Nintendo Belittles Achievements As "Mythical Rewards"
- Thread starter Tom Goldman
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The fuck?
This coming from the people who ask you to get all the stats in Mario games and "Catch 'em All" for absolutely no good reason. Other than bragging rights.
Achievements are bragging rights with PROOF and a clear visible total of your brag-o-meter. Trophy levels, Gamerscore, etc.
This coming from the people who ask you to get all the stats in Mario games and "Catch 'em All" for absolutely no good reason. Other than bragging rights.
Achievements are bragging rights with PROOF and a clear visible total of your brag-o-meter. Trophy levels, Gamerscore, etc.
Except for a few things:Fronzel said:
Video Games in their earliest, most popular years where ALL ABOUT making some meaningless number somewhere increase. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, etc. Theres a reason these games are infamous enough to get entire documentaries made about them.
As for compelling people, theres two ways to look at it: They were gonna do it already (lets just take CODBOps for example), or the extremely few that actively pump their gamerscore. The latter is who I assume you have a problem with, and I admittedly am not one. In which case, CODBops was just another in the line, and they've no doubt moved on by now, meanwhile that game gets tons of play still by all the people who just enjoy the game for it being there (the majority).
I have to agree with this.
I don't even really mind the concept behind Achievements/Trophies. But I do mind the fact that right from the start you already know how to achieve them, since every pre-Achievement flat out tells you what you need to do to get it.
I always liked how Insomniac implemented Skill Points in the Ratchet and Clank games and R:FoM. You never knew before hand how to get a Skill Point untill you actually got it. It all depended on how skillful and inventive you played the game.
I don't even really mind the concept behind Achievements/Trophies. But I do mind the fact that right from the start you already know how to achieve them, since every pre-Achievement flat out tells you what you need to do to get it.
I always liked how Insomniac implemented Skill Points in the Ratchet and Clank games and R:FoM. You never knew before hand how to get a Skill Point untill you actually got it. It all depended on how skillful and inventive you played the game.
The ones that you need online stuff or DLC stuff for are almost unfair, it's punishing you for not having the money to buy it, my friend got all the acheivements on Dante's Inferno, then they added 2 for the DLC and he's not 2 away, he went from 100% to 98% or whatever because he didn't want to buy the DLC, it's just not cool
Acheivements doing crazy things in Single player are nice though. My first time playing Dead Space I beat the entire game w/ the plasma cutter just for the Trophy, but I still have a fun time. Plus when you have to try out games like the target thingy or zero grav. basketball, it makes you more likely to explore, just don't make 50% of the achievements/trophies fucking online crap, unless it's play so many games or get so many kills. Halo's are TOO bad, but some are fucking retarded.
Acheivements doing crazy things in Single player are nice though. My first time playing Dead Space I beat the entire game w/ the plasma cutter just for the Trophy, but I still have a fun time. Plus when you have to try out games like the target thingy or zero grav. basketball, it makes you more likely to explore, just don't make 50% of the achievements/trophies fucking online crap, unless it's play so many games or get so many kills. Halo's are TOO bad, but some are fucking retarded.
I don't personally care for achievements, but Nintendo seems to be turning a blind eye to some basic human psychology here. Many people like things like achievements, little rewards that mean nothing intrinsically, but give a great motivation boost in a lot of folk. It seems a cheap and easy way to increase interest in their games with a certain segment of gamers, without pissing off any other segments. I can't help but question their understanding of how people tick after reading this.
Off course they are. They're basic classical Pavlovian conditioning.
But that's the thing: Basic perfectly defines the majority of people (in the world, and playing games). So, from a business point of view, it's an incredibly good move. It costs next to nothing (a line of text, a couple lines of code, and 1 small image), and you get a lot of people who'll play your game a lot longer just to get them.
It's like holding a carrot in front of a particularly dim bunch of donkeys.
That said, this is Nintendo... It's not like they have a principle against stupid gimmicks or milking things for money, that's pretty much ALL they do.
But that's the thing: Basic perfectly defines the majority of people (in the world, and playing games). So, from a business point of view, it's an incredibly good move. It costs next to nothing (a line of text, a couple lines of code, and 1 small image), and you get a lot of people who'll play your game a lot longer just to get them.
It's like holding a carrot in front of a particularly dim bunch of donkeys.
That said, this is Nintendo... It's not like they have a principle against stupid gimmicks or milking things for money, that's pretty much ALL they do.
I've skimmed the thread so far and no-one seems to have bothered to point this out. He did not state it specifically, but Trinen's problem may be with the gamerscore being artificially inflatable by playing useless shovelware with easy achievements.Tom Goldman said:
This is a very Nintendo way of thinking. They don't, and in my opinion really shouldn't, trust every single third-party developer to make a worthwhile achievement system that doesn't just reward players for completing the first level. Nintendo, being the control freaks they are, would not want a point system they create to be so open to manipulation and generic mucking-up by lazy third-party developers. That's assuming they don't have problems with the idea of a point-based system in general, which they might.
That would also be why Nintendo has no problem with per-game achievements (and, in fact, seems to enjoy implementing them). If you want to brag about your achievement in SSBB, you can do that, and your friends will see you got it by hard work (or not) in that particular game. Compare that to an abstracted gamerscore, which you could have gotten by playing Barbie games. Yeah, people can look through your achievement list, but it's still obfuscated and, thus, easily manipulated.
Finally, making a system-wide 'achievement' point system puts pressure on developers to implement achievements lest they look like they forgot to do so. Not every game NEEDS achievements, and that pressure sometimes results in the lazy "completed level 1!" achievements in many XBLA games. So, I can see where Nintendo is coming from. Perhaps the compromise I would like to see is per-publisher achievement scores. So a Nintendo score and an EA score and the like... but that would be confusing to new players, and Nintendo is very into attracting new players, so it's unlikely.
I agree with Nintendo, they are truely pointless. I like how they did it in Brawl. The achievements give you something. Be it a stage, music, etc. There is no reason to get a PS3 trophy of 360 achievement since they don't do anything for you.
Actually what the guy is saying is that Nintendo doesn't agree with is forcing a full console implementation for achievements which forces every game to have them, and saying instead it should be designed naturally into the games. Going with their big 3 franchises all the way back to the SNES days, Mario Zelda and Metroid, giving you something to achieve has always been a core component of many of Nintendo's first party titles. They won't give you a fancy pixel trophy, but in Super Mario World or A Link to the Past there was always that built in design to urge you to seak out every last star or heart piece until you have them all. Metroid too of course but that was bloody hard. And that's how I like it, if I'm playing a game like Demon's Soul, Final Fantasy, or Fallout I don't want this silly achievement things popping up at random places.SmokePants said:
Personally I wouldn't say I hate achievements, at worst they're only a little annoying but they're not hard to add, but the way MIcrosoft started it I do see them as 'childish'. The way I see them is they're designed for kids and teenagers... maybe with a little overlap into college years. They're the core audience for caring about something like a 'gamers score'. I probably would have liked it to when I was a kid so I can't fault anyone for it, but as an adult I just couldn't care less anymore.
You can call your achievements and gamer scores 'hardcore' gaming all you want but please don't imply in anyway that it's 'mature' gaming, as many gamers are inclined to refer to ms and Sony as mature/hardcore and Nintendo casual/kiddy. Because there's nothing mature about a glorified pixel sticker book, and there's nothing casual about collecting all 120 stars in a Mario Galaxy.
If Nintendo is saying Operant Conditioning [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2487-The-Skinner-Box] is mythical, I think B.F.Skinner would like a quick word. Or maybe a box.
I'd have to say that "score"; whether points, kill counters, xp or other things is alive and well.Fronzel said:
OK, like I said, I'm not a PC gamer, but I still don't understand what all this stuff about Starcraft has anything to do with achievements.Garak73 said:
And secondly, plenty of developers still incorperate cheats and achievements into their games. Hell, The Orange Box allows you to activate cheats and still earn acheivements, although this is admittedly rare. Most games that have cheats just disable achievements when you activate them. Problem solved. If you don't care about achievements, it shouldn't be a problem.
i don't know but you ever think maybe it's a cultural thing? Microsoft is obviously American, Sony with it's international mega-corp setup is kind of a tweener, while Nintendo is still very much Japanese. All you know is that it's something that will work on a Western mindset. Of course that means that it would work for Nintendo over here too, but considering that they sell in Japan first would it have the same effect in a very different culture?Royas said:
Meh. Achievements aren't going to make me do something insane and time-consuming like collect 100 flags/feathers/whatever, but it does feel good getting that little pat on the back for doing something difficult, like finishing a stage without taking a single hit or making a single error.