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.

DragonAge:Origins First Impressions

Big questions are generated in one’s mind when a sequel to a classic is made. If this was a review from a gaming website I would pontificate my opening sentence into a run on of analogies and big questions. Instead I’ll just pretend for a moment that I was Tycho.

Dragon Age: Origins; the named sequel to the famous Baldur’s Gate series. A series which spanned a number of games, from the party mode story telling in all of the PC versions, to the button mashing festival on the PS2, Xbox, and even the GameCube.

This time, the same game has been released for the PC as well as the Xbox360 and PS3. Past incarnations of Baldur’s Gate titles have always played differently on the PC than on other gaming platforms. The PS2 and Xbox games Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and its sequel BG: DA2, were both single hero dungeon romps. In other words, you only ever controlled one character, ever.

The PC versions of Baldur’s Gate all involved party control. Yes, you had your main character, but then you had all these supporting people you could choose from to fill out your party and bring new skills to the table. It made for a more tactical game.

It plays faster than the old PC versions, which may or may not please players, and it plays slower than the old console versions… which again may or may not please players. The controls take a little getting used to, especially if you were expecting one extreme or the other, because it just kind of settles in the middle. You can play the game with party members doing nothing but throwing support as you go on a rampage, or you can play the game and pause as often as you like, the difficulty menu explains it pretty clearly. Easy and Normal mode are more like the old console versions, while the difficult and whatever the last one was named settings, the description tells you that you will want to pause the game a lot.

Enough of its past though, Dragon Age: Origins is a brand new game. Origins is based in a "new" fantasy world, though it is still filled with elves, dwarves, humans, trolls, and orcs. For the first time the elves aren’t really powerful, and instead it’s just dwarves and humans as the politically strong races. Not exactly the awesome new world as was suggested… but as far as generic fantasy worlds with a mild twist go, it’s a fun world. Some people are actually calling out todays fantasy worlds as nothing more than rehash, and from a look at Origins, they'd be right.

Role playing different kinds of characters can extend the life of the game greatly, and I suggest that you do the following. Read the description of your race, class, and starting area, and then before actually starting the game come up with an outline of how you want your character to behave: mean or nice, likes or dislikes other races, interested in love or not, likes men or women, all of the basics. If you’ve played through the game before than you can further flesh out your character before starting, but if you haven’t then don’t try to stretch yourself just yet, because you discover a lot during your Origin Story. I strongly suggest you come up with an outline for your character first, because while how you react is tested almost constantly, it can feel like a letdown when you give in just to get an easy reward, cursing your weak will later which you exchanged for shiny loot.

There are six total Origin Stories and they are one of the best fleshed concepts that Bioware has pulled off. Each of them lasts about 3 hours of game play. These six stories are crafted in order to give your character a particular outlook on the world. They can influence if your character likes the church, or other races, or even their own race. The Human Noble story is the best crafted of the ones I have completed, because it takes you along for the ride without forcing options at you. Some of the other stories, especially the Daelish Elf one, feel extremely forced and can easily ruin any sort of immiscibility you have with the game. I suggest if you want to play a good character, play the Human Noble storyline, and if you want to play a bad character, play the City Elf storyline, and go from there.

Unfortunately this forced storytelling method rears its ugly head throughout the game, destroying any sense of immersion at key points in the storyline. One second a companion will be saying “I’m tired of waiting, let’s go do this,” and the very next scene he will say “I don’t like where this is going, we should do this.” Complete destruction of immersion. It’s also really painful trying to play an evil character. The game just does not want to let it happen. Even the evil characters in your party will get mad at you if you act “too evil”. It’s very sad.

Despite all this, it’s still an incredible story and fun to play through as different personalities. If you want to play a personality besides “neutral good lover of all”, then expect the story to piss you off at points, not giving you the proper options to do what you want. Nothing is more annoying than having someone call you a dirty slave worthy city elf not fit to be in their eyesight and then having the game not give you the option to gut them. The fact that the game can make you feel such emotions though, even if at the game itself more than the characters in the game, shows how well crafted it is, drawing you in and making you feel attached to your character.

The game is rumored to last over 100 hours even if you don’t do all of the side quests. So it is a huge game, and having the ability to play through it with multiple personalities can only extend the enjoyment. Honestly though, most people playing this game aren’t going to be big into role-playing, and will probably only end up with two personalities, good to see what good does, and as evil as possible. What’s that? Sounds like KoTOR? If you are into role-playing, this game can provide a solid 6 or more adventures. I don’t consider the male/female option of playing through as a real character changer.

The much hyped Mass Effect style conversation system falls flat, as previously mentioned. More errors involve cut and paste conversation, where it doesn’t matter what you say, the end result is the same. This creates a confusing illusion that what you say doesn’t have any effect on the conversations, when in reality it just rarely has a real effect on the conversation. The further into the game you play though, the more your conversation choices make an immediate difference.

The biggest problem with the conversation system is that you don’t always know what you’re saying. By this I mean that you think you’re saying one thing, you read the line and go yeah, I would say something like that, but then the person you’re speaking to responds in a totally unexpected manner, and all of a sudden you realize that what you chose to say could be stated with a different tone and mean something completely different. It’s reminiscent of those terrible point and click puzzles, or “logic” flash games, where the answer is only visible if you are the creator, not because you’re supposed to solve anything.

Those are the two most frustrating things wrong with Dragon Age. The conversation system not providing enough information on how you are saying something and the lack of choices to react as your character would. You might say “it’s impossible to provide all the possible reactions”, but that’s not true. There are six origins, each one makes you feel a certain way about the world, and it shouldn’t be a surprise when a blood thirsty city elf who hates humans by DESIGN wants to kill or confront anyone who insults them. Acceptance, Ignorance, Confrontation. Three results, all you need, I’m sure somebody wrote a book on it 30 years ago. Giving two identical options of acceptance is just bad design.

Well, those are my first impressions of Dragon Age: Origins. I plan on playing some more of it in the near future, and I’ll probably have some closing impressions as well. It is a good game, despite my obvious problem with the conversation system, and I suggest that anybody who has played the original PC Baldur’s Gates buy it. If you want nonstop action, you could get it but you’d probably be happier with Modern Warfare 2. If you’re a fan of Western fantasy RPG’s, then this is a staple game that you will enjoy.