A criticism of video game achievements, both their implementation and their affect on the industry.
Care for a garden gnome in Half-Life 2, self-irony of the Uncharted developers, Indiana Jones in Civilization 5 — remembering the most difficult, unusual and interesting achievements in games.
I'm not the most successful guy when it comes to unlocking achievements. My full score is less than 50,000 but I take great pride in knowing most of those points come from completed games and not just games that I've beaten the campaign and moved on. And I think there's something to be said about what a gamer can learn by completing a game 100%. #achievements #complete
I think my want to understand the whole story of the game is what determines if I want to complete it 100 percent, and I only end up 'completing' certain games because of it. But the ones I do completely beat turn out to be my favorites.
I highly recommend you go back and try to 100% games where you didn't enjoy the story. I was one of those gamers who didn't enjoy ACIII. I thought Connor was a bland protagonist and the overall story started out too slow and ended too fast. When I went back to the game to 100% it, I was forced to play all the side missions. I saw sides of Connor I never did before and interacted with some truly fascinating characters. ACIII isn't my favorite Assassin's Creed by any means, but going back to grab all the achievements in the game has raised the game's worth in my eyes. I'm not saying all games are like that but a few stories are vastly improved when you're searching for all the goodies to unlock everything.
I try to get everything as much as I can, but there are some games where it's far beyond any reasonable amount of effort.
I hear you on that. ACIV's "reach level 55 in multi-player" and Dark Souls III's "Learn all Pyromancies" achievements come to mind. Both were brutal affairs for very little payoff other than being steps on your quest to unlocking everything.
A look at Trueachievents and you can find plenty of people with 90%+ completions and hundreds of thousands of gamerscore. Your gamerscore or number of trophies has almost no bearing on how good of a gamer you are. Just how much time you have to devote to a game.
I'm an achievement hunter but mostly because my back log of games is so huge. I try to maintain a 75% completion ratio so I don't feel so bad about buying a new game that ends up sitting unplayed for a year. I used to do that play for a few minutes or hours then it would get traded. I hate doing that and now find I get more for my money if I try to make myself get most, if not all of the achievements. Except for games I really like and care about, I go for completion for them. Just a hair under 200k now while keeping 75% since I started tracking that.
I'd argue a degree of skill is necessary. Take a look at TrueAchievements again. True (haha, puns) there are plenty of people with a 90%+ completion rate but how many of them are 99%+ completion rate? And are also gamers with plenty of AAA titles on their list? There are not many. And those who do have it typically don't exist in the 150,000+ gamerscore bracket. There are some to be sure (like Brownman) but there are not many. Even you yourself claim to only have around 75%. I imagine if you went for a 99%+ completion rating, you wouldn't have the 200,000 gamerscore that you do.
So yes, there are quite a few games that you can 100% just through persistence and enough time (like Assassin's Creed Unity) but there are also just as many that take a degree of skill, patience, and experience in playing video games to 100% (like Dark Souls III).
Indie developer S-Game, in conjunction with publisher Origo Games, announced today that Rain Blod Chronicles: Mirage will launch worldwide on Steam November 11th, 2013. Rain Blood Chronicles: Mirage is a side scrolling action title that mixes classic slash-em-up gameplay in a stylized Chinese setting for the PC.
Rain Blood Chronicles: Mirage will launch on Steam with over 100 Steam enabled Achievements
I love achievements but I have OCD concerning odd numbers, Halo reach F£%"ED UP my gamerscore and the achievement it had to re-balance was so difficult to get, you needed to be online with an amazing team and get a perfect flag return score or something like that??? Anyway after months with no success I actually hacked my gamerscore in order to get that single achievement in order to make my gamerscore even again, OCD.
Dont love em but sure do like getting them :)