Achievement unlocked

Achievements has become the new big thing in games. When Microsoft first added achievements to their Xbox360 games i found it to be incredibly stupid – however it took about 1 hour before i realized the brilliance of it. It actually made me want to hunt different goals in the game.

However i can’t help think that achivements might have gotten a bit out of hand. I feel that they are now heading in the direction of what i initially thought achievements would be. They are slowly becoming utterly pointless badges and every game seems to have its own. The brilliance of Microsofts achievement system is that it’s a unified system, that lets you display them to your friends, across different types of games. People immediately see your achivement points when looking at your profile – or actually, they don’t even need to see your full profile.

If we contrast this to Steam’s achievement system. First of all, not all games on steam support achivements. Some of the support their own achievements, which are only visible on their own local websites, and some do indeed use the steam system. However the steam system does not have the brilliant achivement point system that you see on Windows/Xobx live. You need to dig a lot more to discover how many achievements the people in your friendlist have, and i must admit that because of this extra effort, i don’t care at all about steam achievements. Contrast this to Xbox Live achievement that i so love, and i feel its a bloody shame that steam aren’t using this in a better way.

I’m not sure if its just a usability problem, or if it is something else. But i do hope that steam bumps up its efforts…because i am probably playing a lot more PC games than console games this year… and i want to be able to show off my steam gamer score.

About the Author

Rasmus Boserup Raz is a danish game academic and designer. He likes to describe himself as a genius ninja mastermind, and will send his ninja army after any who disagrees. On a lighter note, he loves to meet new people, play games, play with toys, and has a great passion for Indie roleplaying games...of the geeky tabletop kind.