Don't lose your way
Don't lose your way
I studied game design in university, and while plenty of things that we learned have leaked out of my ears, never to be remembered, one thing that always stuck with me is Bartle’s four different types of gamers. In a nutshell, different types of players enjoy different things in games, and by mapping what players want to interact with against how they want to interact with them, we can come up with four different types of players:
The reason that I love this classification system is that it explains so much about why you like playing the games you do, and why you might bounce off others. I’m an achiever, which means that I’m often happy to step away from a game after I’ve beaten it once, and that I frequently find large games with a lot of content to be too overwhelming. It also means that I find it hard to enjoy many multiplayer games, as there’s often no point where you “win” the overall game - you just keep playing more matches against other players until the game dies or you get sick of it.
Naturally, this means that I enjoy unlocking achievements in games, because, hey, I can point to that and say, “Look at this record! You can see that I achieved this thing! Nobody can deny that I did!” At least, that’s the ideal situation, but not all achievements are created equally: plenty of them can cause frustration, or are too tedious to bother with. Here’s my list of dos and don’ts for what types of achievements you should include in your game, so as to appeal to other achievers and ensure that you’re creating the most enjoyable experience possible.
While achievements can give a good sense of, well, achievement, there’s a certain balance to them. Overloading your game with achievements creates a sense of diminishing returns as they’re unlocked, and if there’s too few, it can feel a bit half-assed. Unfortunately, from time to time, I see some games that include a good number of unnecessary achievements, possibly to try and increase the number included.
Achievements like “Start a new game”, “Jump for the first time,” or “Defeat your first enemy,” are all trivial enough that unlocking them doesn’t feel worth it. The sensation is less, “Wow, I’ve earned this achievement!” and more, “Wow, the devs really want the beginning of their game to feel more exciting than it is!” At best, you’re wasting your time to try and artificially create a sensation that people will feel regardless - it just isn’t worth it.
If an achievement isn’t trivial to unlock, then doing so almost always gives a great sense of satisfaction. Since you therefore want to provide a reasonable number of achievements to players, I recommend you include those that are unlocked as the player progresses through the story. Including them means that players who don’t want to engage with sidequests and the like will still unlock at least some achievements by the end of the game, and as an added bonus, you can use them to gauge how far players are getting through your game.
The biggest thing to beware with story-based achievements is to not overdo them. Unlocking an achievement after a notable story beat or after beating a memorable boss feels satisfying and is a great reminder of what it felt like to be playing the game at that point. Unlocking an achievement after every story cutscene or main quest diminishes the feeling, and leads to them all blurring together.
While it can feel satisfying to get a rare achievement that few people have unlocked, an achievement should not be rare because it takes forever to unlock. An achievement to, say, beat your 50-hour JRPG twenty times isn’t going to be satisfying for anybody: the majority of players will ignore the achievement, and the people who are trying to unlock it will soon find that it feels more like work than fun. Hell, there’s a good chance that even the people who do unlock it will do so by an exploit or cheat, which defeats the purpose of it.
Other examples of grindy achievements include “Defeat X enemies”, where X is far more than the number of enemies a player would reasonably expect to encounter throughout a single playthrough, and anything that involves too much luck. Players will not have fun unlocking them, and by the time they do so, will feel more annoyed at your game than satisfied. And for the love of god, if you have separate achievements for beating the game on different difficulties, unlock the lower tier achievements on completing any difficulties higher than them - you’ll save your players a lot of time and frustration.
What do I mean by completionist achievements? By completionist achievements, I mean achievements that reward players for completing side activities and goals. Some examples of completionist achievements might include:
These achievements are good as they encourage players to try out everything in your game, and they serve as a good capstone to finishing these side activities.
There’s one notable pitfall with these types of achievements. Namely, if a side activity takes too long, or relies too much on the random number god, then this achievement will become a grindy achievement, which we’ve already established aren’t good. To avoid this, you can either not tie an achievement into this side activity, or make it easy to unlock: “Enter a race” encourages players to try out the activity, but doesn’t punish them if they don’t enjoy it.
This type of achievement is related to the above. You know when a side activity in a game gives different ratings depending upon how well you do in it? I have no issues with that; if people enjoy the activity and want to get the best rating, then that’s their choice. But when there’s an achievement along the lines of “Get a Gold Ranking in every race”, or “Achieve the highest score in all arena challenges,” it’s frequently a pain. It requires perfection from players in a mechanic which is frequently only relevant in the side activity, and it often becomes an exercise in frustration.
Thankfully, these annoying achievements can be avoided quite easily by simply lowering the requirements - “Complete every race” and “Complete all arena challenges” are much more reasonable, and change these achievements into completionist achievements. If that still feels like it could become grindy or challenging, the difficulty can be changed - “Complete most races”, which requires 70% of races to be completed, allows players to pick and choose how they want to unlock the achievement without removing the full content for players who do enjoy it. Alternatively, if getting a gold ranking doesn’t require a perfect play, and merely requires players to be good, then this problem is potentially a non-issue.
The best way to illustrate this achievement is by giving an example of it: many years ago, I was chatting with a friend on Steam while they played through the point-and-click adventure Chaos on Deponia. They told me that they’d found a comedic bit wherein they could step on a rake for it to whack the protagonist in the face, which they were doing repeatedly. As we were chatting, they suddenly informed me that they’d gotten an achievement for doing so ten times, which we both laughed at.
Fun achievements reward players for trying things that are funny or unexpected, and are a nice little nod to say, “Yes, we did anticipate that you would do this”. They’re usually easy to unlock, which ideally means that they’re easy to program in. As a bonus, players who are seeking achievements will find out about these fun moments when they look up how to unlock anything they’ve missed, ensuring that more of the content you’ve developed will be seen by players.
When I’m playing a game - particularly one that I enjoy - I’m trying to play it as effectively as possible. I’m trying not to die, I’m trying to keep all NPC allies alive, and I’m trying to get a high score. This makes achievements that reward bad behaviour annoying - things like, “Die 10 times”, “Have every friendly NPC die”, or “Break somebody’s heart” aren’t fun to unlock.
If I unlock them naturally, they’re annoying reminders of that time I screwed up. If I don’t, then I have to play sub-optimally to unlock them, which takes away from the time I’m trying to actually play and beat the game. It’s even worse when it’s related to doing something stupid or cruel in the story - at least for something like “Die 10 times” I can simply walk off a cliff ten times. An achievement like “Betray all allies” has me acting in a way that I don’t want to, to hurt fictional characters, because the developers encouraged me to. What the developers should actually focus on encouraging is optimal play, because that’s likely what the game was designed around, and it will come a lot more naturally to players.
In summary, achievements are a good way to get players to see more of your game, keep them invested, and help them feel as though they’ve accomplished something. When creating achievements, it’s best to try and focus on things that will reward players or encourage them to play your game, while not being too forceful or demanding more of them than the game already does. Do you agree? Disagree? What are some memorable achievements you’ve unlocked in some games you’ve played? Let me know, and I might end up doing an entry about the most interesting achievements to get.
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