Nintendo Belittles Achievements As "Mythical Rewards"

[Dectilon]

As much as I agree, every time Nintendo bashes something I feel compelled to say: Other M: Theater Mode.

 

[Ghengis John]

Oh Nintendo,

Don't you realize that by calling them "Mythical Rewards" you make them sound all the more epic?

"THESE ARE NO MERE MORTAL BAUBLES NAY! THESE BE THINGS OF LEGEND!"

Actually, I think achievements are more for casual gamers. Take a game like New Vegas, where you can actually look up the Achievements to see what all there is to look for. It essentially serves as a hand-holding guide to step players through the game, and then give little tiny encouragements of "Hey, buddy, you're doing a great job," before they ruffle your hair and send you to the next achievement.

I might be inclined to agree with you sir, but I have met a few tough hombres that might beg to differ with you like this cowpoke:
http://www.xbox360achievements.org/game/dead-rising/achievement/858-7-Day-Survivor.html

Or this desperado here:
http://www.xbox360achievements.org/game/ninja-gaiden-2/achievement/15877-Way-of-the-Master-Ninja.html

There are achievements out there that will reach for your head, say "Hey, buddy," and then promptly decapitate you if you failed to notice the hidden wrist blades so you could roll out of the way at the last second.

 

[phantasmalWordsmith]

I like achievements. they're like little pats on the back if you do something good. I never let an achievement influence my playing but I enjoy the sound of those little bleeps and boops

 

[Frozen Donkey Wheel2]

*MASSIVE SNIP*

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.

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.

If you get banned for using a trainer because they added an achievement system then the problem isn't solved.

Oh and being forced to use built in cheats or none at all = controlling how you play.

OK, look. If you're playing Assassin's Creed, and you kill too many civilians, you have to restart. That's the developer's controlling how you play. ANY set of rules in a game, regardless of achievements or cheats, is the result of someone controlling how you play. That's why it's called a game. Because it has rules. They are there for a reason. Are you really saying that playing the game the way the developers intended is inherently a bad thing?

Cheat devices change those rules and it should be up to you if you want to change some or all of those rules.

I'll give you an example, I hate the wallet system in the Zelda games. I hate that artificial limit on how many rupees you can carry. So, on the Gamecube I have an AR and I use it on Wind Waker and Twilight Princess to give myself the biggest wallet from the beginning of the game. That's a useful cheat that doesn't break the game, it just saves me the headache of throwing away alot of rupees (or unopened chests) because my wallet is full.

Alright, that makes sense. I guess I don't mind because I never used a cheat device, myself. But couldn't someone just make one that automatically disables achievements?

 

[Food Critic]

No one gets it here. Nintendo isn't opposed to achievements on the whole, but to an overarching achievement system that runs outside of the game world. Why? because such a system breaks immersion. No longer am i actually playing a game when I'm suddenly preforming an arbitrary task for an arbitrary reward that has nothing to do with the game itself. when Nintendo does achievements, they want them to be integrated into the game world in a way that enhances, rather than detracts from, the immersive experience of the game. Games, like movies, books, plays and other media, should get the player to suspend their disbelief, and the achievements of Microsoft and Sony really do just the opposite.

 

[Yomandude]

OH.
NO.
YOU.
DIDN'T.
FLAMEWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!!!!!
OT: The achievement neurosis has sucked better men than me into the Xbox 360 experience, so marketing-wise, it's not the worst idea. Also, I'm a perfectionist.
As with all elements in an artistic medium, there are good ways to do the Achievement system, and there are BAD ways to do the Achievement system. If I had to opine my respective best and worst examples of this, it would be Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Just Cause 2.

 

[CatmanStu]

As a completionist gamer I like it when a game gives you reasons to 'think outside the game' so to speak. I wouldn't say it makes a gamer 'play the game the way the developer says' as a lot of the better achievements are the ones that you do without even realising it (kill ten enemies in a row without dying type thing) but calling them achievements is what I consider the real problem. The word achievement suggests something that should be challenging which leads designers to go down the 'lets put an achievement for every difficulty level' route, and I don't think a player who really enjoys a game should punished for not being a good player.
For me, the ideal way of doing achievements is to program them as flexible trophies that say more about how you played the game rather than how well you played it.

And let us delete gamerscores for shit games that were traded within a week of purchase so I don't have to be reminded that I played Kane and Lynch.

 

[tautologico]

*MASSIVE SNIP*

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.

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.

If you get banned for using a trainer because they added an achievement system then the problem isn't solved.

Oh and being forced to use built in cheats or none at all = controlling how you play.

OK, look. If you're playing Assassin's Creed, and you kill too many civilians, you have to restart. That's the developer's controlling how you play. ANY set of rules in a game, regardless of achievements or cheats, is the result of someone controlling how you play. That's why it's called a game. Because it has rules. They are there for a reason. Are you really saying that playing the game the way the developers intended is inherently a bad thing?

Cheat devices change those rules and it should be up to you if you want to change some or all of those rules.

I'll give you an example, I hate the wallet system in the Zelda games. I hate that artificial limit on how many rupees you can carry. So, on the Gamecube I have an AR and I use it on Wind Waker and Twilight Princess to give myself the biggest wallet from the beginning of the game. That's a useful cheat that doesn't break the game, it just saves me the headache of throwing away alot of rupees (or unopened chests) because my wallet is full.

Note that there's nothing fundamentally preventing cheats and achievements to coexist in a game. However, there should be some mechanism in the game to turn off achievements when a cheat is in place. This would require that the cheats were made available by the developer, or that hooks should be made available so that the game "knows" when a cheat is on.

OT: As someone said before, Nintendo suffers from a Not-Invented-Here syndrome, where it is reluctant to incorporate any innovation that they themselves didn't invent. It was the last to abandon cartridges, it didn't want to implement online multiplayer, now achievements. They said no one cared about online multiplayer, after all. So their future stance on achievements can be completely different.

 

[Blair Bennett]

I think I respect Nintendo quite a bit more after reading this. Yes, I will admit, I enjoy achievements and trophies, they're usually a symbol of the fact that you've done something awesome. However, I am aware of the reasoning for their existence, and that is to sell games, and to make you play games for longer than what you normally would have. In addition to this, I've considered it, and have come to the realization that I really did limit the ways I could play a game for myself because I was achievement hunting.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

Couldn't agree more. The popularity of achievements/trophies baffles me, and I can't help but think of achievement/trophy enthusiasts as simpletons.

 

[Ryuu Akamatsu]

Bungie did it right, sort of, with their achievements. Getting certain achievements gives you certain armors. However, when the achievement you need to get said armor requires you to gather up a bunch of people in a mode that has no matchmaking, forcing you to work around schedules and such just for that ONE achievement, then you're doing it wrong. Take the vid master challenges, for example. More time was spent actually getting people together rather than doing the actual achievement.

Seriously. Somebody needs to get it right for once otherwise get rid of achievements entirely.

 

[zombie711]

I feel that that achievements dont matter, unless they add to the game, like humors jokes in banjo kazzoi or the simpsons game

 

[TheBoulder]

snip

I meant optional as in you don't have to pursue them.
Besides, why would you want to turn them off?

 

[Ghengis John]

No one gets it here.

Look, outline why that's it and maybe I'll believe that 150 of us didn't get it and you did. I mean from this report, what says that.

 

[Edager6882]

When Blizzard introduced the achievement system into World of Warcraft it breathed life into instances that were dead to most players. High level players were going back to Molten Core (an instance that no one played since introduction to The Burning Crusade) to get their MC achievement.

Achievements encourage people to learn more about the game they are playing. I just played through Fable 3 and I focused on gun play but I wanted to get the achievements for killing people with swords. From trying to get the achievement I found some awesome gun/sword combos I wouldn't have learned otherwise.

Sometimes I get the feeling Nintendo isn't very connected to the wants and needs of modern gamers.

 

[mjc0961]

In a way I have to agree. Sometimes I look at some trophy or achievement I just unlocked and go "Why the fuck did I bother doing all that just for some actually quite useless image tiles?" Examples include the entirety of inFamous, killing 72,000 zombies in Dead Rising 2, playing nothing but Killzone 2 online for a week to get in the top 1%, shooting 200 pigeons in GTA IV (I usually don't mind collecting things, but the decision to make you shoot them which bring the cops on you and not having them do anything aside from unlock some gamerscore was quite stupid on Rockstar's part), and there are probably more but I can't think of any examples right now but I'm sure there are more.

And yet, somehow I still find some kind of weird enjoyment in unlocking these damn things, no matter how tedious. Sometimes I am having fun getting them (Fallout 3's Psychotic Prankster for example was awesome), but sometimes there's the little niggling voice of common sense in the back of my head going "what the fuck are you doing this for?" when another boring grind rears its ugly head. So in a way, it's nice to have some games that just don't have them so I don't feel compelled to do stupid things sometimes.

...Actually I guess I'm just saying I'm happy that a Nintendo game will never make me grind for the promise of what is essentially nothing. Other achievements are fine with me, and can be fun to brag about. Something like my 100% in the PS3 version of Red Alert 3 Commander's Challenge (RTS with a controller instead of a mouse, oh noez!) is something I can be proud of, but stuff like the 72,000 kills is something anyone willing to sit there and keep driving over zombies can do.

 

[starwarsgeek]

They serve the same basic purpose as speed runs, high scores, and self imposed challenges... except achievments suck away precious development time.

Yeah, I can live without them.