Acheivements

My apologies for not posting in a while, I've been putting some work into the RPG and some into TF2. But here's a post. Just a note, these are my opinions and ideas regarding achievements. I haven't actually done any research into this stuff, so it won't apply to every single game, but hopefully it will apply to some.

Achievements

For those of you who don't know, achievements are basically awards for doing a specific thing in a game. It could be to get past an area, not hitting anything for one loop of a race or killing 10 enemies in 30 seconds.

I really like achievements in games, they appeal to the part of me that wants to finish everything. They also make me feel like I've accomplished something special.

Putting achievements in a game isn't hard, but you should think about what they're going to be used for before you start chucking them into your game. If they're just to give the player some more playtime with the game, you can put in as many as you want with as many requirements as you want. But you don't want the player to go crazy trying to get all 10,000 achievements.

An example of this is in Spore, there are achievements for making a creature with three heads, or completely dominating your planet's economy. These are good because they affect the way you play the game, allowing you to experience most of what the game has to offer. Then there are achievements for completing each stage in hard more, encouraging the player to test their skills as well as to build them up.

Next, if the achievements actually give you something you have to figure out what that something is. Is it something that doesn't affect the gameplay in any way? This time, you should make sure that the amount of achievements is enough for the rewards, no point in having 100 achievements when you only need to complete 10 to get all the unlocks. Also, my recommendation would be to give out points for completing each achievement, which can be spent on the unlocks, rather than having an order to each unlock, like "7 achievements".

Then you can get things that actually affect gameplay, these are the most difficult to implement properly as you have to make sure that their rewards are seen as a good thing in comparison to what the player already has, but also that the rewards don't overshadow what the player already has, not too much at least. This is even more apparent in multiplayer games, where not everyone will have the achievements and thus, the rewards.

I don't like achievements that only show the name of said achievement. Even more so when they give you something tangible when you complete them. Granted, I've only played a few games where this happens, but it's extremely annoying when you only have one achievement to go and it's called "Space Cowboy" or some such name that doesn't help me complete it at all.

Well, that's all on achievements for now.

-Shadowfred