Why Achievements Are Awesome!
Mummy Will Be So Proud!
Aaah… Achievements. Something my good friend and fellow blogger OwningXylophone knows a lot about, as he recently got more of them than anyone else in a competition he was taking part in, and ended up winning an assload of stuff. Achievements can be good because they can win you prizes, you see.
But they have the Xbox 360 community divided. Some are classed as “achievement whores”, social outcasts who spend every waking moment grinding away on the most ridiculous of tasks, only to be rewarded with an achievement and a slight gamerscore increase for their trouble. Others shun this way of life, playing as many games as possible from beginning to end while their “completion percentage” whittles away to nothing.
I’m firmly in the middle, although I have to admit that just lately I’ve been swaying more towards the “whore” way of life. Here’s why.
You see, all modern games have a story of some sort. You progress through it, passing various milestones along the way, until you reach the end. It is at this point when, on other systems without the achievement scheme, you put the box back on the shelf and move on to the next game. But not on the 360, oh no. Not if you’re a big dirty whore.
There are so many “ancilliary” things to do in modern games that the vast majority of people miss out on all the fun that could be had because they’re too busy concentrating on the story. Whether it be driving at 88mph in a thunderstorm in a DeLorean (PGR4), completing a level in a stupidly short amount of time (Sonic The Hedgehog, Zuma), or even launching a garden gnome into space (The Orange Box), game developers are now using achievements to encourage gamers to notice all the silly little things that kept them sane throughtout their game’s development cycle.
So, why did I bother completing Half-Life 2: Episode 2 with garden gnome in hand? Why am I taking part in some of the more ridiculously long rallies in DiRT even though I finished the career long ago? And why, oh why did I set up a race with my aforementioned fellow blogger in PGR4 just to do synchronised endos on motorbikes? Because the people who made the games thought that these things would be fun for me to do. And if they want me to keep playing my games long after I traditionally would have given up, squeezing every last drop value out of them, then I’ll keep on achievement whoring until I can whore no more!
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Update
Hello Kotaku readers! 
That’s strictly old-skool. Good stuff.
You should play Dead Rising sometime. Those acheivements are brutal. Transmissionary, anyone?
I played it! And I had a go at transmissionary once but missed one and got fed up with it. Never again!
Props to the people who have got it, though.
I am all for whoring, the only achievements i never do is “find all” achievements. After wasting hours on cracking down looking for those orbs from hell (missing 2 green ones). Even the great GTA4 had the annoying 200 pigeons achievements
That kind of grind is just not fun.
Haven’t even started on the pigeon achievement. The only “whoring” achievement I think I have is the COG tag one from GoW – I was missing two after the first playthrough, so I went and looked up their locations online and was sure to grab them when I played through again on insane.
Totally agreed on Crackdown, although I know my fellow teabagger OX has one of the orb achievements.
So Avatar and Multiplayer Perfect Dark achievements don’t count as whoring achievements?
Avatar achievements are “not letting Tim beat me” achievements! Surely you can understand the importance of that!?
Hello Dr. Nick!
I think its neither here nor there to be honest, Great games, as been said; GTA4, PGR4, HL2 etc they can help show lil cool things that can make you apriciate the game a tincy *lil* bit more, as for stupid ‘collect x ammount of y’ stuff may seem stupid but I suppose if your really /that/ bored it could kill a few hours.
Its all down to the individual really
I dont like them.
they are a waste of time.
And playing games generally isn’t?
It raises an interesting question: should one differentiate a “casual” achievement whore from a “hardcore” achievement whore? You know, someone who goes after achievements not for the sake of attaining perfection, but more for shits and giggles?
Ohh man,
This is the best…my friend always calls me an achievement whore. I’m such a whore that I rented NBA 2k6 and College Hoops 2K6 just for easy achievements (thats a little too far). I totally agree that it adds more gameplay to games that would otherwise just collect dust. I feel that the achievements also reflect your level of gaming expertise also (beat COD 4 on veteran, hardcore!). If I’m adding new friends from online games and they can’t even get some of the easy of achievements they seem almost lazy, or they just suck. I am such a WHORE! Avatar FTW!…..
ohh, and add me if you get a chance, gamertag – Construc
Later
LOL… Avatar. I like your style.
I love the achievement points! I find it hard playing my DS or Wii, because they don’t have achievement points. The only thing I wish is that Xbox would throw you a bone or something! Buying and playing all these games, spending loads of cash and wasting tons of time. We should be able to trade them in for Microsoft points – or just a point rewarding system – for every 1,000 i get 100 Ms points. That would be worth it.
Damn achievements…..
I love them….I admit it.
Being an old school gamer….I can’t help but want a higher score……
Achievements are a genius invention for modern gaming…….it does make you play your games more and in ways you wouldn’t have expected.
Insidious as they can be……you can’t help but love them.
You unimaginative morons.
You could just set goals for yourselves and complete these instead of whoring away at achivements.
And belive me, launching a gnome into space is not as fun when it tells you there is a gnome to be launched in space. It’s far more fun to launch the damn gnome without having a clue of it or how to do it. Cause WHEN you do it you really feel like you’ve done something extra and fun.
No folks you need to review what you are really doing. Really review it.
Funny you should say this, as since I wrote this over a year ago I’ve become much more of a Wii and arcade person, in fact my 360 gets very little love at all these days.
I do still think that achievements add something to games, something for people to aim for that isn’t just “get the highest score” as it has always traditionally been. I don’t think that people are unimaginitive or morons for trying to get them – in the hands of a good developer they can be good fun.
But anyway, rant away… I do think that these people with hundreds of thousands of points should get outside and see the bigger picture once in a while!
Oh, and despite all this I’m still proud of the gnome achievement. It was bloody hard work!
I honestly think achievements have ruined gaming for a lot of old-schoolers. While they are a cool way to finally show someone else how much you’ve done on a game without having too boot up your own save file, they draw people in to “ooh, let’s see how many points I can get,” and can lead to take out a lot of the fun (and a hell of a lot of the replay value) out of some games. Games like Final Fantasy and Borderlands, while a lot of fun, lose the replay value because you don’t get the satisfaction of seeing those achievements pop up when you do cool stuff the second time around. Some games (like the FIFA series) attempt to draw players into grinding their lives away for a huge, normally unaccomplished level of gaming (case in point being the 1-point achievement in FIFA 09 for playing 50 hours of the game). While they can be fun (and who could seriously say hearing that little ding/pop sound when they do something cool isn’t fun?), the achievements draw people out of the game they are playing and into the mundane task of “killing Jar-Jar 10 times” just for the extra 5G.