I like having nice, well balanced takes on things, sometimes getting lost in nuance in ways that muddle my point. But anyone who follows me knows that some days I just to give in. I just have to be a hater. Anyone who follows me knows I have a deep seated hatred of Achievements. Not so much the vague concept of little extrinsic goals, which have been in gaming for decades. No, what I hate is the institution of Achievements. That these are a standardized thing that must exist, on the s...

Sharing because Kayin’s talk about achievements made me think about why do I even accept them in games at all so I disabled them in Steam (the only way to do this is by disabling the whole overlay =_=) and found that I don’t miss them at all.

What’s you opinion on RetroAchievements, and achievements in general?

  • Demdaru@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    18 hours ago

    I’m on the fence with achievements honestly. On one hand, they are kinda coolio and I don’t mind them. But also, except for private progress, they’re (as a whoile - dunno how RetroAchievements works ) worthless.

    Achievement - First Steps! (watched 1s of intro), Prepared (picked up a gun you cannot progress in tutorial without), Armed & Loaded (reloaded said gun), Questionable Choices (killed tutorial enemy you were forced to kill by tutorial)…

    Or the other side of coin: Hard and actually cool achievements…that are owned by 1/4 of the players because most folk just cheat them.

    So, well implemented they can be fun trackers. But they lost any value when it comes to bragging rights, and are quite often heavily overdone or treated more as a tracker for devs to see which parts of game are accessible and which are not.

    • Lucy [she/faer]@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      1·
      12 hours ago

      Achievement - First Steps! (watched 1s of intro), Prepared (picked up a gun you cannot progress in tutorial without), Armed & Loaded (reloaded said gun), Questionable Choices (killed tutorial enemy you were forced to kill by tutorial)…

      Absolutely hate these kinds of achievements! They are just noise, why do you as a dev would want to add noise into your game?

      Or the other side of coin: Hard and actually cool achievements…that are owned by 1/4 of the players because most folk just cheat them.

      To be fair most of the time really hard achievements do have low percentages, at least on Steam. People usually just don’t bother with “complete the entire game without taking a single hit”. They can cheat but I doubt many do.