We’ve all run into the same wall: a quest breaks, an NPC won’t move, a trigger doesn’t fire, or a bug locks you out of progress. On PC, you fix it in seconds with a console command or a small mod. On consoles, you’re stuck. Reload, restart, pray.
But here’s the thing nobody talks about:
Consoles could support console commands and mods without disabling achievements.
There’s nothing magical about PCs that makes this possible. The engines are the same. The tools exist. The hardware can handle it. The only thing stopping it is platform policy.
Right now, consoles treat user tools like forbidden magic. Mods disable achievements. Console commands are locked away. Players are forced to choose between fixing a bug or keeping their progress “legitimate,” even in single‑player games.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
There are obvious solutions:
Allow console commands that don’t affect progression
Allow curated/sandboxed mods without disabling achievements
Flag saves as “modified” without punishing the player
Provide an opt‑in “unsupported mode” for full tools
Let players fix bugs in their own games
PC players have had this balance for decades. Consoles could too — if platform holders stopped treating user control as a threat instead of a feature.
This isn’t about cheating. It’s about player agency, game preservation, and not losing hours of progress because a quest marker decided to take a vacation.
If consoles can run the games, they can run the tools that keep those games playable. It’s time to stop pretending these limitations are technical. They’re not.
I kind of took the approach of not caring about achievements in the first place.
I mean, at best, they’re an inexpensive way of adding grind of some premade categories to games. At worst, they’re another source of tracking player activity in games (though I suppose that as data-harvesting goes, this is probably one of the less-objectionable forms).
I get wanting to do challenge playthroughs to accomplish certain things, but it’s not as if the game developer needs to provide support for that. It’s maybe a quality-of-life improvement, but…shrugs It just isn’t something that matters that much to me.
I think that there’s a good argument for mods disabling achievements, if one wants the achievement to be meaningful. It’s hard to reliably determine whether a mod (or an updated version of the mod) “helps” or not. You’d likely need human review, which is subject to errors and costs something. If someone permits through a mod that helps and then later there’s a re-review and achievements gotten with that mod are revoked, that’s going to piss some players off.
All that being said, if someone does care about achievements, I think that one option might be to have two lists of achievements. One is for the vanilla game. One is for the modded game. That doesn’t require human review of mods or hard calls to be made (since all mods “taint” the achievement and move it to the “modded game” achievement list) and it still lets players who just want to track their own progress do so using achievements. It doesn’t mean that a player can enjoy some quality-of-life mod and still prove to their friends that they accomplished Achievement X in an unmodified game in terms of challenge, but that might be fine for a lot of players.
Achievements were an interesting idea but ultimately they are meaningless. Especially now that they are everywhere… Like big whoop I got an achievement on the Google Games app, GOG Galaxy and Steam…
As for console commands it would be nice but most gamers don’t know that they are doing and would probably ruin it for themselves somehow. Breaking saves files or getting stuck in a crash loop.
And then we’d just replace one problem with another, some people care way too much about achievements and they’d be working even more to get ALL of them / both sets.