Developers, PLEASE Stop Doing These 10 Things in Your Trophy and Achievement Lists

[hikarutilmitt]

So you basically don't want an achievement to be, well, an achievement? 2 thru 8 (4 is arguable, though your example given is correct) are pretty much the definition of an achievement. That's the point. They're the kinds of things we used to do before MS introduced the system in the first place. They used ot be tied to unlockables, even.

9 can die in a fire because those really aren't achievements, just legit checkboxes that a thing happened and were not tied to actually playing the game in any fashion. Genshin Impact has a couple of in-game achievements tied to commissions and they're annoying to not have completed.

10 is weird. What? Why does this matter so long as something else gives you the evening out points? I remember the very last one in Bullet Witch gave you a single point, despite being the hardest one, to clear out the 1000. I laughed.

1... is not a problem with achievements and just the game is buggy. Destiny was notorious for this, where I wouldn't even know I got an achievement and then logged in after an update and pop, pop, pop, pop, pop endlessly while it gave me my achievements and trophies.

OPs PLEASE stop doing this 1 thing in your thread title:

Capitalizing The First Letter Of Every Word

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Truthfully, this is fine in this case because it is properly capitalized as a title, since in and and are not capitalized. Otherwise, what you're saying is annoying for other threads that just capitalize every single word regardless.

 

[N64Controller]

The gamer has spoken

 

[Nephtes]

1... is not a problem with achievements and just the game is buggy. Destiny was notorious for this, where I wouldn't even know I got an achievement and then logged in after an update and pop, pop, pop, pop, pop endlessly while it gave me my achievements and trophies.

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The only issue is #1 and the stackable difficulty achievements. Devs are not going out of their way to create bugged achievements. So telling them to stop doing that isn't really something to say.

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#1 really isn't about how devs add broken achievements, it's that frequently they don't fix them once they've been shown by the community to have bugs.

In my example the bugged achievement in Borderlands 3 was shown to Gearbox before any of the DLC came out. Teams were still working on this game. They didn't do anything to fix it and their comments on Twitter and via the help system was "You should try this achievement again by starting a new character! Experiencing the game fresh will be fun!"

As far as I know, it's still bugged.
It feels like most achievements I see on True Achievements marked buggy never get fixed. And that's a problem because if you make the player go out of their way for a reward and then don't reward them, you've wasted their time.

 

[kitler53]

i can only really agree with 6 and 4. generally i hate mp trophies unless it is a mp-only game just because too many mp modes are unplayable due to low player count. it really sucks to not even be able to try to get them. but 4 is the worst,.. i've totally seen and done that. developers should be actively aware and try to avoid putting in trophies (or not even trophy, a daily xp goal) that actively diminishes the mp experience.

 

[Karateka]

The worst is achievements that become impossible after a service goes down. Fable 3 has an achievement right now that is impossible because it requires you to link the game to the smart glass app... Which no longer exists.

 

[dripordrown]

no ones forcing you to get every single trophies or achievement

 

[Qwark]

The only one that really bothers me (besides the obvious glitched achievements) is missables, but that goes beyond achievements, I just don't want to be able to be locked out of something. Blue Dragon and Legend of Dragoon frustrated me so much.

I think the stacking difficulty one should be promoted from honorable mention to the top 10, that one bothers me a lot. If I beat it on hard, I'm not going to go back and beat it on easy. Earth Defense Force is soooo bad about this. Replay every mission as every class on every difficulty.

I also thought Overwatch's achievements were really fun. I'll never get the plat, but they're creative at least.

 

[hikarutilmitt]

#1 really isn't about how devs add broken achievements, it's that frequently they don't fix them once they've been shown by the community to have bugs.

In my example the bugged achievement in Borderlands 3 was shown to Gearbox before any of the DLC came out. Teams were still working on this game. They didn't do anything to fix it and their comments on Twitter and via the help system was "You should try this achievement again by starting a new character! Experiencing the game fresh will be fun!"

As far as I know, it's still bugged.
It feels like most achievements I see on True Achievements marked buggy never get fixed. And that's a problem because if you make the player go out of their way for a reward and then don't reward them, you've wasted their time.

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But... that's still not a bad achievement type, it's a bug in the game. this this case it's an egregious, shitty thing for the developers to not only not fix it but to hand waive it by just saying to play the game again.

 

[deepFlaw]

Missables I don't mind as long as there's a good guide that isn't going to spoil me. The problem for those is really the spoiler dodging, seriously. Though it's certainly much better if you have decent chapter options and don't have to replay the entire thing for ones you did miss.

Most of my annoyance is definitely directed at the harder difficulty/NG+ stuff, especially when everything else is reasonable. I am not going to replay a game, especially anywhere close to immediately, unless the story requires you to do that (in which case it's not "replaying" anyway). So anything that demands that arbitrarily is annoying when it's something I'd otherwise Plat with 0 issue. And to be fair, it's totally understandable if it is literally an achievement to have beaten it that way; I can't say it's wrong to have one for it in that case? It's mostly just personally frustrating at that point. But on the other hand, it feels like something wasn't thought through if you have an extremely reasonable list and then suddenly just ridiculous one that's "beat everything on the hardest difficulty, without ever dying, under a time limit". And similarly if everything else can be done in one playthrough and then you've tacked on "just play the entire campaign again but it's vaguely harder (except you keep some of your upgrades so not really)", that just feels weirdly arbitrary.

But I could also still stand to, y'know, care less about Platting stuff in general. I usually only do it when it's reasonable to do + it's a game I already loved enough to be playing a ton of, but there's some games I regret wasting a ton of time on despite that because I doubled down even after realizing it was way more of a commitment than I expected. That being said... there's definitely several games I can think of where I'm literally within an hour or 2 of a Plat and just have never gone back to finish it off. Maybe some day... maybe...

 

[Nephtes]

But... that's still not a bad achievement type, it's a bug in the game. this this case it's an egregious, shitty thing for the developers to not only not fix it but to hand waive it by just saying to play the game again.

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I consider it an achievement type: "Bugged Achievement" and developers can stop "including them" in their games by fixing them when they're reported. 🤷‍♂️

I don't know, it made sense to me.
It just seems like 8 times out of 10 the community discovers a bugged achievement and developers don't do anything about it... and it's my biggest issue with Achievements. The lack of sympathy from devs when their code is bugged. It can really ruin my enjoyment of a game when the Achievements don't work, but rarely it seems do developers care about this kind of bug. Only visual issues or game crashes... which are important too, don't get me wrong. But yeah I'd like more care and attention given to the system's underlying Achievements in games.

As many have said here, it seems like often times they're an afterthought more than something baked into a game. And that's a shame since they're one of my favorite additions to games in the last 15 years.

 

[elenarie]

Teams were still working on this game. They didn't do anything to fix it

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Probably because they had 100000 other more important things to finish and fix before being staffed to work on another task / project.

 

[Sprat]

The dumbest ones are when there's a bunch tied to a dog excrement multiplayer mode that no one plays after a few months such as Tomb Raider 2013.



It's kinda lame they took out the difficulty trophies in stuff like TLOU 2 but then you'd have people crying they're "gatekeping" the platinum.

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You can't have actual achievements.

It's like school sports day. Everyone's a winner even if you lose.

 

[deepFlaw]

Yeah, that situation sucks but it is almost certainly not "lack of sympathy from devs". From publishers, maybe. But most likely it's just not able to be the priority over every other thing that needs someone to fix or add it.

Meanwhile I feel like you could argue that Sony and Microsoft should care about that stuff way more and push back when they happen. But I'm not sure that would necessarily be better if it forces them to be worked on in situations when the devs do need to prioritize other things, hmm.

 

[Nephtes]

Probably because they had 100000 other more important things to finish and fix before being staffed to work on another task / project.

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I feel like this is the mentality I'm talking about. "Devs don't care about achievements because there were more important things to work on".

Maybe they're not important in the grand scheme of things, but they're important, very important to the customers that go out of their way to interact with your products to get them.

When I completed the Witcher III on the Death March difficulty specifically for the Achievement (like I'm not going after the hardest difficulty if there's not an achievement for it) after well over 100 hours of playing and dying to the hardest difficulty in the game and the game didn't pop the Achievement, how is that not "important"? How should the user feel?

I can only speak from personal experience, but I felt like in that moment 100 hours of my time has been wasted... Like developer has robbed me of that time. Thankfully I had an older save and replayed part of the game to the end and it unlocked, but in the moment? Yeah I was pretty upset.

It's the single reason I didn't buy CyberPunk 2077... so that not so important thing in the Witcher III cost CD Projekt Red a full price sale at launch of their subsequent game.

Edit: I almost view achievements as a kind of contract between the developer and the gamer. "Do X thing and you'll get Y achievement" and when the gamer does X thing and doesn't get Y achievement, the contract has been violated. Obviously this is subjective. Some people just don't care, but yeah some of us do very much so.

 

[Madjoki]

see also: no one ever giving a single fuck about pc cheevos

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Nah, Playfire and Claimony were pretty good reasons to care hundreds of euros worth of free games earned with achies.
(now, Ep!c if you're into Bandai-Namcos games).