This was my first AC, so I don't have any frame of reference, but I thought it was great and hope so too. That being said, my favorite FromSoft title (Sekiro) never got a sequel, so I've been hurt before.

If you liked this one, I strongly encourage you to get a PS3 emulator and give Armored Core For Answer a try. The menu music alone makes it worth the setup. https://youtu.be/lf6vg4jMvhY?si=rp0KgUS8qP5UgR1M

Disco Elysium and Recruiting Kuuno de Ruyter come to mind

I wish the industry would just adopt standards like what RetroAchevements already does that prohibits both ends of the spectrum. Excessive achievements (as well as multiplayer) get subsets, progression achievements still exist but mostly to track "beating" a game. Nothing too easy, although April 1sts "Baby Mode" set for FF8 was fantastic. Lol

Having a standard made it higher in my mind than Steam achievements. Technically PS and Xbox have set rules too but not nearly as well thought out (e.g. what classifies as a Bronze vs Gold) and still allow some real unoriginal bullshit lol

Forgot the what? Oh, DAMN IT!

I need to go back through the favorites for sure. I've heard good things about that one.

"complete the entire book without reading the same page twice"

I was thinking how in games where you can date people, you can see which characters are less loved (or added more recently) by how far down they are.

I liked ”Go outside" in Stanley's Parable: Don't play the game for 7 years.

Some rare achievements are just funny. One of the rarest ones I have on Steam (3% of players have) is to play the credits which can be accessed from the settings on Blazblue Cross Tag Battle.

"Create a character" - 10% of players have this achievement

the real comment is always in the comments

That must be Monster Hunter.

As a person with ADHD... I kid you not, it took me months to get through Monster Hunter's World character creator, and by the time I managed, I had already lost interest in the game.

It's five years, I got it in january!

Especially if you don't know about

I mean, sure, but let's not put the cart before the horse. Achievements exist for analytics. That's why Microsoft built the system. And some developers cared and used them that way (for example, Bethesda). Some developers did not care (look at the Avatar game everyone rented just to get a quick and easy 1000GS). And yes, some achievements were well designed and funny.

Then there's Nintendo saying they will never support achievements for analytics, yet some of their games have them solely for the player's enjoyment, such as Animal Crossing. Rather than Gamerscore (or Trophies), you get Nook Miles which can be used to buy some things. The system is completely optional to engage with, but provides that same/similar "dopamine rush". And that's fine.

So yeah, not pretending anything, just amazed that most people don't understand why they exist in the first place.

That said, I think I recall reading that Xbox provided/provides publishers with a means to hide "Achievement Hunters" from the analytics entirely. That is to say, if as a player, your goal is to simply collect all the achievements, and/or maximise your Gamerscore (or Trophy collection), your metrics are less valuable to the publisher than someone who is just playing the game normally and the achievements show the choice they made. For example, not only did Fallout 3 have the karma choices (3 separate achievements for each level that had one), Oblivion had two mutually exclusive achievements for picking a faction in the DLC. And BioWare games make use of this a lot. So yes, while they can see which one you went for first, it's not useful information because the one you went for last is the one you stuck with. So they just throw out that data. Or they can.

So two things you can do to mitigate your data being used to vote for how the next game will turn out: One, play the game after the next game has come out. They should no longer care about the analytics. Two, get all the achievements. Your data is less valuable. On the flip side, if you want your data to matter, play the game when it's relatively new, and make choices based on your morality rather than what you think it should be.

I'd also like to point out that there are a handful of games that collect this information without using the achievement system and show you the data. All of the first three Life is Strange games do it. (I haven't played the two newest ones.) As Dusk Falls, which was published by Microsoft, does it as well. I think the Telltale games (e.g. The Walking Dead) do it, too. What's really cool about this system is, at the end of each chapter, you can not only see how your choices stacked up against gamers around the world, but you can also filter it down to those on your friends list (local to Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, or Steam). As Dusk Falls takes it a step further, giving you a preview of how other choices branch the story in other ways. Personally, I think this system is the best system. They're still collecting data on how you play, but they're presenting that data back to you in a meaningful way.

For a lot of games there is a mod that reenables achievements.

Ah OK, it's been a while for me. Congratulations!

It's a matter of taste. The runback is as exercise in speedrunning which allows you to sharpen the core skills until you can pass everything fast without losing HP. At the point where you pass everything with full HP it's not a slog anymore, just going through the motions.

It's the other way around, you build in the analytics earlier in development and add the achievements during polishing. Why would you add achievements when you don't even know if that feature will make it to release.

was so offensive I almost quit, but I kept going on, determined to reach the end. I was nearly at the end of the game when I reached Crust King Khann.

People who love the runbacks will say things like “Once you’re good enough, the runbacks aren’t a slog they are just time consuming.” That’s exactly what a slog is. If the game made you put in the first 100 digits of pi every time you died, no one would play it because it was wasting your time. Punishing you for dying by burning a significant chunk of your real world life span is not something I want to encourage.

My disdain for games that have no respect for the player’s time seems to be uncommon. I criticized Blue Prince for the same reason, and people strongly disagreed.

The only achievement I don’t have in Escape Simulator 1 and 2 is to finish a level in multiplayer. There’s no matchmaking and my IRL friends aren’t interested. Sucks.

Install the game. More like 80%

Jus press random

You'll have to forgive me because I'm barely a developer, but what I've seen indie devs use is when the game is ~95% completed or in early-access or beta, you add achievements to keep track of general player's progress and see what features are being used or not, which lets you hone in on areas of the game that may need attention or aren't being used.

Sometimes this is just for post-1.0 patches but it can also be to determine what the next project is going to look like if certain features didn't seem to get any attention.

If I recall correctly Return of the Obra Dinn has one for blaming the Captain for every single death (arguably true if we're being argumentative, but I can't give that bastard Nicholls a free pass), which admittedly takes some effort, as you still have to play the whole game (which is great on a first or even second time, not so much on an nth time just for the achievement).

Analytics don't need to be public. It's often better for the analyst if they're not. There are much better, much more detailed ways to gather analytics from your own game than achievements.

Achievements are very obviously not analytics. Not for the developers or publishers, at least, or for anyone whose livelihood depends on analysing how players play games. They're incentives to drive player engagement. A way to further, uh, gamify the game.

You might be bored of killing goblins, but you've almost reached the achievement, just 132 goblins more. And then you're almost up to some other achievement, so you keep playing a bit more.

And up goes the playtime.

Which is something analytics are very interested on (since it often contributes to discoverability), even if no achievement measures it.

it was going to make me start from the beginning each time

that's actually not the case, after the third gauntlet room there's one of those giant drill spikes you have to hit that falls and breaks through the floors below, letting you skip all 3 major gauntlets, only leaving the short 4th one

regarding runbacks, imo they're fun, so sure, they take time, but anything in a game takes time to do. And all but one of the runbacks are less than like 40s long, I see them as a phase 0 of boss fights, and greatly enjoy them. They also change things up so it's not just permanently fighting the boss itself the entire time. My caveat here is that the movement system being fun adds to that a lot, so in things like the 3rd person Souls games, if it's just a long sprint, it's not as interesting, whereas Silksong has one of my favorite movement systems in gaming, so I even looked forward to the runback when I died against Last Judge.

I think it's funny that I didn't even find the Last Judge until the end of act 2, so it was a pretty easy boss in my playthrough

True but is this your first time telling someone with ADHD "just don't have a problem?" They always love that.

You don't want the dopamine? Bro you're literally playing video games

A little of column A... But don't worry, even if your advice is perfect most of the time it literally won't help. There's deeper shit going on, ADHD is way more intense than most anybody realises.

Imo this mindset is everything wrong with video games today.

Weird take. If video games aren't supposed to be enjoyable and rewarding, what should they be doing?

Being psychologically manipulated into continuing to play a game that I wouldn't otherwise certainly doesn't sound very enjoyable and rewarding, but that may just be me.

I avoid achievements specifically because video games are supposed to be enjoyable and rewarding. A game should succeed or fail on its merit alone, not how well it plays the manipulative achievement metagame.

Still haven't built up the courage to try the top one for Fortnite yet.

There's also the achievement on the super deluxe version of the game, where you don't play for ten years

The achievements are an after-thought. You add the analytics during development, it's hard to make meaningful decisions without data and you would do work on achievements that you would throw away.
Each time I have had to add achievements they end up beside the analytics code inside the same abstraction layers. Some of the cool achievements do require adding more tracking code, the the amount of data that is gathered is wild.

I mean it depends on how much but video games mostly work by being more interesting or exciting than every day life. I don't like overstimulating video games too but I don't see achievements being the culprit