The game is going on Xbox and maybe Playstation… There will be achievements and maybe trophies… It’s not going to not have them…
Few more ideas
Russell’s paradox An achievement achieved by achieving all the available achievements.
Singin’ in the rain Making a bard go outdoors while it’s raining.
Much blowe For one hit killing a dog. Shiba would do best, but I guess there weren’t any in Europe back then.
Burning the bridges Awarded for attempting to burn a bridge. Obviously bridges in the game are going to be indestructible, players should be compensated for trying.
Hacking on the threads For attempting to destroy a bridge with the sword.
Blast in the past Firing at the bridge during the final castle siege.
Disassembly For trying to use some construction tool on the bridge. Crowbar and so on.
Ants marching For managing to maneuver guards into marching over the bridge.
Stress test The player puts at least five horse carriages on the bridge at the same time. (Because proof load testing of bridges is often done with military tanks.)
You’re gonna go far Meta achievement, for attempting at least 3 different ways of breaking the bridge.
X bridges of KCD where X is the actual number of bridges in the game, for completing an Eulerian trail over all of them.
Bridge troll For blocking a bridge so that an NPC could not pass.
Jim Bridger For being pursued by a large number of enemies and killed.
Crossed a bridge for crossing a bridge when you came to it.
Then there should be an achievement for managing to avoid getting any achievement for at least 10 minutes into the game.
Merge the quest system with the achievement system
Every quest has an achievement tracking it across playthroughs and every achievement is a quest of sorts, its completion will grant XP or count towards improving some in-game skill. For subsequent playthroughs player would have the option to have these bonuses applied to their new character as well.
Making achievements moddable
The game would support a number of triggers that the achievement mod could register for. There needs to be a system of public voting on achievements to weed off the interesting ones. Using triggers would guarantee that achievement tracking is lightweight on system resources. That way the game can track progress on almost all submitted achievement mods, maybe even before the player opts in, as if all were installed at the same time.
Just a crazy idea. Since Steam Workshop does not support it and probably never will, it would require some custom infrastructure.
3 Likes
You love your bridges, don’t you? 
As a huge trophyhunter I can’t wait to see what kind of trophies will be in the game. I also hope for a minimum of 50 trophies and not only 30 or so like in some games. Some ideas:
A Mistake Is Quickly Made: Kill an innocent bystander.
Accomplished The Impossible You found your way home drunk before passing out.
Bad Luck All Around: You killed your own horse.
Can You Spare Some Change: Obtain 10.000 currency.
One Fist Of Iron One Of Fist Of Steel Win a duel with your bare hands.
It’s Only A Fleshwound: Survive with only 10% of your health.
Robin Hood Would Be Proud Won an archery contest by achieving the maximum score.
Run You Fools: Escape an assasination attempt on yourself.
They Told You Not To Play With Fire: Set a building ablaze.
Who Needs Excalibur: Forge a master blade.
You Are Victorious: Capture a keep.
You Have My Axe!: Kill a 100 soldiers with an axe.
You Should Have Bought A Horse: Travel a distance of X while over-encumbered
4 Likes
The trouble with achievements is that in most recent games they are just pointless. Ridiculously so.
“Rat killer - you just killed 10 rats. Wow!”
“Rat scourge - you just killed 50 rats. Cool!”
"Achiever - you just achieved your first achievement! Youre a badass, man!"
What sort of achievement is in this, really? (None, don’t answer…)
I think that some crossover between achievements and perks that do actually give you some benefit would be much better - like in the games such as Alpha Protocol (or others, this one just popped up in my mind) where they don’t just pointlessly inform you about something totally unimportant you have done (scored over 50 critical hits with a pistol… really important to know, yeah), but also reflect your character’s progress through that a give you some minor bonus to the respective skill or ability (pistol handling).
At least that is a sort of a real “achievement” that has some sense. The word “Perk” still sounds somewhat better, though. “Achievements” are simply overused.
Also, they should at least show up only after you unlock them, not the whole achievement chart being visible from the very beginning somewhere in the menu with retailed instructions what to do like for a little baby. To avoid mindless grinding and trophy hunting. (People will always make a chart of their own somewhere on a wiki, but at least that’s their own call, if they want it so hard…)
This is no WoW in medieval Bohemia. It’s supposed to be much more sophisticated. 
1 Like
To be perfectly honest I want my achievements to be pointless. To my mind, pointless = optional, a way for developers to encourage players to do something they would otherwise never have done. To have an in-game benefit for doing so will suddenly mean I can’t safely ignore achievements if I wish to do so and only cherry-pick those which look fun - they stop being optional and become a chore.
Losing is not a shame: You surrendered to an enemy in battle.
A Tale of true chivalry: You spared the life of an enemy.
Courtly love is better than nothing: A noble woman rejected you after you had courted her with a self-made song.
Iron doesn’t float: You drowned while wearing heavy armour.
You win some, you lose some: You’ve won a battle and you’ve lost one.
Let’s eat an humble pie: You apologized for breaking the law in order to save your life.
Rock, paper, scissors - reversed: You killed an armoured enemy with bow and arrow, a rider on horseback with a dagger and an archer with a war hammer or mace.
When two people quarrel, a third rejoices: You waited until a duel is over and killed the winner.
Pearls before swine: You tried to bribe somebody but get arrested instead.
Harm set, harm get: You killed yourself with one of your own traps.
The purse is mightier than the sword: You’ve paid somebody to kill someone instead of doing it yourself.
Tit for tat: You saved the life of a friend and he saved yours in return.
A true fabliaux: You betrayed a noble man with his wife
3 Likes
what’s the point of achievements you’re going to have to do in the game anyway?
it’s like taking the most pointless feature in gaming and making it even more pointless.
When they’re tied to Steam or similar, you can use them to track progress of your friends (or hostages, in your case :-P) so you don’t happen to accidentaly spoil the game for you. Devs also quite often use these unavoidable achievements to see how players play their game so they have easier way of knowing which areas of the game are problematic - when, say, only 5% of players finish a relatively obvious sidequest, you probably did something wrong.
2 Likes
You have right to not like them, you can call them pointless, but fact is, majority of players likes the achievments and wants them. Inluding me. And i don’t care if one will be “You start the game, nice” and second “You found a secret passage to the castle”. I just like all kinds of achievments. I do not hunt them, but i’m happy when i unlock some 
Things is, achievments can make some players happy and the others don’t have to track them or use 'em at all. It’s win win.
except for poor coder who has to tie these achievements to actions in game
I’m sure it’s exceptionally difficult, especially in an RPG which tracks all your actions regardless. Making an ‘achievements(CHEEVOS.10BANDITS)’ call once the already tracked conditions are met can take as much as 30 seconds to code.
Yeah, yeah, I’m making it sound a bit easier than it is and you do need a mechanic to track this stuff in place, but I wager most RPGs will have these systems in place regardless of whether or not achievements are implemented, for many other … RPGy… Purposes.
And I imagine it doesn’t only apply for RPGs, most games in existence most likely have ways of logging events in place already for debugging purposes, so might as well make an end-user benefit out of those.
Why on earth could anyone not ignore them and would have to start pursuing them? That’s all purely your own decision, every time.
What I proposed si something that you don’t really have to pay any attention to, it would still just unlock itself on its own as you go, if you stick to improving yourself in something etc. The game is going to have some training-based leveling system along with a system of perks getting “achieved” along the way, so that’s essentially the direction I’m pointing in.
Contrary to just pestering you with meaningless point-outs about stuff that you already know you have just done (or don’t really need to know for any actual purpose), making it look like the game just has you for a dumbass, it at least gives the achievements some purpose by contibuting somehow to your character progress which you are making anyway (speaking of some small bonus like +5% to something at most, nothing major or pursuit-worthy).
I don’t mean anything that might feel as a necessity to get, only something that would give the whole “achievement” thing at least a bit of some actual purpose to be there, other than just existing for its own sake, without any real addition for the game.
Because THAT is a waste of time better spent on something that really contributes to the gameplay (which makes it funny, considering how lots of people here like to scorn many other ideas brought up on this forum for being a waste of time and resources for the game’s development… and then some of them start coming up with “achievements”).
So basically you’re saying there should be achievements tied to progression. That does’t change much, you know - if the progression system has been designed with some form of perks in mind, you’re going to get them regardless of getting or not getting an achievement. I absolutely don’t have a problem with that. However, that could only apply to achievements directly tied to your character progression, like “Get friggin’ good at swordfighting!” - those are just about the least interesting and fun achievements to do, and it wouldn’t leave much room for stuff like ‘Burn Bridges’, right, @bebuce? Speaking of…
If what you are proposing is designing a system of in-game rewards specifically for achievements, like the above quote, you’re not talking natural progression - and that I have an issue with, for several reasons.
a) Optionality. Previously pointed out in-game incentive to get the achievements. I absolutely hate when games do that. There should never be any additional incentive for achievements than achievements themselves - what about people who just ignore achievements altogether? What about those who turned off any notifications or their presence altogether? Especially those who like to powergame will suddenly be forced to take notice. Just no, the entirety of character progression should be tied into a singular, transparent system, most definitely not divided between actual, in-game progression model and some weird, platform-based progression model.
b) Balance. Even the simplest RPG systems are very difficult to balance, and you can either give players bonuses so small they might as well not be in the game (and even those can get out of hand mind you), or you can give players noticeable bonuses (+5% definitely counts in this category) which will then need to be counted on when designing the entire system. This is especially troublesome for systems with transparent bonuses, like what bebuce suggested - it sort of works in Borderlands 2, but even there a player who has played for a significant portion of time will start off with a character more powerful than his, say, coop partner. KCD doesn’t have coop, but it will need to have a balanced in-game world.
c) Implementation. This sort of ties in with the balance part as well. Making achievements which actually have an in-game benefit is helluvalot more difficult than just doing achievements for the sake of achievements. Your argument is that people complain about Warhorse not putting their resources into something worthless and then turn around and support pointless achievements - well, I believe they do so because achievements are a system where benefits massively outweight the costs*. Most games already track the stuff you get achievements for - numbers of killed opponents, successful hits, that kind of stuff. They need to, either for debugging or because you get achievements for something that just sort of … Happens. So implementing achievements themselves tend to be quite trivial, especially if you have a framework such as Steamworks in place. Implementing achievements with in-game benefits would, however, be far more demanding. Rewards would need to be carefully designed and balanced to work properly, not to mention you would need an internal system to manage them, i. e. outside of the one already made for you with Steamworks.
*I even know of a bunch of people who, when given a choice between a game with and wirthout achievements, will buy the one with them. That’s how important it is to implement them nowadays.
Well, this obviously sounds as a sort of people who would probably pick games like Battlefield 4 where they can spend all the time honing their good feeeling over the scores they “achieved”, instead of a game like KCD, centered on a thoroughly developed gameplay and story experience, not on players competing over who got what and who got more of it. This is something that really doesn’t have any point for an RPG like this. This is stuff for MMOs.
My point about achievements (even though I may not have explained it well) is … make achievements, whatever, I don’t really care, but at least make achievements that are worthy being called that. Not something that vast majority of the players can and will do easily with their left hand during their gameplay. At least make achievements that really require some above average amount of activity to do and difficulty to overcome, so that the result can truly be considered an achievement.
Any rewards from casual activities and choices in the game would better be tied to the regular character progress and perks resulting from that in a way similar to the Alpha Protocol, where this really works well.
1 Like
The unavoidable, The optional and The inspiring…
…and Meta-achievments as in Stanley parable or Spec Ops: The Line(it’s cheap now on Steam, go get it!) are some great thing too! There’s much more to achievements than critics of them aknowledge. Sure, kill “50 bandits”, “produce 100 swords” and “find all books” are rather dull. But that’s not all achievements are capable of.
1 Like
While I normally quite like achievements, I don’t think they would work in KCD in the classical way.
I can’t really imagine how a popup like “Hooray, you killed 100 sheep” in the corner of my screen would made a realistic medieval rpg any more believable.
This is not to say that I wouldn’t want to see any in the game, pretty much for the reasons already given in this thread (feedback for devs, bragging rights on steam, more people buy it etc), but I would like to see achievements implemented in a meaningful and achievable way.
Example: You’ve killed 10 bandits. You don’t immediately get an achievement-popup, but when you talk to the captain of the troops in the castle the next time he says something like * “My god, you really hate bandits, don’t you? I’ll tell Lord [whoever rules] that you made travel in these parts much safer.”*
And then you get your achievement.
This might not be feasible for all achievements, but it would definitely make them more unobtrusive and less immersion breaking.
At least, if there need to be “classical” achievements, I’d like to be able to turn of the notifications.
Also, @bebuce, for the “X bridges of KCD” achievement I want a link to this: http://xkcd.com/1170
On the contrary. A lot of people percieve gaming as a social activity - you should know something about that, after all we are talking about concepts of SP games on a discussion board. With that in mind, the games you have named - MMOs, MP games and similar - already have this social component directly built into them. That doesn’t apply to SP games, and there are people who value the social component just as much as playing the game itself - that’s the group to whom achievements can sell a game, especially a singleplayer one.
As for the rest of your post, yeah, no argument there.
There is a point to the first statement. The “Kill X of Y” achievements are definitely more suited for (M)MO games than for single player story driven RPG. I googled an article suggesting that much. Also, in that article there is interesting remark about “achievement optimization”, aiming at the casual player vs. achievement hunter vs. some obsessed no-lifer.
On the other hand, KCD is also a sand box. And for sandbox experience achievements are kind of an usual part of it.
I assume that the notifications are the main (and more or less only?) issue people have with achievements. An attention grabbing pop-up at the bottom right saying you did something you did not know had any special relevance at that time. I would like to have the possibility to disable the popup but still have my achievements counted in the background.
Another idea might be to add the achievement list to the game. Have say a notice board that tracks your achievement progress, so you need to go to a village to see how you are doing. Or maybe have it as a journal page, with the possibility to set up to five “currently worked on” achievements that you want to get the popups about and have them on the top of the list for easy reference.
There is probably going to be a quest like this in the game. There are bandits terrorizing the area and if you dispose of them, you get a reward from whoever assigned it and goods in shops will be cheaper (because no bandits ~> easier trade). If we can have a cool quest for something, why bother with a meager achievement?
True enough. Since the RPG system for KCD is probably finished by now, I assume the developers will not want to mess with it any more because of some achievements.
No, it is not. It can piggyback on what is already in place for Steam. At the moment the achievement is triggered, it would just add some Xp and so on to the players character. At the point of creating a new character, it would go through all the achieved achievements and offer the player to get the bonuses for their new character as well. If you want tighter integration and more features, it can be implemented using the quest system, which is already in place in an RPG, so no big problems here.
Anyways, as one frequently quoted Czech person said: He who wants, looks for ways. He who wants not, looks for excuses.
Can you give an example or two? I looked up the list for Spec Ops and I couldn’t find anything inspiring in that. Maybe because I haven’t played the game… (And I have no intention to.)
That’s note quite what I meant, maybe my example wasn’t chosen so good after all. I don’t really want to see quest completion achievements, rather I’m hoping for achievements as “emergent mini-quests” (or whatever you’d like to call it), where you basically realize afterwards, because someone mentions something you did, that you did the “quest”.
So maybe not killing bandits, but more something like the mentioned “collect all different flowers”, where you don’t get a quest from someone * “Go and collect me 1 each of this list of flowers, for my cat is sick”, but if you’ve collected the flowers on your own and talk to some apothecary/monk/doctor, he could say * “that’s quite an impressive collection you’ve got there” and then you’d get your achievement (with or without popup)
I’m aware that this probably quite a bit more development work than just notifications, but I think it would be worth the effort.
3 Likes