Achievements in the future

We all know that achievements are fun to complete. It’s the addition of another bar that slowly goes up and records our progress; it tells us how much closer we are too awesome in a game. It’s a lot like the experience bar, but instead of only providing desire for more levels; the achievement systems most new games are including are able to promote the same feeling towards almost any part of the game.

The origins of the achievement system lay with the concept of a 100% clear. This was promoted in many RPG games by providing certain endings depending on what actions you took in the game, or how much of the game you completed. The more things you did right in a game, the better you’re ending. The achievement system always worked best with RPG games because they were a type of game that provided choice to players, whereas games like the original FPS’s and RTS’s would only provide a single path, and no sense of choice. That’s the origins though, the first time an actual achievement system was used that provided rewards to players was with Xbox live from Microsoft.

Probably the original FPS achievement concept can be traced to multiplayer versions of games, where you could go on kill streaks. The higher your kill streak, the better you were as a player. Players could look at their kill streaks and quantify their ability. And it’s not just about counting the kill streaks for themselves, which they could do anyway in their heads. No, kill streaks are integral to the upbringing of achievement systems because they provided a way to show off to everyone else that you were playing with, just how good you were.

Most RTS games still don’t provide any real sense of choice. Warcraft 3 did an okay starter job as one of the first to provide choices to the player, while Dawn of War leans closer to an RPG and does it better. Despite these choices in the narrative, RTS games continue to lack any real achievement system; the game play just does not fit the mold. Achievement systems fit perfectly with RPG’s, and so as FPS games get closer to becoming RPG games, like Modern Warfare 2, there is a lot more room for achievements as rewards, and statistics to show off to other people.

Achievement systems provide players with many new tools. Players can see what they have accomplished in the game, how they stack up to other people around the world if they care about that sort of thing, and it gives them ideas for things to do in the game that they might not have thought of doing before. Just because a player randomly picks up a special flag or something in some part of the game world doesn’t mean that they’re going to go scour the rest of the game for them as well. But when a player picks up that flag and you tell them how many flags they have left to gather before unlocking something special, well then they go out and try to get more of them.

Just having a single objective like having to gather flags does not make an achievement system though. Super Mario games have long had you collecting coins, other games have had you collecting keys, some money; but those aren’t achievement systems, those coins and keys were a way to complete the game. Achievements are all about choices and promoting players to spend more time within the game world than is necessary to actually complete the game itself. In other words, they work like a kind of mini game, and the rewards associated with achievement systems can’t be a part of the requirements to complete the game. If they are, then it isn’t an achievement.

If you aren’t a fan of having an achievement system in every game ever made from here on forth, then the future isn’t looking bright for you. Practically every game in development or recently released has an achievement system. They typically aren’t so much used as a means to reward players anymore as they are to extend the life of a game. When a player completes a $60 game in less than 10 hours, they feel like it wasn’t really worth the money, especially with MMO games on the market providing unlimited play for very low fees. With an achievement system developers can quickly and easily extend the life of a game probably over double or triple the original time that an average person would have spent on it. Good news for gamers and their wallets, though perhaps bad news for gamers who are addicted to games.

Achievement systems will continue to expand in the future. Especially as more and more games offer the player different paths and choices to go down in terms of storyline, there will be more incentive to make sure players recognize the different stories available to them. LotRO was the first MMO to use an achievement system, and they gave a reward for everything, but other companies quickly realized that achievements in themselves were reward enough, that there was no need to integrate real status effects into them. The perk system with Modern Warfare 2 is a great example of a company that uses achievements as a means of unlocking more abilities... it's also a great example of how developers have to tread carefully when they offer any sort of upgrade system that overpowers the player. The number one reason that players want dedicated servers? So they can turn the perks OFF.

Personal Notes - I’m enjoying updating at midnight each night, which means I write the article before hand. Unfortunately it seems that means I won’t always have top quality articles; this one has no references or anything for example. I can think of all the references I would love to add, but I don’t have the time to go search the web for the sites : ( I hope to return to this topic in the near future and right a real piece on: What the future of the achievement system might hold?

Like the Achievement browser game, where you do nothing but try to do achievements, it’s rather hilarious, the entire point of the game is to complete achievements. I know it was made by Armor Games, and I should have discussed it in the article above, but time constraints work in funny ways sometimes. And something else… but I’ve forgotten since I didn’t write about it : /

I’ve also had hard freezes on my system 5 times tonight. After the 4^th I finally started paying attention and figured it out. Apparently the last Chrome update, which has caused Chrome to start over caching and pretending as if I don’t have cookies enabled, is now also causing massive memory overloads whenever I stream anything… from Any Website. Hulu, animewoot, veoh, cnn, youtube, etc., very annoying. This is the reason I quit using Firefox during I believe the launch of the 3.0 update, because it broke the browser and nobody would admit that it was broken from Mozilla. That’s when I first switched to Chrome. Funny because I am now switching back to firefox, and we will see if it has gotten any better. Everyone suggested I use Opera, but I don’t have it installed on this computer and updating Firefox was much quicker.