Semi-fun fact: The tops ones are sometimes a really easy way to do basic analytics without setting anything fancy up, which is handy for small/indie studios. That's why you might see ones for simple things like starting an online match, beating the tutorial, equipping a item, etc.

"Oh, looks like the tutorial is too boring."

I sometimes like to look at the fall-off rate of players by looking at the global achievements.

With Silksong as an example, for the first few months there was a pretty big drop in "Defeat the Last Judge" achievements from everything else in Act 1, but surprisingly very little drop-off after that, which suggests that was a major wall for people, and many quit at that point.

Also that dopeamine hit. Gimme that dopeamine hit. I don't even want these collectable items i just want the notification telling me i got them.

I like challenging achievements if it's in a game that I really like. I don't like the "challenge run" type achievements. I don't don't really want to play the game like a speed runner.

I like to do the same. I remember it especially with Armored Core.

I hate developers that add ultra-super-hardcore-hell difficulty achievements so much.

This meme is giving me flashbacks of Super Meat Boy's developer adding achievements in the console version where you have to beat the entire stage (20 levels) in one sitting without a single death. And that achievement exists for every stage in the game. For reference, one of the harder levels can take an average person over a hundred deaths to beat ONCE.

100%ing the game should be enough to get all achievements. That's what 100% means, but some developers just insist on inserting some challenge run nobody can beat into the mix.

I bet for some of the drop off, it's because the Last Judge explodes after being defeated, and if you die, you have to battle them all over again. This almost got me to rage quit all together. I finally got to Act 3 but didn't have it in me to get to the end.

100%, to me, means the main game. Like, story completion and map discovery. Challenge chevos are for tryhards like myself that want a little extra pizzazz on top.

Let me try a metaphor. Say you've ordered some kinda cocktail from a bar. A no-fuss bartender pours your drink and is done, but a "mixologist" does crazy bottle flips and weird knife play involving fruit. Either way you get 100% of your drink (the game), but one looks a bit fancier if you're into that kinda thing.

I brought the gnome allll the way to the nuke, on console. And then I did it again without cheats on PC.

I fucking love Half-Life 2 and it's Episodes. It's probably one of the few games where I've gotten all the achievements because I truly do love it that much.

This is (one of the many reasons) why I disable achievements on all of my games.

Most games would be glad to even get installed once

If you get all the achievements for completing the game, what are achievements actually for? They are there to create fun or not so fun challenges above just completing the game. It’s not like someone will punish you if you leave some achievements incomplete. On the other hand, completing a tough one can feel like - an achievement!

And the hopelessly hardcore type: kill the end boss 1000 times.

Thanks for the fun fact, it totally makes sense, I never thought about that!

Why? The existence of an achievement doesn't mean you have to do it.

It's the easy ones that should go away. They're just participation trophies, you didn't "achieve" anything by beating the game. They should be actual challenges that most people can't overcome...that's what makes it an achievement

I don't think I've ever "100%'d" a game despite many thousands of hours playing games, and I'm okay with that. I don't think I've ever gone much out of my way for an achievement for its own sake.

Closest I like to those style achievements are things like in game completion medals for speeding through individual levels.

Edit:

Challenging achievements are fine in my book so long as they ain't ridiculously difficult. I'd never wanna get an achievement for beating a game or extremely difficult section without making a single mistake because those types of achievements ain't fun. No I am not gonna speed run every level one after another without getting hurt just for an achievement.

It's not just completing the game, 100%ing means you've finished everything. Got every collectable, finished every sidequest, and pretty much finished everything the game has to offer. To me, that should mean you achieved everything the game has to offer.

Sure, there can be a few achievements for doing something harder, but it shouldn't reach a point where it feels like an unfair challenge run that needs hundreds of attempts and thousands of hours to beat. There isn't an achievement for beating dark souls without taking a hit, but people do it for the love of the game.

For people telling me to ignore the ultra-hard stuff, it's really demotivating to want to get all the achievements but be blocked by blatantly unfun challenges like "beat the game on ultra hard difficulty on ironman mode where if you die, you lose 20 hours of progress and have to start over".

I dropped off there, but not because they explode, which I didn't know. For me it felt like I got an idea of what the game was going to be like, not really going somewhere new compared to Hollow Knight and being a slog with long annoying runbacks.

Not sure if that feeling is accurate for what it would have been like to continue, but importantly for the analysis it was a culmination of everything that came before.

You know, that makes me even happier with my decision not to play HK/Silksong.

Yeah, I don't mind playing the game on the hardest difficulty so long as all it does it adjust damage numbers, but if changes mechanics that's not as much fun.

I have all the achievements in mass effect legendary edition for example. I won't get all of the achievements in the dead space games because beating them with so many saves or one life is bullshit.

100%-ing achievements doesn't represent seeing everything the game has to see, it represents mastering the game and its mechanics in its entirety.

What you're achieving is getting 100% on a collection log. That is a valid achievement worth celebrating, but it is only one achievement.

You don't get to erase the achievements of people who did more than you because it makes you unhappy to see them get more out of the game than you.

If you don't want to get all achievements, that is fine, just accept it means you don't get all the achievements.

Achievement is an achievement, not baseline. It's something outstanding, something more.

I hate achievements that are like 'finish chapter" for each chapter. That's baseline. That's basic. That's no achievement until we talk about game that is hard from get go, built as a challenge from ground up.

I actually was playing something the other day that literally had an achievement like tbe bottom one. That one is rare af. Most are closer to the top one, which is generally why I don't care about them.

The achievement really was "Beat the game without taking damage on the hardest difficulty in under X minutes using Extra Enemies, Random Loot, and some 3rd modifier I can't remember."

I think it was Lords of the Fallen, actually 🤔 The moment I read it I was like "Welp... I'm never 100%ing this."

I think that achievement was harder to get in L4D2, personally. Just getting the gnome in the first place is a bit of of a challenge, and you have team mates thst either suck cuz they're bots or will ditch you because they don't know/care about the gnome.

The runback for the Last Judge wasn't even that terrible, just annoying and time consuming. There's another one called Groal The Great which is:

At what point does "mastering the game and its mechanics in its entirety" stop and start becoming a waste of people's time? Because I'm talking about the unfair and time-wasting achievements. You can always keep making harder achievements and justify it with "I guess you didn't master the game", but the reality is that these achievements just taunt everyone who doesn't want to dedicate thousands of hours into the game. Achievements should be reasonable.

You could make an achievement for beating the game on the hardest difficulty. Then beating it on the hardest difficulty with the true ending. Then beating it on the hardest difficulty without dying. Then without getting hit. Then beating the true final boss at level 1 with a butter knife without taking a single hit within a 10 minute timer and you need frame-perfect jumps to avoid supposedly undodgeable attacks.

The first is fine, the last is a complete waste of time and shouldn't exist. This isn't some weird undocumented phenomenon, adding ultra-hard achievements will often lead to people burning out trying to achieve it and people complain about them all the time. If you want to do a challenge run in your own time, feel free, but I guess I'll die on this hill that they shouldn't be an official achievement.

I think it's pretty neat, even better if you have to be that 0.001% to be able to complete them, as long as there's progressively increasing difficulty achievements to do to that point.

I completed all the Path of Exile achievements and the most frustrating was to Capture the Flag.

Capture the Flag is a dead game mode so you can be queued literally forever and never find a game. You have to personally wrangle 6 people, convince half of them to queue in a different party without anyone leaving and then actually play the match (which crashes almost immediately).

TIL people still don’t know that achievements are a front for analytics. They’re not for you. They’re for publishers.

Fallout 4 didn’t initially let you play a bad guy because the analytics from Fallout 3 achievements showed them that a vast majority of players hit each level achievement at good karma. They were checking for that. They just didn’t expect the bad karma gamers to be so vocal.

They did that with one of the tomb raider games and one of the assassin's creed games. Nice try. I’m not playing your shitty multiplayer.

I share your feeling that the latter aren't fun for me, that's why I don't try. But I don't resent the people that do. In fact I enjoy knowing there are still higher degrees of mastery to aspire to. I like Hades II but after 100%-ing its achievements going further feels hollow and arbitrary. I kinda wish there were achievements breadcumbing my way to a hitless max fear run.

You're right that envy is not some weird undocumented phenomenon. Nor is my wish for external recognition of the mere journey, for that matter. But what's important, and what's earning you those downvotes imo, is that we don't blame the devs for where they choose to put themselves on this impossible double-bind.

These are our shortcomings, not theirs, and if you externalize your own problems onto them you're denying yourself the opportunity to grow.

Holy fuck did that fight annoy me the first playthrough. Once I figured out the trick to it, it became easy as hell, but until then I almost put the game down entirely.

I tend to view those achievements as ones you pick up by accident rather than something you strive for. It turns them from something I absolutely have to get into a nice surprise when I do particularly well at a level I didn't realize was supposed to be hard.

It's been long enough that I can barely remember the specific bosses, but some of them took me forever!

Just looked him up, and I remember Balteus too. Yeah, that was a learning curve.

This was the one that I had to grind out over and over and over...

Oh fuck, and then you had to remind me of THAT guy...

Man, as hard as they were, some of those bosses really are staggeringly good. Once the bugs got fixed, I never really felt like the fights were particularly unfair, and some of them like STRIDER were downright fun. Then again, STRIDER reminded me so much of AC4A that I couldn't help but adore it. That whole mission felt like a love letter to 4A.

I'm always surprised by how rare some achievements are that aren't so much difficult to do, but more a reflection of the decisions a person makes within a game.

That was a fun achievement, and not really that difficult. Only way you could fail was if you forgot the gnome somewhere.

I was using the shotguns a lot, and I think a balance patch nerfed them later, so maybe I got by easier than I should've.

...talking about this is making me want to replay.

I'm not an achievement hunter, I just play, so I'm totally that person. I have many hundred hours in XCOM, and I somehow got some really basic achievements yesterday just by chance because I did something different.

There are plenty of gamers (myself included) who do actually like well-designed achievements, and they can actually really help you vary how you engage with a game. I'm sure that publishers also love the analytics, but pretending that they aren't for regular people at all is silly too.

I generally agree with the exception of sandbox games intended to be played through multiple times, like grand strategy games. In those cases they can be a fun way to find absurd goals to try out, like in Victoria 3 when I made the US a monarchy or made Paraguay really big!

Same lol. I just reinstalled it. Time for playthrough number 4, I guess.

Have you done more than one playthrough?

Caring about achievements. Poe is about gambling

It's funny how fuzzy my memory is about this game, but I know I haven't played it since right after it came out. I remember that I did multiple playthroughs to get the true ending though, if that counts.

Achievements sometimes just don't register (e.g. when playing a game with mods). I've been playing Factorio for many years and still don't have most of the achievements despite having hit those milestones.

Kingdom come: Deliverance has a couple trophies like the second option.

Novels should have achievements, maybe one "understand the basic text of the book" and another "Understand the subtext while being hammered by three different drugs and being 72hrs awake"

Yeah that's what I was wondering about. The multiple endings are so fuckin worth it.

I really hope they do a sequel to this one, because I rank it second best out of the whole series (behind AC4A, of course). Hopefully, that sequel brings back weapon arms and the ability to equip multiple melee weapons, but even if it doesn't, I'd still play the shit out of it.