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Why don't you like achievements? I'm curious. I never cared about them in the past and for most games they are just a little nonsense side bubble that pop up so

Why don't you like achievements? I'm curious. I never cared about them in the past and for most games they are just a little nonsense side bubble that pop up sometimes. But for a few games I've sunk a ton of hours into, mostly rouge likes, they are fun to try to complete.

TulliusCicero 5y ago
I feel similarly sometimes myself. It's like those studies on giving money to little kids when they draw. You're doing something for the intrinsic reward, the joy of playing, and now they've slapped on some extrinsic reward you didn't ask for. So the game makes you feel, on some level, that you're doing it for the extrinsic reward, and it saps some of the intrinsic joy you felt earlier. https://www.spring.org.uk/2021/07/intrinsic-motivation.php https://www.spring.org.uk/2021/07/intrinsic-motivation.php > So, those who had previously liked drawing (high intrinsic motivation) were less motivated once they expected to be rewarded for the activity. > In fact the expected reward reduced the amount of spontaneous drawing the children did by half.
mikepurvis 5y ago
As an adult gamer with limited time, I'm not a completionist at all, so I sympathize with feeling that achievements can be kind of naggy, like I'm being scolded for not investing further in a title. Part of that is just facing my own demons— like, Spider-Man PS4 was a super fun time; I played it through twice and got almost all the trophies, but I'm not a bad person for being done with it before getting the platinum. On the other hand, recently playing Nobody Saves The World, I've actually come to enjoy the little mini Form Quests that it gives you— you have to complete something like 200 of these to progress the main story (they award stars that are needed to open key dungeon doors), but more importantly, they encourage you to engage with the mix-and-match abilities system that the game offers, which preps you with the mindset that is needed to take on certain late-game challenges. Into The Breach is another excellent title that has in-game completion tracking, encouraging you to get a 2-, 3-, and 4-island victory with each set of mechs, and awarding unlocks at certain milestones of those. So I think I slightly resent but am happy to ignore "bolted on" achievements that are purely observational, but I also appreciate some games that do more with achievement-like challenges in terms of pushing the player to try new strategies.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > Into The Breach is another excellent title that has in-game completion tracking, encouraging you to get a 2-, 3-, and 4-island victory with each set of mechs, and awarding unlocks at certain milestones of those. I f'ing hated the achievement-based unlocks in Into The Breach. If you want to gate content behind beating the game at certain difficulties or something, I guess that's fine, but to do it with arbitrary numbers of random bullshit objectives, many of them luck based, was annoying as hell.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    > I f'ing hated the achievement-based unlocks in Into The Breach. That's a fair perspective. For my part, I felt pretty consistently when I lost an ITB run that I deserved it— I hadn't lost to a heartless RNG, I had lost because I made a wrong choice, and the scenario would have been beatable if I'd made different tradeoffs. I think what I liked about the progressive unlocking was that I was never overwhelmed by too much choice upfront as happens in some games (think old school RPGs with a spreadsheet character builder as the first screen), and I felt when I did get a new team unlocked like I'd really put in the effort and earned it; I was excited to try it out in a way that I wouldn't be if I just had them all available from the beginning (or unlocked via some other means that I hadn't worked for).
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      > That's a fair perspective. For my part, I felt pretty consistently when I lost an ITB run that I deserved it— I hadn't lost to a heartless RNG, I had lost because I made a wrong choice, and the scenario would have been beatable if I'd made different tradeoffs. ....which has absolutely nothing to do with achievements? I agree, the game design was fine in this regard, it is the gating of unlocks behind arbitrary objectives relying on luck that I have a problem with[0]. If they just gated each team behind beating the game with a previous team I wouldn't have complained. [0] Specifically, unlocking certain characters relied on luck based events, as did even having an attempt at some of the achievements. All achievements need to be unlocked for the final team, which I never got because fuck that noise.
brnt 5y ago
They are a meta game and feel like cheap way to encourage me to play more. A game, at least that's how I prefer it, should just be so good that I will want to play more. Games should trust their own quality, and let the player have their own experience of it, not incentivize or normalize the experience.
egypturnash 5y ago
I am mostly take-it-or-leave-it on achievements but I keep the notifications turned off because it's super annoying to get to a big dramatic moment in the story and have an achievement with a dumb punny name pop up. It kinda ruins the reward of "getting this cool story beat" with the supposed reward of "one more virtual trophy". There was a time when I would have detested them because they would be constant teases to the part of me that wants to get 100% on any game I start playing, but that was before I sunk the time into getting the astoundingly disappointing reward for getting 130% in Crash Bandicoot 2 and swore off ever doing that again for a game that wasn't pure joy to play.
account42 5y ago
I think achievements can sometimes push you into playing the game in a way that is less fun than what you would have otherwise done. The opposite can be true too of course, but still for people that a predisposed to want to "complete" things they will inevitably run into bad experiences. One variant of that problem is achievements for certain endings or outcomes that feel like discouraging you from choosing your own. Another problem is not inherent with achievements but but with the common implementation: For immersive games a popup even if it is show only a short time can really take you out of the experience. On the other hand, it is possible to inegrate the achievement popups into the experience like the "The Part Where He Kills You" achievement in Portal 2 that adds of the comedic effect of the cutscene it appears in. Overall, there are definitely games where achievements take more away than they add. Unfortunately they seem to get added to almost everything just due to cargo culting, because they also serve as telemetry or even player demand. Platforms should at least give you the option to never show them.

TulliusCicero 5y ago

I feel similarly sometimes myself. It's like those studies on giving money to little kids when they draw. You're doing something for the intrinsic reward, the joy of playing, and now they've slapped on some extrinsic reward you didn't ask for. So the game makes you feel, on some level, that you're doing it for the extrinsic reward, and it saps some of the intrinsic joy you felt earlier. https://www.spring.org.uk/2021/07/intrinsic-motivation.php https://www.spring.org.uk/2021/07/intrinsic-motivation.php > So, those who had previously liked drawing (high intrinsic motivation) were less motivated once they expected to be rewarded for the activity. > In fact the expected reward reduced the amount of spontaneous drawing the children did by half.

mikepurvis 5y ago

As an adult gamer with limited time, I'm not a completionist at all, so I sympathize with feeling that achievements can be kind of naggy, like I'm being scolded for not investing further in a title. Part of that is just facing my own demons— like, Spider-Man PS4 was a super fun time; I played it through twice and got almost all the trophies, but I'm not a bad person for being done with it before getting the platinum. On the other hand, recently playing Nobody Saves The World, I've actually come to enjoy the little mini Form Quests that it gives you— you have to complete something like 200 of these to progress the main story (they award stars that are needed to open key dungeon doors), but more importantly, they encourage you to engage with the mix-and-match abilities system that the game offers, which preps you with the mindset that is needed to take on certain late-game challenges. Into The Breach is another excellent title that has in-game completion tracking, encouraging you to get a 2-, 3-, and 4-island victory with each set of mechs, and awarding unlocks at certain milestones of those. So I think I slightly resent but am happy to ignore "bolted on" achievements that are purely observational, but I also appreciate some games that do more with achievement-like challenges in terms of pushing the player to try new strategies.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> Into The Breach is another excellent title that has in-game completion tracking, encouraging you to get a 2-, 3-, and 4-island victory with each set of mechs, and awarding unlocks at certain milestones of those. I f'ing hated the achievement-based unlocks in Into The Breach. If you want to gate content behind beating the game at certain difficulties or something, I guess that's fine, but to do it with arbitrary numbers of random bullshit objectives, many of them luck based, was annoying as hell.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  > I f'ing hated the achievement-based unlocks in Into The Breach. That's a fair perspective. For my part, I felt pretty consistently when I lost an ITB run that I deserved it— I hadn't lost to a heartless RNG, I had lost because I made a wrong choice, and the scenario would have been beatable if I'd made different tradeoffs. I think what I liked about the progressive unlocking was that I was never overwhelmed by too much choice upfront as happens in some games (think old school RPGs with a spreadsheet character builder as the first screen), and I felt when I did get a new team unlocked like I'd really put in the effort and earned it; I was excited to try it out in a way that I wouldn't be if I just had them all available from the beginning (or unlocked via some other means that I hadn't worked for).
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    > That's a fair perspective. For my part, I felt pretty consistently when I lost an ITB run that I deserved it— I hadn't lost to a heartless RNG, I had lost because I made a wrong choice, and the scenario would have been beatable if I'd made different tradeoffs. ....which has absolutely nothing to do with achievements? I agree, the game design was fine in this regard, it is the gating of unlocks behind arbitrary objectives relying on luck that I have a problem with[0]. If they just gated each team behind beating the game with a previous team I wouldn't have complained. [0] Specifically, unlocking certain characters relied on luck based events, as did even having an attempt at some of the achievements. All achievements need to be unlocked for the final team, which I never got because fuck that noise.

brnt 5y ago

They are a meta game and feel like cheap way to encourage me to play more. A game, at least that's how I prefer it, should just be so good that I will want to play more. Games should trust their own quality, and let the player have their own experience of it, not incentivize or normalize the experience.

egypturnash 5y ago

I am mostly take-it-or-leave-it on achievements but I keep the notifications turned off because it's super annoying to get to a big dramatic moment in the story and have an achievement with a dumb punny name pop up. It kinda ruins the reward of "getting this cool story beat" with the supposed reward of "one more virtual trophy". There was a time when I would have detested them because they would be constant teases to the part of me that wants to get 100% on any game I start playing, but that was before I sunk the time into getting the astoundingly disappointing reward for getting 130% in Crash Bandicoot 2 and swore off ever doing that again for a game that wasn't pure joy to play.

account42 5y ago

I think achievements can sometimes push you into playing the game in a way that is less fun than what you would have otherwise done. The opposite can be true too of course, but still for people that a predisposed to want to "complete" things they will inevitably run into bad experiences. One variant of that problem is achievements for certain endings or outcomes that feel like discouraging you from choosing your own. Another problem is not inherent with achievements but but with the common implementation: For immersive games a popup even if it is show only a short time can really take you out of the experience. On the other hand, it is possible to inegrate the achievement popups into the experience like the "The Part Where He Kills You" achievement in Portal 2 that adds of the comedic effect of the cutscene it appears in. Overall, there are definitely games where achievements take more away than they add. Unfortunately they seem to get added to almost everything just due to cargo culting, because they also serve as telemetry or even player demand. Platforms should at least give you the option to never show them.