Let's Talk Achievements: Some Basic Guidelines

As mentioned before, the entirety of this category was inspired by the countless thought experiments (similar to this one) that asks: What if old games had achievements? How would they work, what would they look like? OK, that topic may borderline on weird game fandom. Let's take a step back and look at how we got here.

At the launch of the XBox 360, Microsoft ushered in a new "feature", achievements, which were meta game tokens that "reward" players for certain goals and completion. However, the concept of achievements though go much much further back with simple tokens of rewards such as unlockable rewards such as videos, concept art and other bonus content that were popular with the advent of CD based media systems. With the XBox, MS has placed an interesting meta-game on top of all it's games, by drawing a level playing field for all titles regarding "goals", and basically telling players that competition and goals within each game contribute to the greater identity of the player (I'm not going to talk about the ramification of this idea, but it's interesting to think about it).

Within this group I think I'll have two separate themes of discussion:

1. Let's analyze games with existing achievements.
2. Let's give new achievements to games that didn't have any.

The former is relatively simple to explain: For games that have existing achievements, let's look at what works and what doesn't work, and figure out who things were designed in particular way.

The latter is more interesting: For games that didn't have achievements, let's make up new ones.

So, let's talk details (I've seen more via confidential documentation, but I'm going to dig up publicly available articles to show that I'm using publicly known facts). On the XBox, according to MS's own website explaining achievements and XBox360Achievements's own explanation, each retail game can have 5 - 50 achievements, totalling 1000 points; any additional DLC can total upto an additional 750 points, with 30 more achievements. Arcade titles feature a similar structure: 12 achievements, totalling 200 points; additional DLC adds another 3 achievements with 50 points. On the Playstation 3, Sony has been much less forthcoming with facts, with GiantBomb's article and AVForums agreeing on a few basic facts (Bronze = 15 points, Silver = 30, Gold = 90, Platinum = 180; retail games = max of 1230 points, downloads = max of 315 points), but details are scarce at best. Looking at cross platform games, most titles have similar if not identical achievements (sans Platinum trophy). For simplicity sake, I'll use the XBox one as the basis of creating new achievements in future articles. Outside of these hard rules, a few other obvious ones:

• Achievements needs to be obtainable (without absurd rules, like wiping out save data)
• No making up new features for the game (can't add an online component for a SNES game)
• For simplicity, let's assume all games are full games, and not categorize what's a "full title" and a "arcade size" title

So, why the interest in achievements, especially in light of counter-arguments that achievements are not that good of an idea? I'm hooked (probably not a good reasoning)? More legitimately, I point to games like Geometry Wars 2 on why achievements can be a way to create new play experiences for the player. Rather than merely becoming just checkpoints or absurd goals, achievements can become something that suggest new play mechanics or ideas for players to play around.