintain a leaderboard, the main thing to be is it legitimizes some retro gaming by disabling save states and cheats while still having sets for modded games. I think it sets a good standard for what the industry should be doing.
For instance, it checks those boxes; it’s opt-in by default and there are privacy options, although hardcore mode requires rich presence for enforcement of the rules. There’s still the softcore option though. The sets have rules about what you can make, leaving grindy and multiplayer stuff as subsets. And again, modded/hacked roms get support, since all it takes is a user wanting to develop it (except Pokemon Clover, that’s banned for pretty good reasons lol)
At this point, it feels more legit than Steam, Xbox or PlayStation achievements. If the industry adopted a similar model, most of your concerns would be addressed although it’s likely impossible since developers often have to write achievement code that fits all platforms.
(Oh, and if you can’t tell, my answers to the questions, mod use makes it irrelevant on PC and permanence does matter to me, although not for any good reason: RA badges are nice to look at. Lol)
I love achievements to the point I’ve been replaying a ton of old games just cause of retroachievements. As for what I’d think of others not wanting them, I don’t really care what you do. I do see a lot of pushback against achievements, especially whenever the topic of Nintendo adding them comes up since they’re the only platform without it, so a way to just permanently system or game wide disable them would be nice for those people. Something easy to access so you wouldn’t have to dig in menus for it.
I’m not asking to get rid of achievements, I’m asking for a compromise, I’m just questioning the importance of achievements, there are devices and or cheats to unlock all achievements and those who use mods and don’t care for what achievements they have, that’s not reliable developer data. Like my post states I see many sides of this discussion, pro achievements, neutral to achievements, and I guess in my case questioning of achievements. One’s either pro or neutral two game achievements, in truth I have yet to hear anyone who wants achievements GONE, or at the very least an option to clear or delete one’s achievement history, it’s the permanency of the thing for me you see.
I don’t think I’ve ever gone much out of my way for achievements for their own sake. Games where they also unlock stuff (eg: binding of isaac), sure, but that’s for the unlock.
I may have done some challenge stuff that I learned about for the achievement, but only because it seemed fun. I wouldn’t go very far into anti-fun just for an digital badge on my profile.
I like them. They’ve given me incentive to try out playstyles I wouldn’t have like the ghost achievement for Dishonored where you can’t alert or kill random npcs in the game.
I haven’t run into many scenarios where mods disabled achievements and if they did I would play with the mod over achievements if it brought enough quality of life improvements.
They were never relevant. It’s a Skinner box mechanic that really triggers certain people’s dopamine production in an addictive manner.
We have very different understandings of what a Skinner box is, and I don’t think achievements count.
Variably timed “rewards” which trick your brain into performing repetitive tasks for longer than you normally would? Achievements definitely count.
They tell you exactly what rewards you with them in most cases. They’re finite and not random. They’re hard coded and easily searchable. The point of a Skinner box is that the mouse doesn’t know when the next reward comes. I’m not prepared to say “most” definitively, but at least many achievements don’t require any repetition and are given out for one bespoke action exactly one time, often just as checkpoints for how far you made it into a story.
I think they’re relevant for people who like them. Most games I don’t care, but for games I really like I’ll use achievements to see of there are things I haven’t yet discovered.
Sometimes it’s fun to compare to friends.
I don’t really know why they disable them with mods installed. If a person cheats and gets them all, who cares? It’s not like there’s actual value. If it makes them happy, let them be happy.
And yea, an opt out feature for people who don’t want them would be good, too.
Sometimes it’s fun to compare to friends.
Unless…
a person cheats and gets them all
If I’m actually friends with them, it’s a trait I’ve accepted, and at worst roll my eyes at. If you somehow feel less because a friend of yours has more achievements, that seems like a different issue altogether.
I’d say you’re definitely overthinking it. I’ll look at the high end achievements if I’ve finished a game I like, as that could point me towards things I may have missed during my initial playthrough, but other than that, I don’t think about them at all.
If I actually do 100% a major game (Like I did for Fallout New Vegas) I’m proud to have accomplished it, but I’m not losing sleep over the other 3000 unfinished titles I’ve played.
As you can see, I care about achievements: https://sh.itjust.works/post/56525516
As others have said, it’s a great incentive to go deeper in a game. It should just not become a grind and that’s why I don’t 100% a lot of games.
It can also make you remember what branch of a story you went for in a story driven game.
If it gives data to developer about how a game is played, it ain’t something I mind as the way I play isn’t a important privacy wise as other data.
What’s stupid is when people buy a game just because it has easy achievements though…
I really like seeing the breakdown of what percentage of players have done X, Y, or Z compared to me. When achievements were first implemented, it was the first time developers had real data about how people played their games, and it influenced how games would change after that. I don’t think many people are circumventing them via mods percentage-wise, so they’re mostly a good representation of the sample size’s behavior. I rarely go for all of them, averaging about 35% of achievements per game, but I did just 100% Escape from Ever After not long ago, and part of that was getting all of the achievements in it, which was a fun little extra activity to do in a game I really enjoyed.
If you really don’t want that record attached to you, you could prioritize playing games from GOG via offline installer, I suppose.
Relevant to what? I’ve never had a reason to care.
People who mod, people who replay games, people who value privacy, people who don’t want a permanent public record, people who uninstall or refund games, people who don’t want their leisure time turned into a scoreboard, people who feel pressure from completion systems, people who simply want the option to not participate.
Achievements are background noise for me, I only chase them if they sound fun to chase. I have done all the achievements for a few games intentionally, but only if there are like a dozen or less that don’t just happen naturally by playing.
