Achievement ideas

Gameplay
#1

We already know that there is going to be an achievement for visiting all conciliation crosses on the map. What would your achievement ideas be? Here are mine:

  • Fair Play awarded for not playing the backgammon minigame in a save-load style. Provided that we can play backgammon in Act I. Or cards, maybe?
  • Jack of All Trades to a character that always sharpens his own swords himself, makes his own potions and so on.
  • Mountain Pilgrim for visiting all the hills on the map. (Because in 1419 the Hussites were organizing sort of “pilgrimages to the hilltops” and they were preaching there)
  • Hitchhiker’s guide for leaving the room in which the game starts (after the hero wakes up) through the window. Again, assuming we can climb through windows, but I assume we can, since there are going to be some stealth mechanics in the game.
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Achievement ideas cont
Achievements, trading cards, profile backgrounds
#2

I personally don’t like it (achievements) because it doesn’t make sense to have achievements in games. whoever came up with the idea must think that it’s really necessary to get some meaningless rewards from playing a game. There is only one game which I personally really liked for its achievements because it was making fun of it. This game is called Stanleys Parable. For example you have to knock on a door five times and then the narrator of the game was making fun of you because you thought that you would now get this achievement but this is not so easy because you have to do more tasks than that like knocking on other doors, going to the printer, knocking on another door again and walk on a desk. Really funny, the way it was done.

Any other game ( like the ones of TellTale Games) fail because they just give you achievements for normal game progression. So I’m asking: What is the deal with achievements? Why should a game need that?

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#3

I agree with you on the point of the TellTale Games adventures having achievements. Story driven games like that do not need achievements, but I think achievements make a lot of sense in sandboxy games. And in games like KCD I would not like to see achievements you get for story progression but rather achievements for stuff you do in your ‘spare time’ like the ones @bebuce suggested.
You picked every type of flower in the game? Great, here’s an achievement to show off to your steam friends. This adds some kind of fun competition to a single player game that you can either ignore or attend.
So I would certainly like to see achievements in KCD, but real achievements you get for achieving something and not just doing something everybody else does. Something you can really be proud of!

#4

Also, I’m not a total fan of achievements
 but 
 sometimes it can be quite funny and surprising.
E.g. when doing something stupid many times over, and therefore getting a satirical/ironical achievement -without knowing there was such- 
 taht can actually be quite funny
 at least in my sense of (some) humour

On the other hand getting a “yaaay First steps”-Award-thingy for pressing the forward-button a few times
 well
 that’s simply “meh”
 Nowadays everyone tries to “spice up” his/her game with boring achievements (like the latter mentioned). Most of 'em weren’t even read. ANd also with achiebing those you couldn’t even brush your hair up a bit by telling your friends “you pressed the forward-button several times” (to stick to the mentioned example.) Because that is, what you certainly will do in a roleplaying game. Going forward.

So, well, if you get to achieve some really unsual things, say like, getting eaten up by some beasty pigs maybe several times, and then getting some achievement like “pearls before the swines” [forgot the English version of this phrase 
in German it goes like “Perlen vor die SĂ€ue”]
 That could be actually a fun thing to do. At least if you’re not going to plan such things to happen, so they can happen eventually and by chance/accident
 even several times, though.

Finalizing the thoughts: Achievements can be a fun-thing to have, but thay should be well thought over
 And have at least some sense of getting a laugh or two, or maybe some lessons to be taught
 Otherwise, the invested ressources would’ve been spend elsewhere much wiser


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#5

The question is: Why shouldn’t you include someting as easy as achievements which is liked by many players while it didn’t take away anthing from players who don’t like it?

Achievements won’t harm you if you don’t like them. Just ignore them. But some people are happy to get them and to “hunt them down”. They have fun in doing so. Why not just letting them? It’s really just a minor task for a developer to come up with some nice ideas for achievements and to include them into the game


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#6

As said: some achievements are nicely done. However I’d like to gain something. Humour is a gain because it’s entertainment and games are entertaining. I don’t have the attitude for collecting or competing for a whole set of achievements. And games 10 years ago had no achievements at all and were still enjoyable, even if you didn’t know what you can see in the later game stages. If you check achievements beforehand, you get to know what you can do and therefore spoil the fun yourself. You’ll also check achievements to see what you might have missed. Then you play for the achievement instead for the joy and entertainment.

#7

From the game design perspective, achievements serve the following purposes (I am making this up as I go, so it is probably not a definitive list ; )

  • Showcasing aspects of the game
  • Pointing out nonobvious mechanics
  • Adding social aspects to the game

Showcasing aspects of the game

Our map is large and beautiful? Let’s make an achievement for traveling it a lot and searching some stupid little conciliation crosses.

We have a lot of pickable flowers? Let’s make an achievement from that. This helps to get more value from the game assets. Every asset had to be modelled. Without achievements like this, people might explore less and therefore some assets might go unseen, which is a waste of developers time.

Pointing out nonobvious mechanics

Say the player is able not only to steal from NPC’s inventory, but also to “steal into”. So we can have an achievement for solving a fight by placing some poisoned food into enemy inventory and waiting a bit. The possibility of this may be hard to spot and the achievement highlights that.

There are four ways how to solve a particular quest? Let the people know by making an achievement that counts down the ones they discovered.

In Team Fortress 2, a flame thrower is an effective weapon against cloaked spies. Make achievement for using it that way. In the very same game, engineers can rocket jump using their automatic turret. Another achievement candidate.

There is a line in a quest that people tend to miss, all the crafted dialogues going to waste and so on? Let’s add an achievement that will make people looking.

There is an interesting statistic that a vast majority of feature requests for Microsoft Office that the users submit is already implemented in the software, they just don’t know about it.

Adding social aspects to the game

@YuusouAmazing Many games have some story driven achievements. You get it for getting to particular points in the story. The reason is that your achievement list is usually public, or at least visible to your Steam contacts. This adds social competitive aspects to playing otherwise a single player game: My friend got further along than me? This might not stay! The achievements tend to have cryptic names as to not spoil the story for people who did not yet made it this far.

Badges

It might make more sense to call it say badges, instead of achievements. Precisely for the reason that from the player perspective they oftentimes are not really meaningful achievements, as @NathanielBlack mentions. The StackOverflow site does it this way. According to the site founders, one of important roles of badges on that site is to make the users know what types of behaviour are encouraged.

What about Challenges?

There are some problems with achievements. First, there tends to be a lot of them and choosing which one to do next is a cognitive burden. Second, people need to go actively looking through them. Third, there isn’t any sense of urgency in completing them.

So. What about having Challenges in the game? At every moment only few of them, say five, will be visible and the player has to fulfill at least some of them before being offered another set. Say, your character wakes up and you are thinking “What am I going to do next”. Challenges to the rescue. Say this pops up:

  • Go see the sunrise over the lake
  • Leave the inn before the rooster sounds for the third time
  • Do not tread on black cobbles the whole day
  • Steal from the same merchant three times in three different towns

And you either pick something of dismiss it.

Meaningful for our in game character?

Some ingame events which may be relatively mundane for the player may be actually very novel for our in game character. Say first real sword duel, first kill and so on. Not so much for me, since this is not the first game I played, I killed thousands of people before.

Maybe as part of this “achievement” we could get a journal entry where our character would describe his own feelings and observations: salty stench known only from pig slaughter before, sticky fluid on the sword, mixture of regret and victory


This might be a bad idea, because the essence of RPG is that I am becoming the hero in the game and having some intermediary between me and the game who has their own feelings might be distracting, the reason why FPS was chosen over third person camera, but whatever. Just saying.

That’s from the Bible. Which is probably the reason why it is totally international. We have it in Czech too.

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#8

QFT. Often enough, I use achievements when talking about games with my friends to see how far along they are so I don’t spoil something that happens further along. Or just to generally track their progress.

#9

Just remembered that there is a fun Achievement episode on Extra Credits.

#10

Hammer Time Successfully kill an opponent using a Hammer or Blunt weapon

Home run Successfully decapitate an opponent

Drunk Leprechaun Steal something of great value without getting caught

#11

I was asking about achievments during the campaign on KS and i’ve been told that achievments will be there, at least on Steam. So that’s (hopefully) sure.

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#12

You’re just telling me that you don’t like achievements. And you tell me that everyone should experience games the way you do.

You miss the fact that playing for achievements and playing for joy and entertainment is exactly the same thing for many people. Achievements are to many people just another layer of challenge, something to achieve for itself or something to achieve while going along in the story.

There is no proper way how to enjoy a game. Everyone has different tastes and opinions and games just offer possibilities. The more possibilites available, the more options each player has, the more ways of enjoying a video game. You may think that playing a video game to gain achievements is the wrong motivation of playing it. I say that it’s not up to you to judge on that.

I guess the real problem here is that you seem to lack the discipline to not look at the achievements list while you want to play the game for its story or something like this. But that’s not a problem of the developers. They’re not there to teach you how to play a game or how to discipline yourself. That’s up to you. That’s the same flawed argumentation as with difficulty settings. Different difficulty settings just give players more options how to enjoy a game and how to make it a better experience for them. If you don’t have the discipline to choose a higher difficulty setting that’s a problem of your personality or character and not a problem with game design. Perhaps in that case you should work on your discipline yourself instead of asking the developers to cater the game exactly to your way of gaming while locking every different opinion or way of gaming out. :wink:

#13

Nothing of that sort. The way I read it @YuusouAmazing is saying he does not like achievements as they usually are implemented in games:

Achievements tend to be added to the game as an afterthought just before shipping, they tend to be awarded for unavoidable in-game actions and therefore are totally meaningless, or they take the form of cheap, poorly thought out challenges designed to artificially prolong the gameplay. Such achievements exploit the Skinner box mechanics to keep us playing way over what we would in a clear state of mind consider enjoyable. Sometimes their names spoil more than is strictly necessary. These rubbish achievements only clutter the list and divert attention from the well designed meaningful parts of the game. We do not want to have heaps of rubbish “achievements” in KC:D, that is something we all can agree on.

RPG games have a lot of knobs and levers that the designers can use to artificially set the gameplay length. There is no need to involve also achievements in this.

Do you know Feng Shui? It is a Chinese pseudoscience for which this idea is central that the environment you live in has strong influence on how you live. Any change in how you live has then start with changing the environment you live in. It can be applied in architecture and interior design. Regarding furniture arrangement, we are usually in position to make changes and nobody who is willing to put a fridge in the bedroom deserves sympathy for struggling with midnight overeating. On the other hand, we are not in position to rearrange the Steam UI. If the design put up by the developers includes them throwing spoilers all around, I think I can be excused for accidentally tripping over some and then being righteously irritated. We should be allowed to take advantage of achievements, if only for checking on how far our friends got, while at the same time being able to enjoy the story unfolding as we play along. If they are not able to design for that, they are bad designers.

#14

That’s not the same thing. Achievements are not about gameplay length. They are about adding another layer of challenge (and/or fun).

But the most crucial point is that achievements in general don’t take anything away from people who don’t enjoy them but add another layer of challenge and fun to those who do enjoy them.

Of course I would vote for “clever” achievements. But most games have a wide array of achievements for a good reason. Some are easy to get, some are hard to get, some are really hard to get. RPGs are a perfect fit for achievements since they are based on player’s decisions and actions and achievements can additionally reward you for tough or uncommon ways of playing. Achievements also can be an additional incentive for a second, third, fourth or whatever playthrough to “get all of them”, especially with RPGs and branching stories.

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#15

Right, having an achievement for completing the whole game say in a stealthy way is sure meaningful. Especially because combat system is one of the main features, so people who voluntarily choose to avoid combat should get some award at the end.

#16

Well, with a good game design (and a broad scope) different ways of playing should lead to different outcomes in the game: people should interact with you on a different way, there should be different options to proceed, maybe you should even see the whole story from a different angle because as a stealth guy you’re likely not at the same spot as the fighter or bard guy
Stuff like that should make different approaches to the gameplay more interesting and they should add depth to the RPG elements of the game.

Achievements can only add an additional layer, as I said. They shouldn’t be used as an excuse for lazy or uncreative gameplay and game design (as you said above)
 :wink:

#17

If I am honest I am not fussed either way about acheivements and I must admit I only tend to acheivement hunt on games I am finding boring to play, if a gams good I am so immeresed in it that I barly notice the achivement notices popping up

#18

Achievement Ideas------ Who cares?

#19

I do. Don’t be rude, kid.

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#20

Hello, my name is JBN and I am an achievement who
 lover. BUT I only love meaningful achievements or the trickiest one. Something like ‘Use only unarmed combat againts Frank Horrigan’ type or I’ve made No Kill & Ghost & No Magic at once in Dishonored.

Not a fan of ‘You have completed chapter 3!’, but these have at least information value for developers (‘Only 33% of our players make it to the Chapter 3? We are doing something wrong!’), so I can tolerate them, but there is no love.

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