Achievement Unlocked

I have a confession to make. Whenever I put a new game into my 360, the first thing I do is have a look through the Achievement list. I’ll scroll down the list, see what you have to do to get those Gamerpoints, which are easily obtainable on the first playthrough. It makes me feel dirty and shallow, but when you’re a relatively new 360 owner, being faced with a Friends List full of mighty Gamerscores can make you feel a tad insignificant. So every point counts.

One thing that the Achievement list does tell me, though, is just how much effort the developers have put into them. It doesn’t take long to realise that 95% of all Achievements out there are variations on a theme - complete a level, collect something, get a new high score. Repetition is the key – and it’s boring.

I’m not saying I’m dead against ‘progress’ Achievements – after all, giving the player frequent rewards is a sure fire way to get them to keep playing. However, when the vast majority of Achievements in your game are made up of the sort of thing you’re going to be doing during the game anyway, then they cease to be achievements. Instead, I’d like to see such rewards given a relatively low number of points, and more focus given to the more difficult or obscure activities.

Japanese games are most often guilty of unimaginative rewards, with the average title containing between 5-20 different Achievements based on doing the same thing over and over. This is fine for the Japanese market, where gamers have the mindset for grinding and lengthy unlock processes. Indeed, these are some of the hardest Achievements to get – not necessarily because they’re difficult, but because of the sheer amount of time needed to invest to get them.

Western gamers, though, tend to need something new and shiny to spur them on, and Achievements are the literal carrot on the string for the short of attention span (including myself, I’ll admit). Having a good mix of campaign, collection, and multiplayer Achievements is rare, particularly if you want to give your game an acceptable difficulty curve.

It’s getting on a bit now, but Crackdown is still a good example of Achievements done right. Sure, there are the usual progress ones for going through the game as you normally would, but they’re worth a couple of hundred points, at most. The real meat of the points come from exploration and messing around in the world – the player is actively encouraged to drive into, blow up and jump off stuff in many different ways, and is rewarded accordingly.

Instead of forcing gamers to play in a specific way, or to struggle through the campaign on the hardest difficulty setting, Achievements should be there to encourage them to try new things. More Achievements should be secret – not revealed at all until the player triggers it, otherwise there’s no sense of discovery – of achievement. They should be more than simple checklists for the obsessive-compulsive. And with the PS3 getting its shiny new Trophies any day now, the need for creativity dressing up these carrots has never been stronger.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and hunt some pigeons.