Install the game. More like 80%
“Create a character” - 10% of players have this achievement
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.
Jus press random
I liked ”Go outside" in Stanley’s Parable: Don’t play the game for 7 years.
It’s five years, I got it in january!
Ah OK, it’s been a while for me. Congratulations!
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.
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.
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.
This is (one of the many reasons) why I disable achievements on all of my games.
Thanks for the fun fact, it totally makes sense, I never thought about that!
“Oh, looks like the tutorial is too boring.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Disco Elysium and Recruiting Kuuno de Ruyter come to mind
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.
For a lot of games there is a mod that reenables achievements.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
spoiler
not great at all
Tap for spoiler
The fake bench before him that forces you to get diseased
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.
Tap for spoiler
I miraculously cleared the first three gauntlet rooms on the way to him before dying in the fourth. When I went back in and realized it was going to make me start from the beginning each time, and that it may take me ten or so times after I finally reach the boss to finish, I immediately uninstalled.
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.
Especially if you don’t know about
Tap for spoiler
the secret bench, and even than it’s still not great. Fuck Groal
You know, that makes me even happier with my decision not to play HK/Silksong.
I like to do the same. I remember it especially with Armored Core.
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.
spoiler
Balteus felt like the real noob filter, though. Holy shit, that fight took me SO LONG the first time through before I had unlocked the Songbirds.
Oh, and then Sea Spider. Fuck that guy right in Balteus’s ass.
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 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.
Same lol. I just reinstalled it. Time for playthrough number 4, I guess.
Have you done more than one playthrough?
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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).
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.
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.
Caring about achievements. Poe is about gambling
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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”
“complete the entire book without reading the same page twice”
the real comment is always in the comments
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.
That was a fun achievement, and not really that difficult. Only way you could fail was if you forgot the gnome somewhere.
Forgot the what? Oh, DAMN IT!
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.
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.
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!
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”.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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 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.
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 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.”
Kingdom come: Deliverance has a couple trophies like the second option.
