The concept of achievements and trophies (to make it shorter, I’ll just say achievements now…), by itself, is okay. Do good in games, get a score attached to that, get bragging rights (if those matter to you at all), this is fine. It could be better, there could be some kind of reward if you get really high gamerscore/level(no, extra stuff to put in your apartment in Home doesn’t count), but overall it’s good. It adds some replay value to games that gamers THINK is not in the game from the start(though, as I’ll explain later, gamers have been doing “Achievements” for a long time now).

But despite the concept of achievements being… not too bad… well there’s a huge problem with it. A problem I actually realized recently.
I might not be the first to see this, but whatever, I still feel like talking about it.

Read on and see why, in general, achievements are stupid!

Why do they suck?

I was playing Gears of War 2 recently. It was my first time playing, so I was on the normal difficulty. I go through the tutorial level, shooting a few bottles and throwing a grenade (really, that’s it), and suddenly, I see “Achievement Unlocked: Green as Grass”, which requires going through the tutorial. I realized, this was not the first time I saw something stupid like that. Just about every game with achievements have something like that.

So as I went no through the game, I got other stupid achievements, like  killing a number of enemies, killing enemies with all the weapons, kill a small number of enemies with a certain kind of attack, doing 30 perfect reloads, moving on through the game. And that’s where it REALLY dawned on me. Achievements are ridiculously easy. Not all of them, of course, but most achievements are ridiculously easy to do, and none of them are actually, you know, ACHIEVEMENTS. I’m not achieving anything by finishing the tutorial. Perfect reloads are easy to do, why should it be considered an achievement to do it 30 times? How is advancing through the game (this works on any difficulty by the way) an achievement? I’m just doing what everyone else is doing, and Gears of War 2 is really easy on Normal, so I really don’t feel like I’m achieving anything at all.

Of course, Gears of War 2 isn’t the only game with stupidly easy “achievements”. Just about every game on the market has easy achievements. Some games even sell solely because of an easy 1000/1000 score. An example is Avatar on the Xbox 360, in which all achievements can be done in less than an hour.

Killing a number of enemies isn’t an achievement, since you can just replay the game a bunch of times to do it. Finishing the game isn’t an achievement, unless the game is really hard. Getting an achievement for finishing a chapter is even stupider than getting an achievement for finishing the game. Killing enemies at all shouldn’t be an achievement, since you’re doing it all game long, and the method you kill them with shouldn’t matter(Kill 3 enemies with the knife in RE5, WTF? it’s easy AND stupid).

I think the stupidest achievements are online achievements. A good number of people are prevented from doing them at all (people who can’t hook up their consoles to the internet for random reasons, people who refuse to pay for Live (like me), or people who just don’t like playing online at all), and really it just requires playing a bit. Yeah, getting 2000 victories is pretty good, but what if you have 25000 losses? It just means you won a measly 7% of your matches, and despite getting the 2000 wins achievement, YOU STILL SUCK (yeah, random numbers here, but you get what I’m saying(unless you’re a moron)). Achievements asking to just play a number of matches are stupid, since it doesn’t matter if you’re good or no, you just need to enter a few games and that’s it. You’re not achieving anything other than playing the game a lot.

So this is why achievements suck. Developers go the easy way out in making their achievements, and they don’t really think about ways to make their achievements satisfying.

Can Achievements… NOT suck?
I think my point is pretty obvious. Achievements need to be something that you feel you actually ACHIEVED something. There is one game in particular that I feel really did it right: MEGAMAN 9.

Sure MM9 has its share of stupid achievements: killing a number of enemies, killing 1 boss with just the megabuster (this one is stupid since you only have the mega-buster on your first boss anyways >_>) and a few others like that, but other than that, MM9s achievements (or challenges in this case, since only a few of those are actually achievements on the 360 version) are totally badass.

Finishing the game without killing any normal enemies (AKA only killing mini-bosses and bosses) can be hard if you’re not super badass at the game, finishing the game with just the mega buster (other than “puzzles” that require you to use them in Wily’s Castle) can be really hard if you’re used to relying on special weapons, finishing the game 5 times in a day is relatively hard considering the game itself is pretty hard by itself (though that becomes easy after finishing it a few times), finishing the game without falling in any holes/spikes is not too tough if you’re being REALLY careful, finishing the game without using energy tanks isn’t THAT hard either if you’re good at it, finishing the game without dying is damn hard. There’s a few other ones like that. And those are the easy ones.

The harder ones require finishing the game without getting hit once(THIS IS MADNESS!), or finishing the game in an hour(which should become easy once you’ve mastered the game), or finishing the game without picking up energy pellets (other than the 8 ones you have no choice to pick up when fighting the robot masters a second time in Wily’s Castle), or finishing the game with 100% accuracy with the mega buster(that can be made easier by not actually using the megabuster), or beating the robot masters in less than 10 seconds each (there’s one challenge for each, so you don’t need to do all of that in one run, thankfully), or killing all the bosses with only 1 pixel of health left. Now THIS is crazy stuff. Some of that is borderline impossible(but all the challenges are still doable). But when you finish those, you feel like you really achieved something. You’re given tons of challenges, and if you really like the game you’ll constantly have something new to work towards to. And, most important of all, they’re fun to do  because they require you to devise new gameplay strategies and makes you play the game differently than what you’re “expected” to do.

There’s a few other games that have proper achievements too, I won’t be an idiot and say that ALL of them suck.

Another good example would be Disgaea 3.
The Disgaea 3 trophies that came out in Japan recently are more than brutal, they outright REQUIRE to play hundreds of hours to even begin working on most of them, let alone getting them all. Few of them are really actually HARD, but expect to play a LOOOONG time before doing an attack that deals 100 million damage. And when you’re done with that, get ready for 10 BILLION damage. Sure, might not be fun for the average gamer, but for fans of the genre/series, thoses can be pretty fun, and most of all none of the achievements require finishing the game, which goes in a totally different aspect of the game. There’s a few stupid ones like jumping a few times and such, but other than that it’s solid stuff for the dedicated Disgaea player. Sure, it requires a lot of time, but it requires dedication and actually understanding how the game works. So just playing normally will be far from enough to get any of them (other than the few stupid ones), and unless you have good understanding of the game mechanics and such, you won’t be able to do much to get through most of those no matter how long you play. Those are definitely good trophies.

I could probably name a few more games, but I’ll stop here, it’s really kinda hard to find games with proper achievements.

So how can other games have achievements that don’t suck?
Well, it’s not THAT hard to make achievements that don’t suck. Megaman 9 is clear proof of that. Here’s a small checklist of things not to do when making achievements, and things TO do.

1. Do away with the “Finish the game” achievements UNLESS the game is REALLY hard, or if the higher difficulty levels are a LOT more challenging than the easier ones (and only give an achievement for the other ones).
2. Of course, that means no more “you finished a chapter” achievements, and even LESS “finished the tutorial” achievements. That SERIOUSLY pissed me off when I got that in Gears 2, considering I barely did ANYTHING other than walking around in the tutorial…
3. No more “Kill X number of enemies” achievements. They’re easy since there’s so many ways to get your kill count up fast, it just requires time.
4. No more achievements for doing basic stuff in the game multiple times. So what if I did 30 perfect reloads? I could just stand there at the beginning, shoot 1 bullet, perfect reload, and repeat that 29 more times to get the achievement. Not only is it easy, it’s stupid. That’s like giving an achievement in a Mario game for jumping 50 times.
5. No more Online achievements, I already explained myself on that.
6. “Collect X amount of collectibles” achievements are fine, but don’t make like 10 achievements for this. Like “Collect 5 cakes”, then “Collect 10 cakes”, then “Collect 15 cakes”, then “Collect all 20 cakes”. Instead just have the “Collect all 20 cakes” achievement. And ONLY if they’re not easy to find. If all of them are in plain sight, don’t even bother.
7. No more “Took a picture for your profile” or “Made a logo” or other stupid achievements of the sort.
8. There’s no such thing as “too few achievements”. If you have only, like, 5 achievements, FINE. If they’re good, there’s no problem with that, just make them give more points or whatever. Don’t add in stupid and easy achievements just to have more. If your 5 achievements are made of pure awesome, don’t ruin your list of achievements with “Kill 10 enemies”.
9. BE ORIGINAL. That’s VERY important. Remember those people who were challenging themselves in games before the idea of achievements was thought of? Like people finishing Final Fantasy on the NES with only 1 white mage? Yeah, by now that’s not considered original, but back then it was crazy. People getting stupidly high scores in Donkey Kong or Pac-Man with just 1 credit? Hardcore and that’s really long ago. People completing FFX without using the sphere grid (and tons of other weird challenges people made up)? It was a fun, original way to play the game, and it was hard as hell. Heck, all those Megaman 9 challenges? Well people were doing those on the NES Megaman games. Make achievements something like this. Original but doable. Things that the more “hardcore” gamers would think of to get more challenges from the games they like(heck, hire a few “hardcore” gamers and let THEM make up some interesting achievements. Less work for you, more fun for the consumer).
10. MAKE THEM HARD. The second most important aspect here. Any achievements that can be done while playing the game normally shouldn’t even be thought of. Don’t make them impossible, of course. Not like something like “Finish Mirror’s Edge without jumping”(AKA something impossible), but if you go with “Finish Mirror’s Edge while jumping only when you NEED to and no more”, that’s possible and really hard (since you might jump to fight enemies, or you might jump over obstacles that you can really just walk around, or you might just screw up a jump. This is really hard yet not impossible, and it can definitely be fun to get a perfect run through the whole game). If an achievement isn’t hard, it’s not good.
11. MAKE THEM FUN. The most important element on this list, obviously. Games are made to have fun, and if the achievements aren’t fun there’s little point in doing them.  If an achievement is stupidly hard to the point of being annoying, what’s the point? Give the players a chance to strategize, make them think about their next move, make them play the game differently than usual, and add a new element of challenge that wouldn’t be there if I was to play through the game normally. Really, when a player does one of the really hard achievements, he’ll have to say “Yay, I did it, this was awesome, what’s next?!?”, not “Finally done with it, what a pain in the ass that was, I’ll never play this game again”. If most players say that, you failed to make a proper achievement.

Do all of that, and you’ve got some pretty solid achievements. Fun, hard, not something people would do while playing the game normally, and usually interesting.

Overall
My point is clear. In general, achievements are just too easy, and, most of the time, you don’t really feel like you achieved anything. I definitely don’t think I achieved anything finishing Gears of War 2 on Normal. Actually, for the most part, recent games are so easy I don’t feel like I achieved anything with finishing ANY of them.

More games should follow the example of Megaman 9. Hard but fun challenges. I’m sure I’d feel incredibly proud if I managed to finish the game without taking damage. And that’s how ALL achievements should be. Keep the idea of trophies too, with different levels of achievements. But change what each of those mean. Bronze=really hard, Silver=really fucking hard, Gold=nearly impossible and requires you to be a total master of the game, Platinum=you’re a freaking god at the game and few people can rival you(for gamerscore, do the same but with different numbers of points given for each).

Currently, few games manage to have anything resembling good achievements, and the more “hardcore” gamer, if he REALLY liked the game he played, will eventually end up making up his own challenges instead, and they’ll most definitely have more fun than going through the “achievements” the developers included in the game.

jobocan Games, Random, Rant, analysis