The Call of Achievements
Achievements are "like a topping on a pizza," explains
Robert Bowling, community manager at Infinity Ward. They enhance the gameplay
experience and reward dedicated players for their effort and skill.
That is why unlocking all the potential points in a Call of Duty game is such a grueling
process. They are badges of honor -- particularly achievements like "Mile
High Club," says Bowling.
Only 2.8 percent of the 10 million Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare players
who have ever logged into Xbox Live have earned the achievement, which is
awarded for completing COD4 on
veteran difficulty.
Achievements like "Mile High Club" should be rare -- perhaps
only one per game, Bowling explains. "It is one of the hardest
achievements to achieve and you lose some of that weight when they are all that
hard. It would be more frustrating than fun."
Players, however, complained that the achievements in Call of Duty 2 were too difficult to
obtain, says Call of Duty 4 lead
designer Zeid Rieke. All but three of the 13 achievements had to be completed
on veteran difficulty. So the studio compromised for COD4.
"It's really nice to get a pop-up every hour or two saying
that you've done something cool," says Rieke. That's why the team ensured
achievements were more evenly spread throughout COD4. Points should not be given away, he says, but the player
should naturally unlock them as he progresses through the game.
"The trick is you want to constantly feel like you're being
rewarded," says Bowling. At least 60 percent of achievements should be
achievable by the average player on one play through. That's why COD4 has achievements for consistent
headshots and knife throws -- it rewards players for developing their skills.
Infinity Ward also wanted to highlight creative play. If someone
found and used a rocket-propelled grenade to down an approaching helicopter, he
unlocked the achievement "Bird on the Ground." "Daredevil"
was awarded to players who, blinded by a flashbang, still managed to kill an
enemy. These rewards, says Rieke, inspire players to try new things.
While incentives are important tools, Infinity Ward is conscious
of achievement mania. That is why it chose to only distribute achievement
points throughout the single player campaign.
Other games with robust
multiplayer modes have been plagued by achievement whores who hijack bouts so
they can complete incentivized goals, rather than the goals of that game
instance. Since COD4 is team-centric,
Infinity Ward thought adding achievements to online play would end up ruining
the experience for all.
Skate This Way
Achievements can also act like traffic cops, directing players
toward new features they might not otherwise experience.
The Skate team at Electronic Arts built a robust community
site, Skate.Reel, for its game but worried players would not naturally
gravitate to the site. It used achievements to drive players to the web by
rewarding the uploading of Skate session
photos and videos.
EA Black Box's Skate
But some of these online achievements -- designed to goad
players into joining the community -- were too far removed from the game.
"Skate Celebrity," which was unlocked after your photo or footage was
reviewed 20 times by other gamers, was entirely outside of the player's
control.
"It wasn't necessarily fair," says Skate 2 Producer Brian Lindley. Players
complained that the game's achievements were generally too difficult to get.
"In retrospect, we had too many online achievements in the original Skate. It was a hard lesson."
When Skate 2 rolled
around, the team decided it would spread the achievements more evenly
throughout the experience, and it would be a bit more generous when it came to
giving them away.
"For a game like ours, where it's a big open world and a
lot of stuff to do... If a player has played through all the paths of the
career, they should walk away with 400 points," says Lindley. But to get
the full 1,000 points, players will have to complete every challenge in the
game.
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Personally, I prefer if a game has no online multiplayer (ranked matches especially) achievements. The main concern is if I pick up a game that no one else plays (at all or anymore), then I'm locked out of (typically) half of the achievements. This happens especially for those games that no one bothered to pick up at launch and I picked it up a few months after launch.
Thanks for the article.
I really find it hard to believe that older gamers take achievements seriously, though. If you're 35 years old, and you've got a family, a full-time job, and a disposable income, you're probably not very likely to be sitting around trying to unlock achievements with the limited gaming hours you've got available. I've heard plenty of older gamers complain that many games are too long for them already, and that's without achievement hunting. So I'd be really interested to see a breakdown of interest in achievements by demographic.
It seems like you're almost implicitly writing achievements off as a gimmick for players with more time. I'd caution against this. First, it's very possible, and has been done, to implement achievements that either are A) not time consuming, or B) capitalize on skills and knowledge directly incident to the normal play of the game. Secondly, achievements are going to have appeal across the board. For instance, I don't want to seem facetious, but might achievements be attractive to those gamers who comprise the "Achiever" gaming type? There seem to be a decent amount of those, and I'm willing to be they're not quite localized in a single age group.
I don't want to deal to heavily in anecdotes, but I'll use myself as an example. I'm 25, I'm in law school, I do game dev on the side. Suffice to say, I have no extra time. Yet I somehow get a kick out of pursuing achievements in games. Sure, I'm judicious about what I go after. Sometimes it's clear following a certain achievement's just not feasible, and I write it off. (Title Master in SFIV comes to mind. Collect every title in the game. Yeesh). But I find many achievements very attainable, even with my limited time frame. Take those away, and you'd have one grumpy gamer. Basically, though, I don't want this to seem to critical. It's an interesting question, and maybe the actual answer would prove me flat wrong. I just think you might be over-generalizing a little.
Maybe the key to making achievements workable in multiplayer is to make them easier to obtain? But then again, if everyone can obtain them, what's the incentive to achieve, where's the distinction in having something no one else has? And the other side of that, if you leave open a backdoor to game the achievement system (and that door may prove impossible to close), even if achievements are hard to obtain, exploiting just as effectively kills exclusivity. Just some interesting things to think about. Personally I think it is possible, and desirable, to have a robust, workable achievement system for online games. But it's a complex issue, definitely worthy of some further thought and study.
One of the things I hate most about many achievements is the "beat the game on hardest setting" achievement. The hardest setting is rarely available at the beginning of the game so it requires 2 playthroughs. Now I know they're just trying to increase replay value, but for some gamers that enjoy playing it on the hardest difficulty it ruins the gaming experience. Sure, I can put it on a harder setting after I beat it, but it will probably end up being easier than my first playthrough just because of the experience I have. I think designers need to stop this trend because it is actually hurting the experience of those people that want to play a hard game from the beginning. You wouldn't lock "easy" mode out, it is the same thing. Locking easy mode out would disturb the not so good gamer making them probably die multiple times and have to reload. Just as locking hardest mode out is disturbing the experienced gamer making the game simply boring. So seriously stop doing that. There are other ways to entice people to play more than one time. For instance buying weapon upgrades when there is no possible way for the upgrades to be earned in one play.
Having said that, if I beat a game and I haven't gotten most of the Achievements I feel ripped off. Somehow I didn't play the game "correctly." It's a cop out. If you (as a designer) have a feature that you want people to use, design it to be a more integral part of the experience. Don't attach it and point and achievement at it and expect people to play it.
I think using achievements to point out a non-integral part of the game is a perfect use. If something is basically unimportant, but is a nifty feature that not everyone might see, making an achievement is good for letting people know it is there, rather than designing a portion of your game around pointing it out. The achievement in Mirror's Edge to complete the game without shooting anyone is a good example of this.
Also, examples like Uncharted giving an achievement for killing three enemies with a grenade is a cool way to encourage people to use a particular feature. If you are consistently using grenades anyway, you will probably get this achievement by default. If you don't use that many grenades, it will encourage you to use them in situations where grenades are a good idea.
@Oscar
I agree, collect-a-thon achievements are a waste of time to get and to implement. This ties back to Eric's point, but if the only purpose of your feature is to award an achievement, then you should cut it, as in your GTA example.
Don't forget that achievements apply to ALL games, not just those on the Xbox 360. Microsoft, to some extent, swiped the achievements idea from Pogo.com. There you'll find the gamut of game players chasing after the site's badges. Hell, even Web site communities have been incentivized in such a manner. BetterRecipes.com, a site squarely targeted at 35+ female demographic, uses a form of achievements (virtual currency instead of a score) to get moms to contribute their own recipes to the site. Achievements have a universal appeal; however, all are not universally appealing.
While many games -GTA4 being a common example- have achievements with no unlockable incentive the process of finding those birds and pigeons usually brings you to places you might not go. Which obviously might give you new goals and ideas to try out.
I don't think achievements should be stripped from online play. But racking up kills or doing specific things (like shooting the sky, sticking a Warthog with three passengers, or getting 15/any number of head shots) should necessarily be the reward. Joining a clan in a game that supports them would be an example of something unobtrusive to gameplay yet useful. Halo 3 dodges a lot of the problems by only letting you complete some challenges in ranked matches, mess up and your rank becomes gruesome. Maybe encouraging trying out unlikely weapon combinations for a small amount of time. Things that are still under the player's hands yet not very goal oriented in the sense of trying to take down other players. Because when other players get involved the potential for stupid redundant play on the part of the achievee is bona fide.
I'd not heard of that. Is the virtual currency available at that web site useable for anything? Or is it just a measure of your standing within the community?
I agree with oscar, I would like it more if they were tied to the game a little better. Jeff mentioned the grenade example in Uncharted. Well what if obtaining that achievement unlocked a more powerful grenade for use in the game? You've already achieved something difficult...reward the player for it. Achieved a headshot trophy? Narrow the target spot to make it easier for future use. You successfully collected 40 heads to earn the head-hunter trophy which are rare drops? Increase the drop rate then. Simply making them badges really does nothing, especially if those trophies are difficult to come by.
I also dislike the online achievements, although for a different reason. Forcing a player to play the game how you want to just to earn trophies is very silly, and it simply leads to people trying to break the system. Look at LittleBigPlanet and the trophy levels designed to net you 7 or so online trophies all at once. When achievements become more a chore and less like fun, well, that's where they break down.
Let a person play the game how they want. Let them unlock all trophies from single player or multi-player, and that way people can gain everything they want to out of the game and not feel "forced" to play in a way they dislike to "complete" the game. I think that's the main trick.
But "Disarm the other team's bomb 50 times in multiplayer" is a bad idea. It's a bad idea because now I'll log in to some server and everyone will go "Don't shoot the terrorists, we're taking turns disarming bombs to get the Disarm Achievement." Then I have to leave, because actually playing the game would be considered griefing since I'd be the only one who actually got online in order to play instead of grind for some stupid trophy.
I enjoy the bonus points in the "Ratchet & Clank" games a lot more, because they're part of the game. Not just part of my PS3's operating system looking over my shoulder and watching me game. I wish achievements worked a lot like that.
Take Resident Evil 5, for example. It's essentially got TWO achievement systems. The one that actually makes the game more fun by unlocking new weapons, new "figures", new costumes, etc, and the one that adds to your trophy list on PSN or Live. It's redundant, and slightly confusing, and there's a good amount of overlap between the two. Why not merge them into a single list of achievements and base the in-game incentives on that?
Also, giving points away for simple stuff cheapens the value of the achievements. They need to require at least some sort of skill. Time played is not really an achievement. Watching the opening cinema to a game is not an achievement...
Check out this article for more: http://checkyourhud.com/the-anatomy-of-the-achievement/
I'd say that the "Gamerscore" part is pretty worthless for exactly the reason you name. Ultimately, all these Achievements are meaningless, but if you want to have a sort of meta-competition with your friends or just show off how good you are Game X, they work well enough. However, the fact that Game X and Game Y can each give 1000 points without any regulated "how hard is this to earn?" metric does mean that the total number of points will ultimately be irrelevant. I think that the real value is that your friends can see that you did some amazing thing...not that you completed the game, not that you blew up 500 demons with the rocket launcher, but that you completed some challenge, like beating the boss of level 4 without getting hit. I guess there's one other use, too, and that is, as the article mentioned, to say "Ding! Good job!" every hour or two on a player's first run through the game.
The virtual currency is redeemable for virtual furniture. So earning it allows you to pimp your virtual kitchen. It's a bit of a stretch in comparison to Xbox 360 achievements, but it serves the same basic principle--getting you to do stuff you otherwise wouldn't.
@Michael Lattanzia
One of the Turn 10 guys raised exactly that point (there wasn't room to dive into it in this article). His suggestion is that Microsoft should find some way to weight individual games in such a manner that their achievement difficulty factor is reflected in a player's GamerScore. For instance, someone who snags the Mile High Club in Call of Duty should get a GS bump in comparison to a game like Resident Evil 5 where achievements are essentially handed to you. Whether that's something that is plausible--or something that enough people care about to warrant a GS overhaul--is unknown.
Personally I have mixed feelings on achievements. I, myself, am not motivated by achievements, but when you do something "outside the box" and get an achievement it feels good. If I get an achievement for something I'm suppossed to be doing anyway, like beating a boss, or completing a level, I feel like it is unjustified, even though it does serve a purpose of proving to my friends that I did indeed make the progress I said I did.
One negative thing I see with achievements, is it gives developers a lazy way to get the player to do things. Instead of driving the players experience by game design itself, they can just throw up some achievements to fill in holes left by poor design. I do not see this too often anymore, but the potential is obvious.
I don't think we can make generalizations about the type of gamer who likes achievements as far as age or other categorizations are concerned EXCEPT for two elements: preferred playstyle and poor/excellent implementation of achievements. The latter is an issue for designers but the former varies with each individual, although there are broad categories of preferred playstyles. However, there's no predetermined demographic for preferring one playstyle over another; it just varies with each player.
I completely agree with the annoyance of including multiplayer achievements, at least for most any game currently made or that has been made to this point. The only way I feel that such achievements are valid is if you make a game that is marketed and targeted as a multiplayer product (i.e. analogous to board games that say, "for 2 to 4 players" or something similar). In my opinion, multiplayer has become a crutch that only hurts the development process (aside from the hypothetical type of product that is created solely as a multiplayer offering, as I mentioned).
GameInformer also ran an article last year about poor/excellent achievement design. It raised some of the same points as this article as well as the points in various replies. I think the industry is still trying to get a handle on the best ways to use this type of feature.
One thing that can be done but doesn't seem to be implemented as much as it probably should is to have one "type" of achievement with a scale of levels. Star Ocean: The Last Hope does this with a few of its achievements, particularly the Battle Trophy system. The BTs are broken down into 10 different achievements for how far the player gets in obtaining all BTs in the game. Considering there are 9 playable characters with 100 BTs for each for a total of 900 BTs in the game, this is much better than simply offering a single achievement. However, this approach is also taken with some other achievements such as the Quest completion which has a few different achievement levels in its scale. Doing things this way allows the player to see progress rather than an "all or nothing" approach, so I think it is probably much more positive as far as the overall experience is concerned.
I also agree with the annoyance of locking out higher level difficulty settings, especially since the only thing that higher settings do in today's games is multiply the health, damage, etc of the enemies (which really is not a higher difficulty, just more time consuming). If enemy abilities changed or specific types of enemies changed, or if certain events were only accessible through higher difficulty (and I don't mean only at the end, either, but rather throughout the game) then it makes sense to offer higher settings. However, if all you do is change the health, damage, etc with a multiplier, there's no reason to offer multiple settings at all, let alone lock the higher ones out. If the content doesn't actually change, you're only making the process longer to play, and that's not more difficult, per se, just more problemation due to other obligations and time limitations.
I'd like to add that I see a very disturbing trend amongst gamers (at least in my opinion) as far as achievements are concerned. Specifically, I see people checking achievements before they even actually play the game, and I've read notices about this trend on news sites so it isn't just my imagination. Basically, some gamers are not even playing the actual game; instead, they are playing the game as though the game experience was designed for them to aim for achievements. This is ludicrous, at least for many games (I have not seen a game designed with this focus but I suppose it is possible to do so). For example, I can use Star Ocean as an example again since it is the title I've been playing most recently. I see people talking about strategies for various achievements even when they'll get the achievements simply by playing the game. I'm talking about achievements that you cannot possibly miss by merely playing the game, not stuff that requires planning to achieve. This includes most of the Battle Trophies; as long as you actually play with a specific character (a prerequisite for getting any BT for that character) you will get most of the BTs simply by playing. There's no need to check achievements or ask for strategies of how to get them because they'll just happen during play (which is exactly how achievements are supposed to be awarded, after all). I think this is similar to some of the replies here with respect to certain online multiplayer achievements and how someone who wishes to actually play the darn game can't even do so due to certain gamers aiming for achievements rather than actually playing. It's also somewhat analogous to how some people say they play Halo but really mean they play multiplayer competitions using the Halo settings and equipment. That's a very different meaning from a person such as myself who states that they play Halo and is talking about the actual game itself (story, background, characters, etc) - after all, the multiplayer competition wouldn't exist without the game content from the story but the story still exists without multiplayer.
As I said, I find this very disturbing. Perhaps additional, optional achievements could be offered for people who want to approach a play session from that type of viewpoint rather than actually playing the game itself. That would allow players to share the same general approach to playing.
On a separate note, some above have suggested that Achievements only appeal to a small niche demographic and I have to point out that these statements are completely untrue in that it is really a mass market phenomenon and as pointed out in the article they are not exclusive to the 360 or even to games. I believe Microsoft has built the most value out of their achievement system and anyone I know with both a 360 and PS3 tends to get games on the 360 like 99% of the time simply to play into the achievements and wider Gamerscore systems (the rare exceptions being the few cases where there were large quality or content differences in the PS3 version). This is a testament to the value of the Achievement rewards system. IMO the lack of Achievements in XB Community Games is also another reason those games will never compete seriously with XBLA games (even assuming that XBCG eventually raise their quality bar).
I don't like when achievements overlap unlock rewards. The achievement becomes redundant, other than as a gauge to measure just what your players have unlocked. Nor do I like achievements being tied to online play. Online achievements are too dependent upon how popular the game is during the time-frame that you are playing. A few are okay, but some games put too high a percentage into online achievements.
I find people that play the achievement meta-game to be a bit funny. People even write guides on how to maximize your gamerscore with minimal effort, time, and game rental money. They give step-by-step instructions on how to set up to get achievements without having to do things like actually learn to play a game. Even FAQs for specific games now tend to come with a section on achievements, ranging from describing them to giving detailed instructions on receiving them.
On a tangential note, one thing that I found discouraging was the tone of surprise at how many people skipped Cod4's single player mode to go directly to the multiplayer. As one of those gamers, I absolutely loathe when developers lock multiplayer content under the single player game. CoD4 is one of the nice ones about it, unlike the majority of games.
Tom Newman has a good point that I agree with, and the reason why I loved the aforementioned achievement, is that it's player driven, and it just enhances gameplay.
This research is a very important resource when we want to make achievements. To what extent does the carrot should be separated from the donkey and how easy can be grabbed?
Excellent article.