On the whole, achievements encourage players to do stuff that isn't fun. Sometimes they're funny or encourage good gameplay, but too often they're just busywork, mindless random drops, or insane investments in time/skill.
Achievements (for me, at least) are just a reason to spend more time with a game that I enjoy. In most cases, I have trouble enjoying a game if I don't have goals to work towards (either game-imposed or self-imposed). If I finish the main part of the game, and am not tired of it yet, achievements give me goals that I can follow if I want to keep playing.
Definitely agree that there's too many games that have achievements that are just in no way worth the time and aren't even fun as an auxiliary goal, though. The best ones are the ones that get you to do things you otherwise wouldn't (e.g. playing a non-standard playthrough of the game). The lazy ones ('Kill X enemies, Earn Y dollars') are just busywork or earned 'automatically' while doing other things and add nothing.
Yeah I agree with this. Most achievements just don't have the fun or inquisitive nature they should and are pretty much meaningless.
Trophies can be very fun when they incentivize the player to interact with the game in ways that you normally don’t do during a regular play through.
Most games have trophies designed by some corporate drone and consist of a handful of trophies giving for completing the storyline and the rest for token actions that you’ll inevitably do while playing. They fucking suck!
Ratchet and Clank did it right back in the day before trophies with their Skill Point system. Little fun challenges that you wouldn’t normally do. Gave you points to unlock some skins and cheats.
Is that really so much to ask for… yeah I already know the answer.
Most games have trophies designed by some corporate drone and consist of a handful of trophies giving for completing the storyline and the rest for token actions that you’ll inevitably do while playing.
Those are basically just publicly accessible analytics for how far people typically get in a game.
They weren’t trophies but I liked the challenges for Titanfall 1 that allowed you to ascend to the next level.
They were mainly using different weapons that I probably wouldn’t have tried because they didn’t seem as good as the easier to use weapons.
But dodging 100 random lightning bolts is fun!!
Too many people seem too focused on getting 100%/Platinum though, and I feel like that's almost always going to end up in a kind of exploration grind, or just having achievements for playing the game.
The best achievements imo is when you do something random and get an achievement for it, then youll be able to see how many other players managed the same.
I enjoyed the Tokyo Drift achievement in Sea of Thieves. I was running from a larger ship and naturally thought of going full steer around a rock and dropping anchor. It worked! We lived.
After someone on Lemmy recommended Dwarf Eats Mountain (it's okay), I checked out the idle game genre for the first time.
On one extreme, Magic Archery was completed in under an hour and all seven achievements were earned during normal gameplay.
But most other idle games, ho boy. They tend to have several hundred achievements, many of which would take literal weeks if not months to achieve, and often require resetting the game back to the start dozens of times due to prestige mechanics that are necessary for late-game progression.
Action games, for the most part, have well-thought achievements, TBH. If designed well, they can nudge you towards the intended way to play the game and by the time you're done, you will have mastered the gameplay or got really close.
In Hi-Fi Rush, for example, some achievements encourage you to parry, parry counter, air juggle… etc.
You can beat factorio with extremely inefficient gameplay, layout, etc. There are two achievements in that sort of "taught" me how to play better. First was the one that limited how many items you could handcraft, and second was the speedrun achievements. Both were doable but forced me to automate more and plan things out in advance, and I can't remember any other game's achievements that qualitatively changed how I played.
Breath of the Wild: getting all 900 or whatever Korok seeds. The reward is a golden Korok seed whose shape makes it very obvious that you've been cleaning up Korok poop this whole time. Pretty funny prank for Nintendo to pull tbh.
I'm glad Nintendo did that. Almost all completionist achievements are shit compared to actual substance in a game especially one as rich as BotW. Give the achievement hunter their dessert.
Super-bosses that award ultimate weapons... like why am I going to use this weapon now that the biggest challenge is done?
You killed the ultimate boss; now with their drop you are the setting's ultimate boss. You just need to wait for another plucky young upstart to rise and take you down.
Diablo spoiler?
Or many of the Soulsborne games.
Tap for spoiler
Replacing Gehrman in one of the Bloodborne endings being the most direct example.
Ehhhhh... Kinda, not really. The wizard goes mad, the rogue aligns with evil and the warrior failed to contain the big evil and is possessed by it.
Doesn't sound like final boss to me.
I may be wrong, didn't follow the series much, but wasn't Diablo2 BBEG the player from the first one turned evil?
Yeah, as I said, it was the warrior, who took diablo's soulstone with himself, but succumbed to evil and was possessed by Diablo. So, yeah, kinda turned evil. Still, at that point I wouldn't call that body the player from the first game.
Afaik originally in D2 we were supposed to kill him and that would be it, but the animator company decided that it would be cool to animate some dude piercing his forehead with a stone, and since there wasn't anymore dev time Blizzard North decided to go with it. That gave way to to justification for the corruption/possession of the D1 warrior character and thus the story of D2 and kinda D3.
Oh, btw, Blood Raven, the second quest you do in act 1, is the rogue from D1; and the summoner you encounter at the end of the arcane sanctuary, the one who had Horazon's journal, is the mage from D1.
Rarely even happens in-universe.
There is sadistic satisfaction to be had from absolutely nuking enemies who gave you trouble before.
I also like collecting shiny things.
You might need them for ultra-bosses that reward ultimate ultimate weapons.
It’s for the secret boss!
Hey, that's not fair. If you complete the original 150 Pokedex, you also get a little diploma you can print on your GameBoy Printer.
Oh BTW I am currently waiting to complete a "challenge" (its an achievement) for a special game, with a special achievement. All I have to do is, not to play the game. No seriously, "The Stanley Parable" has a famous achievement, that you get if you don't launch the game for 5 years. The fun story is, I purchased the game just to get this achievement. Really. I purchased it and waited 5 years, then installed it and run it.
But wait, why don't I get the achievement? After an investigation I came to realize that the game has to run at least once, so the timer starts counting. Well, since then I played the game and wait another 5 years. I almost reached the fifth year. So to complete everything (which I did not honestly) you would need to do not to play the game. Is it worth it? I say absolutely!
The Stanley Parable is a meta game - a game about playing and making games. And there you are having fun not playing a game…
Change your system time and relaunch the game for a sneaky cheat.
Yeah I know, there are methods. But I want to "earn" it the right way, as I don't like cheating for this kind of stuff. But thanks for the tip nonetheless. Edit: Especially as I'm in the ninth year now...
I cleared all the question marks in Skellige in Witcher 3. I expected...something...anything?
The payoff is in Cyberpunk.
i broke the boat in the middle of the water and then quit the game for few months
I think something that makes a challenge worth it or not in a game is a combination of how fun it is and how much time it will take.
I recently got all the achievements in Another Crab's Treasure. Most of the achievements you get naturally from playing the game, and I only had to hunt down a handful once I completed the game. All I had to do was fight 1 optional boss that I missed, grind a little bit to buy shells from a store, and play a couple of hours into NG+. Hunting those down was worth it because the combat is fun, and it showed that things are different in NG+ (I had to fight a brand new boss that wasn't in the regular game), plus it didn't take more than 3-4 hours.
On the other hand, I also played Schedule 1 again (post cartel update, but before shrooms were added). I love the game. I love the process of starting small and doing everything myself, and eventually building up to buy other properties, hiring employees, and refining the process to be more efficient. But man, that achievement to get $10 million is fucking nuts. I had all the properties producing drugs, the dealers and I were overflowing with product and I still haven't gotten the $1 million achievement either. The game stopped being fun because everything was built up and I was basically there to restock the properties. Also actually getting to $10 million would have taken forever, so I gave up on it. I'll definitely go back and play the game again, but I think I'll wait until there's another update after the one that added shrooms.
As someone who has in fact completed both the original Gen 1 and the full Gen 2 Pokedex (including Mew and MissingNo.), I genuinely can't imagine playing through a Pokemon game without at least completing the regional pokedex. Collecting the creatures is what I play those types of games for.
And the reward isn't the little completion diploma Oak gives you to print out. It's the self satisfaction that comes with finishing your goal. Like getting all the achievements in a game; I don't get anything whatsoever for that, but I still like to do it. Because I'm a completionist.
Beg to differ on the Pokemon example, but then again I am a completionist so that type of challenge gives me lots of self satisfaction (plus now I have achievements through RetroAchevements so a little bragging rights). Frankly, things like that should have internal motivation, so literally no reward is fine by me. I'm literally doing a professor oak challenge right now, which is significantly worse, lol.
Where I draw the line is mostly challenges that I just don't see myself being able to accomplish in a given lifetime. Like the Balatro golden chip on every joker is way too RNG and time consuming for me. I also generally prefer not to have to do a speed run, but that's mostly because I have kids now and setting something down without worrying about time is ideal.
The professor oak challenge is rough lol. I tried it out on Pokemon Silver and must have spent well over 10 hours grinding to get my Feraligatr.
It's mostly awful for the first two badges, but playing with fast forward I beat my first badge in White 2 with in game time around 65 hours (so probably around 15 hours). It's insanely tedious, but I enjoy it late game.
Gosh, y'know, these days breathing gives you an achievement because gamers like to get achievements to have achievements. Why do gamers like to have achievements? Sense of pride and accomplishment, I suppose. And because I am very simple, I'm the same - I crave that dopamine of the li'l 🎶Di-Ding. And platinuming a game is of course more dopamine. It's just very useless in most games, it's nothing but a number somewhere in some statistics. Paradoxically, I think nobody needs achievements and I'm annoyed at how important they've become, and at the same time I'm disappointed if there are none.
Challenges that give me equipment that simply has some better stats are ... well, challenging. Especially when I don't get around to them until after I finish the story. That's when I care the least about increasing my ice damage by 2 points.
Make me explore the world to find things, that's my jam. Especially if the things I find add to the lore. ... No I can't think of any examples right now.
Finishing a Dark Souls game.
And finishing a Dark Souls game.
I was debating saying beating Consort Radahn. It took me about a day of grinding to learn patterns, figure out strategies, find all the upgrades, and simply have the best RNG.
I didn't want to respect and just cheese him either. I will never attempt to beat him again, but I do feel satisfied that I beat him.
I was going to say Soul Level 1 playthrough of Dark Souls is one of my favorite gaming experiences. Absolutely worth it for me. Helped me through some depression. Do not recommend to anyone however.
Dark Souls 3 is a great game to play at SL1. You've got quite a selection of weapons and armour that you can equip, plus one spell, so it's a bit of a puzzler to find optimum combinations of stuff to beat all the bosses.
Dark Souls 1 is okay to play at SL1. You're limited to being a pyromancer and have a good selection of flame spells that you can cast, but you're limited to weapons with fairly boring movesets, and you'll be doing a lot of running back to Blightown to get pyromancies and level up your flame.
Dark Souls 2 is goddamned brutal to play at SL1. Your dodging is tied to your agility, which means you're a sitting duck until you get some stat boosting gear. Start the game by murdering Cale for his hat of +3 dexterity, grab the work hook and the ladle to swap out in your off-hand for their small stat boosts, and get yourself to Tseldora to grind the peasant set for its small adaptability bonus. I hope you're good at beating end-game bosses with a rapier, no shield, and bad rolls - maximum four in a row due to your low stamina, which makes throne watcher / defender hellish.
Scholar obviously has all of the pain of 2, plus you can't rush into the DLC areas for their high-powered rings. By the time you get the ring of the embedded for its massive SL1 stat boost, you'll have most certainly earned it.
Yes, I did play through all four at SL1 in preparation for the release of Elden Ring. DS3 is fun at SL1, but I also do not recommend the others to anyone. Elden Ring is quite good at RL1 - it still allows some quite varied builds, and it forces you to learn the bosses rather than just "DPS race" them like you do normally.
I 100% RDR and killing cougars with a knife still haunts me. It's exactly as it sounds. Go do melee combat with a gigantic pissed off cat that almost always comes in pairs, sometimes a trio.
I fucking hate how if certain animals come at you at a particular angle, there's literally nothing you can do. Sure they give you the button-mash prompt, but it does literally nothing, and you still get mailed to death. Every. Single. Time.
I know you meant mauled, but the image of a giant cat sticking you in a box and mailing you to the reaper was just too funny 🤣
Any challenges from Ubisoft games.
Megabonk has some "fun" challenges that probably counts towards both. I did the "AFK gaming" one, where your character isn't allowed to be moved by the player ( a huge handicap). It was kind of fun figuring out which character would be best, what pickups to prioritize etc.
I’ve decided not to go after the golden strawberries in Celeste. The only other thing I’m missing is the moonberry.
When I finish a game naturally I look at the list of stuff I didn't do yet, and think "how much time will this take? Will I even remember doing completionist stuff in 5 years or would it be better to start a new game?"
Beating Dark Souls 2 without dying or using a bonfire rewards you with a ring that makes your right hand weapon completely invisible.
It isn't worth it at fucking all, since there is a spell that does the same thing and is way easier to obtain (even in 2025 despite being a multiplayer rank reward). The spell and ring also have ZERO effect on PvE and it rarely matters in PvP when the animations of your body instantly reflect the size of your weapon to a good enough player. Like, I don't need to see your Ultragreatsword to know that's what you are swinging when your arm starts hefting the weight.
Most collecting achievements are just game filler really. The ones I find interesting are ones that, in a more free-form game, create an interesting goal to work towards.
For some of my favourites I've on occasion gone through the list and been like 'Yeah that sounds like an interesting objective.'
The key for decent ones is usually that they are an achievable goal for one playthrough that act as a 'guiding star'.
I got one character to lvl 60 in Classic WoW Hardcore. When I got that last level up, I cried a bit. Very emotional journey.
That was an achievement.
I tried doing Ironman a while back. Not even on classic, just on whatever the latest patch was. It was only getting easier with time and I wanted my name on that leaderboard. In my mind, it didn't seem like it would be that difficult as long as I played carefully.
I gave up after level 20. I didn't die, but I had a few close calls and figured it wasn't going to be worth it to grind out 90+ more levels using the worst gear in the game and no healing or stat boosting items.
I'm at 99% of RDR2 for like 2 years now because I can't be bothered to do the dominoes part of the gambling challenge.
That dominoes shit makes no sense to me. I've tried to look up the rules multiple times online and then I go into the game and try to make a legal move and the game won't let me.
Whoever programmed that shit was on crack.
Same, no idea wtf I'm doing with that one.
Factorio: lazy bastard is not worth getting but there is no spoon is absolutely worth getting. People over estimate how much is required pre rocket and get bogged down in these over engineered designs. After finishing thre is no spoon you realise how little is actually required and its best to just go build something than try design the perfect system that lasts into the megabase era.
My first full Factorio playthrough was a Lazy Bastard run. The game is a lot more chill when turning off biter expansions & turning up trees slightly in the map gen.
Granted I think I racked up like 200hrs in that run, largely because I could leave the game running in the background whilst going off to study or do other stuff. Once you're past the intial stage & have a mall set up, hand-crafting really doesn't matter much.
There is no spoon was alright as a goal, but it also ends up being a definitive end to that playthrough (which, arguably, can be both good and bad).
I also play with no biters. I just dont see the point in having them enabled since i get past the rocket stag quickly and then end up working on a megabase for a few hundred hours and biters are just annoying.
Not worth it getting all the Korok seeds in BotW
Challenges in action games are worth completing most of the time because they're typically designed to either drive home the intended purpose of individual combat mechanics, or outright reveal mechanics too advanced to cover by basic tutorials—e.g. dodge counter in Hi-Fi Rush.
Completing the Pokedex is pretty cool.
I've come close to getting all the capsule toys in Shenmue but in the end it was a lot if reloading saves and eventually I gave up. I barley finish any games so doing extra challenges is even rarer for me :/
Regarding collectables-based challenges, in my experience, all collectables that don't unlock content or aren't some kind of upgrade are a waste of time.
I remember collecting all the figments in Psychonauts 1, how frustrating and time consuming it was and how it was near useless to the regression of the game. I love Psychonauts and I would like to play it again over and over, but I would not collect those pesky figments ever again.
If the collectibles aren't satisfying to obtain on their own, I don't think putting an unlock behind them makes them retroactively better.
A good collectible is something like Strawberries in Celeste, each one requires you to take a more difficult path or do an additional screen. They're fun to go for, and I think it actually would've detracted if some unlock made them feel like a required task rather than a bonus challenge.
Any "no death" achievements/challenges in souls-like games. I don't see a point in struggling for weeks/months just for a small badge on my account.
On the other hand, 100%'ing certain games like Stardew Valley is definitely worth it. I won't spoil what happens, but just know that it is worth doing.
I enjoy seeing the little achievement pop-ups, especially when it's a rare one, but I almost never go out of my way to get any. Don't see the point, tbh. I'm not interested in playing the game in a way that's less fun for me, just to check an utterly meaningless box. I guess you could reasonably argue that every goal in a game (quests, completion, exploration, what-have-you) is meaningless, but achievements have always struck me as particularly hollow.
I'm an achievement hunter, I have 115 perfect games on Steam. Many of the games I've completed 100% are extremely difficult;
list of games
- Shovel Knight
- Offspring Fling
- Dead Cells
- Dark Souls, +2 +3
- Hotline Miami, +2
- Binding of Isaac, + Rebirth
- etc.
:::
I have two points to make:
First, the Achievement Hunting community is autistic as fuck. I don't mean that as an insult (I believe I'm on the spectrum myself), but rather, I'm convinced there is a correlation.
Second, I believe achievement hunting is like the difference between playing sports for fun, or playing sports competitively/professionally. The challenge of 100% is occasionally so far beyond whatever 'difficulty setting' the game ships with.
I believe some blend of these two factors are the impetus for achievement hunting (in most cases).
In any case, I don't disagree with you, achievements can feel hollow. In some ways, I think they have contributed to games losing their magic.
Gone are the days of some rare and obscure secrets a game has, because you'll always know there is something you missed when you check your achievements.
"Discover the secret in the rotting wood graveyard" OK, cool, just fucking ruin the surprise I guess?
From a development standpoint it kinda makes sense, you do want your audience to experience everything the team worked on, but yeah, magic gone...
I'm also on the spectrum. Sometimes I think the spectrum is so wide as to be functionally useless for describing behavior. I feel like my comment maybe implied that I think less of people that feel compelled to 100% games, which is not the case. I just have different compulsions.
I've been gaming for over 30 years, and probably have thousands of games in my digital library. I don't think I've gotten all of the achievements in any of them. I tend to predominantly play rpg's, and other games with a strong narrative bent, and I try not to peek at the achievements, so as to avoid spoilers. I appreciate when the developers hide them, so it isn't an issue.
I've seen many people argue that achievements have had a net negative effect on gaming, and I tend to agree, but I don't really have strong feelings about it, since it typically doesn't affect my experience very much.
I do challenges for the fun of doing them, not for the reward.
Dark Souls at level 1 is absolutely worth doing if you're replaying the game. It's a lot of fun, and much easier than you'd think during your first time playthrough.
Surprisingly enough, playing Getting Over It 50 times over for the achievement is one of the most fun experiences I've ever had. The skill curve is just awesome to experience, my time dropped from 18h all the way down to 10 minutes.
Challenge not worth doing : all achievements on Rayman Legends. The game itself is amazing, but to get the last achievement you need to play daily procedural levels for MONTHS unless you're a god at the game (and I'm pretty sure the top times are always cheated anyway, so you're never getting the highest point reward anytime ever)
I hunt down achievements when I enjoy the game and the achievements sound fun and not busywork. If it's interesting side quests, minigames, or fun challenges, I almost always do them. I also like playing at max difficulty when it's fair.
If it's about going through a checklist to collect 100 feathers or spending 50 hours learning the entire game by heart to complete some hardcore challenge, I'd rather do something else with my time.
I think the jump rope and volleyball moons in Mario Odyssey were pretty bad. They didn't really connect to the gameplay and just felt tedious to get.
I didn't do all the optional bosses in expedition 33. I finished the plot and was so powered up the story bosses didn't even get a turn. But fighting the billion hp "dodge 13 hits in a row or die" just wasn't fun for me.
I have the "Completionist" achievement for Half-Life2 cause it was a fun challenge to get them all (yes even the gnome one), but gave up on Osmos: fun and relaxing game, but the last levels were too much hassle.
Anything involving multi-player is just completely ignorable.
Collecting every item in Rabbids Go Home.
Stupid game made me think there was a secret moon level. I feel like the devs actually forgot to put in at least a trophy or something because it unlocks nothing.
I draw the line at whether it's something that can be done naturally, as a result of playing the game and enjoying it enough to put in that much time. I'll entertain trying to 100% a game that has an achievement to farm 1000 of some herb, if it's something that I'll just come across in due time by making full use of all the game mechanics, and presumably see some form of in-game payoff for my efforts. I'll instantly become content with just seeing the credits if an achievement to get a similar quantity of something is just an excuse to pad play time by making me grind some monster drops just for the sake of getting that last achievement.
Completing entire tech tree in minecraft modpacks. For those who dont know, many popular modpacks for minecraft has a questlines, usually its main progression chapters, explaining how to play the game, and many secondary queslines for specific stuff or mods. And many of this mods are optional for the main progression, so completing them or even using them at all is just useless extra work.
I mean, it‘s videogames so any challenge that gives you the satisfaction of clearing it is worth it, any that doesn‘t isn‘t worth it. Could mean all of them are, could mean none of them are, and could mean anything inbetween. I‘m an achievement hunter so I go for those, but I‘m not super purist about it; if the challenge is to walk 40000km, I rubberband the controller lol
I'll only answer the first one.
Achievement systems full stop. People who value completion through achievement systems are fucking uncreative persons who need to find a different hobby or reconsider why they enjoy theirs. From a dev standpoint it's just a way of lazily padding a game.
I'm not talking about completionists of actual game content like collecting all the stars in a Mario game, or catching the 151 pokemon, but moreso the "silver trophy" for killing 2000 grunts or whatever bs achievement ideas they decided to arbitrarily create. You're diluting the art form.
Mine is completing the Pokedex in the original Pokemon games. All you get is just Professor Oak giving you a wink and a small few second cut scene. And a congratulations text. Imagine spending all of your time then, getting all 151 and even 252 pokemon just for that? Yeah no thanks, I never completed the pokedex.
Well, to me this is worth it, because the journey is. Zelda Tears of the Kingdom is a similar thing. Doing all of the work for just a checkmark is not really worth it, but the adventure and the fun I have doing all of this is worth it. I am not after the price, but after the experience. Therefore its worth it, if its fun to do.
Filling out your arsenal with adversary weapons in warframe gets easier the more you do, and a lot of them are really worth while... but maxing them out? Hell no, that's 5 forma a pop, and the valence bonus is NOT worth re-grinding out. I'm glad DE has made the Infested Adversaries easier to deal with, so the valence bonus is easier to max out but good god. that's too much forma.
That one insane hour-long-wait shape trace in The Witness. Respect if you completed that one, not worth it for me..
I 100%'ed Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. That was pretty fun with secret characters and levels to unlock.