- cross-posted to:
- retrogaming@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- retrogaming@lemmy.world
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?
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I’ll never understand the discourse surrounding achievements. They’re typically very noninvasive; you can ignore them, disable them, hunt them, or do whatever you want.
It obviously depends on the preference of the player, the game, and how much thought went into the achievement. Not sure what else needs to be said.
People who look at 100% completion as peak gamer cred suck. People who walk around telling others to stop achievement hunting because it’s “sucking the joy out of gaming” equally suck.
It’s clearly a personal preference, so I just do my own thing and let others do their thing.
I find that how much I care about achievements parallels how well they are done. Some games I care almost nothing, especially when the achievements feel tacked on. Other games, the achievements represent thought-out developer-suggested goals or progression and feel right. If I trust the developer’s choices in creating achievements, I enjoy the achievements.
As such I don’t care about RetroAchievements at all. The achievements aren’t a part of the game. They end up either trivial or tedious. If I want a tedious challenge and can’t come up with one myself, I’ll see what people who love and have mastered the game tend to aim for.
FYI if it’s just the notification you want to disable, you can do it from the Steam settings (at least in desktop mode). I despise notifications, so I have them completely disabled, but you should be able to remove just the achievement ones.
I wouldn’t say I hate achievements, but I can’t understand what’s appealing about them.
I can’t understand what’s appealing about them
Receipts for your bragging rights.
Doesn’t mean much when you can just directly edit them with third party tools.
To be fair, they didn’t originate on PC where you could do that. They originally were just a feature of XBL.
Yeah okay that’s fair.
I’m aware of extrinsic motivation vs intrinsic motivation, about the potential upsides and downsides, the potentially positive or detrimental effects of achievements.
I often do chase or consider achievements, but also explore games and their limits or what they cover anyway. I do like completing, especially if 100% is feasible. Other times I ignore them and focus on the game. If the game is not very captivating or interesting, I often don’t care much about achievements.
I did find incremental progression games interesting in how they make the extrinsic motivation, the numbers-go-up system, the core game mechanic. It’s interesting to explore and be mindful of how that can be fun, but in a different way than creative, exploratory, or story games. Of course, some mix both systems.
Achievements are not for me. I might have a look through the list and if some sound fun I might try to engage but most of the time they are a grind, and that’s not why I play. To me they have always felt like an insincere engagement tactic (or something like that).
I had to delete my RetroAchievements account because it sucks the joy out of gaming. When achievements don’t exist I just happily play a game until I’m finished with it but when they are there I NEED to get them all.
I’m the exact opposite of the OP in the article. I love achievements and can call myself achievement hunter. I have even written multiple non-spoiler achievement guides for others. I get a more accomplished and fulfilling feeling after beating a game 100% achievement wise instead of just seeing the credits.
There are of course games where achievements make no sense and games where the achievements feel like ‘slop’. Take a look of for example the digital version of the board game Talisman and its list of achievements. I can’t believe anyone finds going through those kinds of achievements fun and rewarding.
In addition of the beating the game 100% I find it fun to ‘compete’ against my friends whether they know I’m doing that or not. Comparing for example Steam achievements lets me do it. If someone has 54/67 achievements I want to have 55.
My girlfriend tends to be a completionist as well. She would often try to 100% a game she’s playing, or at least to get as close to it as feasible.
But what surprises me the most about her approach is that she’s completely chill about it. She doesn’t force herself through miserable shit just to get an achievement.
And my experience with completionism is completely different. There’s always an achievement that plain sucks. Getting 100% in Dark Souls 2 involved a lot of boring grinding and getting through the game 2 and a half times on the same character. Getting 100% in Lunacid forced me to grind a useless spell from bunnies for two hours.
I don’t know, I just feel like it is better for me, my time and my mind to not see achievements at all, to not think about them and be focused on games themselves. The system is clearly not for me haha.
I totally get you. There are games that are fun and easy to 100% also there are games that are challenging and rewarding to 100% and then there are games that are so annoying that you are better off just leaving them ‘unfinished’.
I completed both Dark Souls 1 and 2 and both had that multiple playthrough requirement but I will not make myself run those steps in DS3 for 7-8 hours just to get those proofs of concord kept. That’s just… no.
Past me was much more serious completing games but now days I want to experience many games so I can’t be stuck with just one title. Time for entertainment is limited I’m afraid.
When playing trough a game the first time I never care about achievements. I do not disable them, but I just ignore them and don’t check which ones the game has. And if a game does not have achievements then I indeed do not miss them.
But if I have finished a game I ended up really enjoying and want more, then I do check the achievement list for inspiration for what to do. And sometimes I end up discovering parts of the game I initially missed that way.
I have never bothered with RetroAchievements, but I also don’t get the hate about them. They are achievements that are not a part of the game, that you need to deliberately install to be able to get them. So if you don’t like them, just don’t install them? Some people clearly enjoy them, so I don’t think it’s a bad thing that they exist even though I don’t care for them.
When playing trough a game the first time I never care about achievements. I do not disable them, but I just ignore them and don’t check which ones the game has.
I wish I could just ignore notifications and other distractions lol. Unfortunately I tend to lose focus easily from this kind of stuff. It’s particularly bad when developers add achievements to emotional/climatic moments. Like, why? Why do you ruin the moment with an out-of-place pop-up?
What gets me so often in retro gaming is the desire of some to “repair” the past.
This would indicate the ‘hate’ is on ideological grounds.
I tend to agree, if I’m being honest. I sometimes see the retro modding community excited about improvements they’ve made: new models swapped in for characters, upscaled backgrounds with 10x the detail that was ever put into them, 4k textures stretched over low-poly objects like an animal wearing a skin suit. And these are called ‘better’. This is how new people are told to play these old games: we have added 4 cups of sugar to make the horrible taste easier to swallow.
I see this and I think… why? Why be this way?
Can you imagine if we raised new generations to treat paintings the same way? The Mona Lisa is not worth seeing because it is too old and ugly, but it can be made tolerable to one’s senses with the new power of AI?
This image is profane. It can only be produced by a sick people.
I worry that people’s desire for this kind of thing indicates a lack of curiosity in life. An unwillingness to do anything not already familiar to them. I would consider this attitude a character flaw in most people, if I met them.
