2016: What an Achievement

I was chatting with my friends earlier this evening about the matter of achievements and trophies in games. As long-term readers will know, my opinions on these metagame awards that were introduced with the last generation of games consoles have gone back and forth somewhat, but on the whole I feel I’m starting to come down on the side of liking them.

The reason for this is simple: after nearly 10 years of them being A Thing in gaming, a lot of developers are getting the hang of how to use them effectively — and the reasons for using them.

There are, in fact, several reasons for the existence of achievements. From a developer perspective, they provide feedback on just how much people are playing games and what they’re doing. This is why so many games have a “started the game” achievement — look at the rarity statistics on PSN and you’ll see that there are a surprising number of people who have booted a game up for long enough to add the trophy list to their profile, but not actually started to play it. I couldn’t even begin to contemplate what the reasons for doing this might be, but it happens; as an example, the wonderful shoot ’em up Astebreed gives you a trophy for completing the interactive prologue sequence — something you have to do before you can even access the game’s main menu — and yet only 91% of players have accomplished this, suggesting either that 9% of players simply turned the game off for some reason or other during the prologue, or were unable to complete it. And I’m not sure that last option is even possible.

From a player perspective, a well-designed trophy list provides a metagame to layer on top of the existing game structure. They can provide challenges for players to complete and encourage them to explore a game in full rather than simply making a beeline for the credits — and, again, those rarity statistics suggest that relatively few people who pick up any game, regardless of length and quality, make it to the end, which is kind of sad — or suggest new ways to play.

A good example from recent memory that I’m still engaged with is Compile Heart’s PS4 RPG Omega Quintet. I have gone for the Platinum trophy in most of Compile Heart’s games to date (largely the Neptunia games) because I have a keen awareness of how the developers probably use them for statistics, as mentioned above. I see attaining a Platinum trophy — which for those unfamiliar with PSN is the trophy you acquire when you have achieved all of the other trophies in a game — as a mark of support for the developer; a sign that someone out there cared enough about a game to play it to absolute death. (Omega Quintet’s Platinum trophy, incidentally, has a 1.1% rarity rating, which is not altogether surprising as going by my own experiences it’s something of a beast to attain.)

And in Omega Quintet’s case, that Platinum trophy really is a sign that you have explored everything the game has to offer, because it’s a good trophy list that runs the gamut from “deal 1 million points of damage in a single combination attack” (something that gets significantly easier the further in the game you go) via “complete all the quests” (something which you can miss in a single playthrough if you’re not fastidious about cleaning up quests before advancing the story) and “see the True Ending on Advanced difficulty” (having figured out the conditions to do so, of course — hint: get Aria and Otoha’s affection levels to 4 to guarantee this) to “defeat Double X” (a superboss who sits at the bottom level of the optional Training Facility dungeon and provides one of the stiffest challenges the entire game has to offer)

The interesting thing about Omega Quintet’s trophy list is that by the time I finished my second playthrough (during which I achieved the True Ending on Advanced difficulty) I had only accomplished about 50% of the available trophies. Deciding early on that I wanted to go for the Platinum, I jumped into the post-game (the ability to keep playing the game after you’ve beaten the final boss and seen the end of the story) to explore what these additional challenges might be.

Nearly 50 hours of gameplay later, I’m still playing, though the end is finally in sight. In those 50 hours, I’ve beaten the 13-floor Training Facility dungeon, pretty much mastered the game’s combat system — the extreme difficulty of the Training Facility encounters, including Double X, demands that you know what you are doing, otherwise you will get your ass kicked, even if you grind all the way up to the level cap of 999 — maxed out the affection values for all my party members, mastered all the weapon proficiencies with Kyouka and have come pretty close with a couple of the others, completed all the sidequests and recovered all the hidden archives. This latter one is particularly interesting, as the archives reveal an absolute ton of story context that isn’t made explicit in the main narrative, largely because it’s not directly relevant to the main cast’s personal stories, but instead provides some interesting background lore and worldbuilding context. You stumble across some of these as you simply explore the main game, but quite a few of them are hidden in post-game content.

In other words, without the trophies to give me a nudge in the direction of this additional content, I might not have gone looking for it. One might argue that the game not necessarily signposting this sort of thing is a problem, but if the trophy system is there — and it’s compulsory to use on both Xbox and PlayStation — it may as well be used to push people on to explore things further. Combine that with PSN’s “rarity” feature and there’s a really nice sense of… well, achievement when you know that you’re one of the 1.1% who has seen everything Omega Quintet has to offer.

(Just two more trophies left to go: kill 10,000 enemies and get 1 billion approval rating points. I sense that the challenging DLC dungeons and bosses — including the fearsome Banana Demon pictured above — will be my main means of achieving this!)

1103: One Hundred Percent

I very rarely “100%” the games I play. The reason for this is that in many cases, doing so involves a lot of abject tedium and just stops being fun after a while. Often it requires the systematic use of a walkthrough to find all the hidden packages/shoot all the pigeons/see all the events, and once you start playing with a walkthrough next to you, I often feel you’re missing out on part of the game’s fun — discovery.

And yet I find myself tempted to pursue all of the endings in Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 simply because it’s one of the most enjoyable, entertaining games I’ve played for a very long time. Whether or not this means I will actually play through the whole thing enough times to get each separate ending or just cheat the system with a well-timed save I haven’t decided yet… but I do sort of want to see all the different endings and all the content on offer.

An exception to the 100% rule is visual novels. I’ll usually try and see everything a visual novel has to offer before moving on, because it’s often quite straightforward to do so — though in games with a huge number of decision points like School Days HQ, it’s often quite a time-consuming process. I have, to date, 100%ed several visual novels, though, including Katawa Shoujo and Kana Little Sister. When I finished them, I did feel satisfied that I’d seen everything the game had to offer because, in those cases, very little felt like filler.

In the case of RPGs, though, a lot of that additional content to push you up towards the magic 100% figure is very grindy, rather dull and has nothing to do with the story. But in some cases, the game can wrap you up in its world and its systems enough for that to not matter. Final Fantasy VII is the earliest example I can think of that my friends and I worked all the way through and acquired (almost) all of the secret stuff — all the hidden materias, all the nightmarish Chocobo breeding and at least a good attempt at the secret areas and bosses. We loved that game so much we didn’t want to stop playing; pursuing these time-consuming, ultimately irrelevant and often game-breaking sidequests meant we could continue playing for longer, so we did. Then we played it again. To date, I have no idea how my friends and I found time to complete Final Fantasy VII as many times as we did.

So far as Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 goes, a single playthrough is apparently relatively short (for an RPG, anyway) and thus charging through it multiple times isn’t out of the question. The advent of the “New Game+” mode means that you can carry a bunch of stuff over from game to game, too; given that a number of the endings are dependent on some gradually-increasing relationship statistics that will likely be a bit of a pain to achieve in a single playthrough without some serious grinding, it almost makes sense to play it through several times to make building up these values a more natural process. Hmm. Hmm.

Oh, what the hell. I saw all four endings of Nier (and had my save file deleted by the game to prove it) and enjoyed the experience hugely. (Yes, I enjoyed Nier.) It is but a small jump from four different endings to seven, right?

Right?

Place your bets now on how many I get through before I give up.

#oneaday Day 916: You Have Earned a Trophy

I go back and forth on whether or not I like Achievements/Trophies/equivalents. Sometimes I like them. In Diablo III, for example, they became an addictive metagame once you’d ploughed your way through the main (rather predictable and marginally disappointing) story. In World of Warcraft, they provide a wide variety of things to do that reward you with tangible things with which to outfit your character. In The Secret World, they’re a handy way of tracking what you have and haven’t done.

But in other cases — typically in story-heavy games — they just make the sense of ludonarrative dissonance even more pronounced than it needs to be. The most egregious example I can think of was Oblivion, in which I raced through the various Guild questlines in order to get all the achievements, then the Shivering Isles expansion, then the main quest. By the end, I had all Oblivion’s achievements, but had completely lost all sense of that thing that made The Elder Scrolls series special — that sense of you being a character and forging your own path in the world as if you “lived” there. Instead, all I had done was follow a checklist. It ruined it. And it soured me on Skyrim somewhat. (Well, that and the realisation that Bethesda RPGs have great worlds but some of the worst characters and storytelling in all of gaming. But that’s another matter altogether.)

At the moment, I’m playing Yakuza 3. The joy of the Yakuza series is, like its spiritual predecessor Shenmue, exploration and discovery giving you a sense of immersion in the game world. What’s down this side alley? Oh, it’s an arcade! I wonder if I can play the arcade machine? Oh, I can! That’s kinda cool. I wonder if the crane game works? Yes it does! Awesome! Oh, hey, there’s an irritable-looking lady, I wonder what’s wrong with her? Oh, she’s had her bag snatched… etc. etc.

Since Yakuza 2, the series has had a “completion” menu that taunts players with how many sidequests they’ve completed, how many cabaret girls they’ve romanced and what foods they’ve eaten in restaurants. After 40 hours of Yakuza 2, I had beaten the main plot but apparently only “beaten” 33% of the game. I didn’t feel short-changed, as a lot of the stuff I’d missed was simply eating as much food as possible and playing some minigames that, while fun, weren’t the reason I was playing Yakuza.

Yakuza 3 compounds this problem with a Trophy list. Not only do you have a “completion” menu now, but you also have an actual checklist of Things to Do. I wouldn’t mind so much if these trophies simply tracked your progress through the game, but when they demand that you spend time playing indecipherable Japanese board, dice and card games in order to score some sort of virtual trophy, that pulls me right out of the experience. It puts me in a quandary while I’m playing — “should I go and do this stuff I don’t really enjoy just to get a trophy?”

The answer, of course, is “no”. There is no sense in playing a game if it’s not enjoyable — unless, of course, it’s something like Pathologic, in which case its sole reason for being is to be less than enjoyable — but I continually see people who insist on “Platinuming” or “1000Ging” their games and feeling like they’ve short-changed themselves if they don’t. That’s fair enough, and of course it’s their call if they choose to do that, but the fact is that in most cases, it becomes abundantly clear that these people are not having any fun. By following these arbitrary checklists, they are voluntarily sucking the fun out of a game that might have been a favourite.

“Oh, but chasing the trophy list is fun in itself,” you might say. And for some people it might be. But for the trophy whores I follow online — who, for all I know, could be in the minority, I’ll admit — pretty much every single one refers to their relentless pursuit of Platinum/1000G as “work”, a “slog”, a “grind”, and they express relief rather than joy when it’s done. That, to me, is just bizarre. Why continue doing something long after it has ceased to be fun in the pursuit of something intangible that, in most cases, doesn’t benefit your in-game experience at all? Are we so vain that we need to brag about the fact that we started ten fights in first-person mode (an actual achievement in Yakuza 3) or that we spent three hours mastering an ultimately-irrelevant darts minigame just so that we could get a “hat trick” (another actual Yakuza 3 achievement)?

Apparently we are. I’m not judging you if you’re one of those people who likes (if that’s the right word) chasing Platinum trophies. I’m saying that I find it completely unfathomable. I have no desire to grind my way through abject tedium purely so I can get a differently-coloured virtual trophy that no-one will look at or care about. I don’t beat a game, look at that trophy list and feel I’ve not had my money’s worth if I haven’t got 100% of the game’s trophies. I beat a game, roll the credits and then, in most cases, move on to any one of the bajillion other titles waiting on my Pile of Shame — which, I have to admit, has only got bigger during the recent Steam summer sale.

It’s easy enough to ignore Achievements and Trophies, I guess, and they certainly don’t hurt anyone. But I kind of resent the “torn” feeling they give me when playing a title like Yakuza 3. I’d much rather they not be there at all than pull me out of the experience by making me wonder whether or not I should be seeking out locker keys, cabaret girls, karaoke bars, dartboards… you get the idea.

My favourite implementation of achievements in a narrative-based game? Deadly Premonition, which rewarded you with one achievement per completed chapter, one for completing 100% of its sidequests and one for completing it on each difficulty level. That’s how it’s done. I don’t need any more incentive than that. Build your reward structure into the game and build the achievements around that — don’t give me a list of arbitrary objectives that don’t actually improve my game experience at all.

Achievement whores, I salute you. I’m a patient sort of guy in most cases, but you guys must be like saints.

#oneaday Day 858: Pete Achieved [Blog-Rollin’]

Time to take a break from the creative writing on here for a little while (though I will try and continue doing it behind the scenes) and talk a little bit about the current hotness that is Diablo III. Now the furore over its botched launch has somewhat subsided and at least a few people are starting to realise that “online game” and “persistent online DRM” are two completely different things, we can take stock of the things that the game does extremely well.

I wanted to focus on one in particular, because it’s something I think Blizzard handles extremely well, and it’s also something which divides opinion about modern gaming immensely.

Achievements.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Achievements. On the one hand, if used well, they can encourage you to try playing a game in lots of different ways — Crackdown springs immediately to mind here, with its quirky challenges such as playing tennis with a car and rocket launchers, sticking things together, climbing up to the top of the highest building and leaping off without dying. On the other, you get shit like you see in Call of Duty, which gives you an Achievement for starting the single-player campaign.

Some people actively pursue Achievements (or Sony’s synonymous Trophies), even going so far as to play a game well beyond its enjoyment event horizon just so they can say they have “1000G-ed” or “Platinumed” it. There’s often a lot of “filler” Achievements in there, making this an unnecessary slog at times. On other occasions, it can ruin the experience of playing a game by directing the experience too much — I “1000G-ed” The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and walked away from the game realising that I had still missed at least half of the game’s content — and had no motivation or incentive to seek it out after that. The Elder Scrolls series is supposed to be about freeform, open-world exploration, and the Achievements (tied to various quest lines) completely spoiled that for me by shunting me down specific quest paths.

So back to Blizzard, and Diablo III specifically. Diablo III features a wide range of Achievements for all sorts of things. There are Achievements for reaching significant milestones in the game’s story — beating bosses, completing Acts, that sort of thing. There are Achievements rewarding those who explore thoroughly and delve into the surprisingly deep lore. There are Achievements for completing special challenges, encouraging players to play more skilfully. There are class-specific Achievements, nudging players in the direction of a good way to play said classes. And there are plenty more besides. There are hundreds of them, as they are not limited by Microsoft and Sony’s arbitrary limits, and chasing them is an immensely addictive experience.

One key thing about the whole system uses Diablo III’s persistently-online nature to great effect. As soon as someone on your friends list attains an Achievement, you’re notified. This helps to encourage communication between people and also lets players see at a glance how their friends are doing. It’s even possible for players to browse each others’ profiles and check out what Achievements they’ve managed to snag, providing incentive for a little good-natured competition when, say, one sees that the other has somehow killed the Skeleton King in less than 20 seconds. In short, it helps make Diablo III into a more social game, which is exactly what it’s been designed to be. Where its predecessors had discrete, segregated “single player” and “multiplayer” components, Diablo III blends this all together into a seamless online experience that encourages communication, competition and cooperation, where players can feel like they’re making progress even when playing by themselves, and continue making progress when they want to play with friends. It’s a good fit for the series’ gameplay, though it makes the ludonarrative dissonance between the ridiculous on-screen action (punching people’s skeletons out!) and the rather serious fire-and-brimstone plot seem all the more silly.

If you haven’t given Diablo III a shot yet, it’s well worth it. Over 6 million people can’t be wrong. Although if you value your sanity I wouldn’t advise looking at Blizzard’s forums. Ever.

(I think I still have a Starter Edition code knocking around somewhere, so if anyone wants to give it a go for free, get in touch and I can give you the code. First come, first served.)

#oneaday, Day 35: In Praise of Last Gen

An oft-had discussion in gaming is what constitutes the “golden age” of gaming, or indeed if there has even been one.

For some, it’s the age of the arcade, when games were designed for pure fun and nothing else—besides emptying your pocket of quarters/local equivalents, of course. For others, it’s the home consoles of the NES era; others still, the 16-bit wonderment of the SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive. For yet others… You get where this is going, I’m sure.

For me, the golden age will forever be the PS2 era. I didn’t always think this was going to be the case; I remember playing PS2 games for the first time and thinking they were graphically impressive, but somehow lacking the “magic” of my favourite PS1-era games, particularly when it came to JRPGs. It took time, but the PS2 gradually proved itself as a force to be reckoned with, with a gigantic library of excellent titles (and an even bigger library of fucking awful ones) and the kind of backing from the public that Microsoft and Nintendo could only have dreamed of in those days. Funny how things change.

The thing is, being unemployed and skint as I am at the moment, I’m finally getting around to attempting to beat some of the PS2 titles that have sat, under-loved, on my shelf for years now. Final Fantasy XII is my current project: I’m now over 60 hours into it and still loving every minute. It’s struck me while playing FFXII that it seems to be a much more infrequent occurrence that a current-gen (360, PS3 or Wii) game will grab me in quite the same way as numerous titles from the PS2 era did… and indeed still are.

I wonder how much of this is down to graphics. Naughty Dog aren’t far from the truth with their jokey “next-gen filter” option in Uncharted; an increasing number of games in the current generation are looking increasingly interchangeable, with “gritty”, “realistic” graphics often winning out over vibrant colours. There are exceptions, of course, and I discussed a number of these the other day.

I don’t think it’s just visual character, though; I think the way games are designed and consumed has changed considerably since the PS2 days, too. Look at the number of people who Achievement-whore these days. More often than not, this takes place not through a desire to see everything the game has to offer, but instead to line up their shiny virtual trophies on their virtual shelf and brag to their friends. The social side of gaming is cool, sure, but what happened to gaming just purely for the sake of fun?

There’s no reason for these people to want to 100% Final Fantasy XII, for example. There’s no public way of recognising your achievement besides actually telling people. But I think that’s kind of a good thing, personally—if you want to be a hardcore insane idiot and complete every insanely difficult hunt, clear out every unnecessarily difficult area just for the satisfaction of knowing you have, that’s great. But there’s no feeling of “obligation” to do so—the person who storms straight through FFXII‘s main quest without exploring the side content is getting their money’s worth just as much as the hardcore insane idiot.

But in games with Achievements these days, many people feel that they haven’t got their money’s worth unless they 1000G/Platinum Trophy the game. And in many cases, some of those Achievements and Trophies are enormously tedious collectathons (Assassin’s Creed), forced replays of lengthy games (Mass Effect, Dragon Age) or encouragement to completely remove any “meaning” and sense of consequence from moral choices in games (any game that has separate Achievements for completing quests/levels in multiple different ways, thereby encouraging saving before “important” bits, then reloading and replaying just to get said Achievements).

Screw that; I’m just as guilty as the next man or woman of Achievement-whoring at times. But spending such a protracted period of time in the company of a last-gen game without all that bollocks to think about is giving me pause for thought. Are things really moving in the right direction?

It makes me a little sad to think that there’s a generation of gamers now who have no idea what gaming life pre-Achievements was like—and with Sony’s ditching of PS2 support on the PS3 and Microsoft’s woeful “backward compatibility” (I use the term loosely) on the Xbox 360, it’s becoming more and more unlikely that newer gamers will have the opportunity to explore that side of gaming—and then even if they do, they’ll probably be put off by “ugly” SD graphics. Look at how much snobbery people have towards the Wii’s graphics now.

Do I have rose-tinted specs when it comes to looking at last-gen gaming? Perhaps. But I’m more than happy to live in the past, if so.

#oneaday, Day 320: Achievement Locked

I’ve just done something I haven’t done for a while. I’ve beaten a game with no Achievements. No, I don’t mean that I played the game so terribly that I didn’t get any Achievements (I don’t think there’s a single Achievement-supporting game out there that will allow you to do that)—I mean I started, played, enjoyed and beat a game which did not support Achievements of any kind, be they Steam Achievements, Xbox Achievements, PSN Trophies or a built-in Achievement-like system.

Said game was Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, which I enthused about at some length a few days ago. I beat it tonight, but there’s a load of stuff after the ending, too, so this isn’t the end of my time with the game. I am, however, glad that there were no Achievements along the way.

Achievements are generally considered to be a good thing. And for some games, they are. Freeform games like Crackdown use Achievements to encourage players to try crazy things that they might not have thought to do otherwise. Skill-based games like Geometry Wars use Achievements to display player skill. But when you get into the territory of “Fire your gun 500 times”, you know it’s getting a bit silly.

I played Oblivion a while back and greatly enjoyed it. I got all 1250 Achievement points in it. The thing is, though, that wasn’t the whole game. There are tons of sidequests in Oblivion which don’t have associated Achievements. How many people do you think bothered to do them? Not many, I’d wager.

Achievements often direct your experience and encourage you to play in a specific way. For some types of game, that is good. In others, it’s not. Part of the joy of Recettear is the discovery of how different things in the game work. Over time, you naturally figure out which customers you can get away with charging a bit more to, which ones will come in at what times of the day, which products appeal to which people and all manner of other things. Even the adventurer characters you can take into the dungeons have their own individual quirks for you to learn. As soon as you add Achievements like “Sell 20 Baked Yams” to that mix, you start playing differently in order to get that Achievement. You start focusing on becoming the best damn Baked Yams supplier there ever was, to the exclusion of more profitable things like treasure and adventuring equipment.

Achievements are, on balance, a good idea, I think. They provide an additional reward mechanic above and beyond that which the game should be offering anyway. But it’s when they start to take over, to become the most important reward mechanic—more than the inherent rewards built into the game itself—that things aren’t quite right with the world. It’s a fine line, and I don’t think making the support of Achievements mandatory is the correct way to be. Or if there’s no way around that, let’s see more games like DEADLY PREMONITION, which simply has an Achievement for beating each chapter, one for each difficulty level and one for 100%ing the game. Nothing more. Nothing more needed. Even then, I’m pretty sure there will be at least one person out there who will go back and replay the whole game just to get all three difficulty level Achievements. That shouldn’t be why you replay DEADLY PREMONITION. You should replay it because it’s awesome.

So, anyway. Don’t be afraid to pick up a game with no Achievements. You might be surprised. Games can be fun without having to tell you how awesome you are every ten minutes.

#oneaday, Day 84: Eternally Questing

Giant Bomb recently launched a quest system on their site. It rewards participants with experience points, badges and a sense of “yay” for exploring the site, looking at different pages and taking part in various activities. Some of the quests are as simple as setting up your profile. Others are more complex “puzzly” ones that require one to solve some cryptic clues about games and game culture. It’s a lot of fun, and it actually convinced me to sign up to the site and make greater use of it.

This echoes the thoughts of social game designers at GDC a while back, including Brian Reynolds from Zynga. The idea of getting Achievements for things you do in “reality”. It sounded stupid, but given the amount of fun I, and numerous others, have had with Giant Bomb’s metagame, it may not be so dumb after all.

It’s not the first time it’s been tried, either. A very long time ago I posted about a site called PMOG, or the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. This game, actually a Firefox addon that sits atop your normal browser interface and re-christened The Nethernet a while back, allows players to earn experience points, achievements and items for exploring the web. More than that, though, other players can leave stuff on web pages for others to discover. These could be malicious (bombs, which make your browser shake about a bit and cause you to lose some points) or helpful (crates with money in them). They could also be mysterious portals, which lead to random places on the web, the destinations of which are only known to the portal’s creator. It was an interesting concept let down only by the fact that it only worked in Firefox. Since Chrome came to Mac, I haven’t touched Firefox since, the Mac version not being the greatest piece of coding there ever was.

Then there’s Shuffletime, now sadly defunct – although the developers claim to be working on the “Next Big Thing”. Shuffletime was a great idea – it was a collectible card game where the cards were websites. And you only got to collect the card if you correctly answered a question about the site it was showing you against a strict time limit. It was a fantastically addictive game, and a fine way to get people looking around the web at things they wouldn’t normally. I’m sorry to see it go, but I’m sure something interesting will come out of it.

Like them or loathe them, Achievements and Trophies are here to say. And it’s entirely possible that their influence will spread out of the world of core gaming and into the collective awareness of the web at large. Let’s face it, it’s always nice to get some encouragement isn’t it?

Now, how many Gamerscore is hitting 100 One A Day posts worth?