Image source @ Visual China
Text | Game Pizza, author of | Dante's Ark, edited by | Zhou Yabo
I don't know when it started, but the "achievement system" has been defaulted to standard for games and game platforms.
Recently, the PC game platform Epic Games Store finally launched an achievement system, and Epic official blog announced the matter with a rather witty statement: "Great Epic scientists have overcome many difficulties and achieved great victories after arduous scientific research struggles - your friends can finally see your achievements!" I am deeply proud of the efficiency of the headquarters! It only took us three years to make the feature spicy! ”
The subtext behind the joke is that the achievement system should be the basic feature provided by the game platform. From a platform perspective, the achievement system is part of a community feature for players to demonstrate their game progress and demonstrate proficiency in the game. This is why single-player games often place more emphasis on the achievement system than online games – online games come with social attributes, and levels, strengths, and even gameplay records are more intuitively presented to other players.
Specific to each game, achievements can generally be divided into the following categories: difficulty achievements, process achievements, collection achievements, skill achievements, brush achievements, and fun achievements, each of which has different difficulty conditions.
In extreme cases, an achievement can mix several attributes to increase the difficulty exponentially, such as The Bearer in Red Dead Redemption 2, which requires "being attacked by a bear in story mode and eventually killing 18 times", with a combination of process, skill, fun, and brush volume, which only 0.9% of Steam players worldwide do. Far Cry: Primitive Killing has a special achievement, Survival of the Fittest, which requires the entire game to be completed with the highest difficulty, without any fault tolerance, and the achievement note reads: "Forget it... It's impossible for anyone to do it. ”
There is no doubt that most of the time it is not an easy task to achieve the "full achievement" of a game. After doing so, there is no shortage of physical and mental exhaustion into the "sage time", so the next step of "Platinum" (the name of the game's full achievement on PS) is often "sealing".
Even so, the "All-Achievement Party" still takes this as its goal, frequently switching between joy and pain on the road to pursuing achievements. Players who don't care about achievements may not look at them from download to deletion.
As a hallmark of modern video games, is the "achievement system" really indispensable?
Where does "achievement" come from
Many game makers will release themselves in the achievement system and design some fun achievements.
Some are classics, such as the "Bystander Qing" achievement in Total War: Three Kingdoms requires the player to command the archer to shoot Xiahou Huan, corresponding to the real encounter of this warrior in history, and the "The Witcher 3" also has an achievement of "shooting the eye with a bow and arrow", called "David and Goliath", which is used from the giant story in the Bible.
Some are more nonsensical, such as "Lethis: Road to Progress" an achievement called "I Am a Pirate", if you detect a pirated version of the game on the player's computer will unlock, "Dungeon Adventure" in the "sewer brewing" implementation condition is to have a drink with the developer in the real world.
Some are pure bad tastes, and the more famous ones are "Look at the Bottom of the Skirt 10 Times" in "Neil: Artificial Life" and "The Last Guardian" in which the vultures "solve the problem of internal urgency".
If you don't have the same unlocking conditions for achievements as "five years later" as in Stanley's Fables, fun achievements are often easier to obtain, after all, their essence is "Tu Yi Le". The most likely to attract disgust, of course, is the amount of brush achievements, "kill X enemies" is only a basic operation, "Assassin's Creed: Owl" there is a "notorious" achievement requiring driving a carriage to crash 5,000 objects, if you do not take out the time brush, try to unlock while playing, then all the main lines, side processes do not want to let the carriage run normally in the middle of the road, seriously affecting the game experience.
Essentially, "achievements" should be rewards for the player's gameplay behavior, which is why it was originally born.
Exactly 40 years ago, Activision pioneered a "physical achievement system" that was first used in the game Chopper Command. This is a two-dimensional shooting game, the player controls a helicopter, constantly firing missiles to destroy enemy aircraft, while moving up and down to avoid enemy attacks, the top of the screen will display the cumulative score according to the progress of the game, if more than 10,000 points, the player can take a photo or video to leave a certificate, to Activision in exchange for a physical badge made of embroidery technology.
The system was quickly expanded to other Activision games, and the way was not limited to scoring, and completing certain conditions like "how many seconds to pass the first level" can also get badges.
However, the production of peripheral products also means that the company has to bear additional expenses, how much to do is uncertain, and it is not very convenient to send, and it is not long before some manufacturers think of building achievements into the game. In 1990, E-Motion designed five kinds of "mystery bonuses" in the game, including "complete all levels" and "complete the game without moving to the right", etc. The rewards were changed to in-game points, which are very similar to today's achievement system.
In 2005, Microsoft launched the Gamerscore system on the Xbox 360, the first multi-game achievement system for a unified platform, which has been used on Microsoft platforms to this day. In the form of different achievements in each game with points, generally all achievements of a AAA masterpiece are combined with 1000 points, and the total scores obtained by players in each game will be displayed on the personal homepage. Ten years later, the total number of achievements achieved by players on microsoft platforms exceeded 100,000, and the total score exceeded 2.3 million points.
However, Microsoft's limelight was quickly suppressed by competitors, and in 2008, Sony added a "trophy" system to the PS3's 2.4 firmware update. Compared to Microsoft, Sony has made a little "micro-innovation": changing the score to a more intuitive trophy. The different achievements in the game are divided into bronze, silver, and gold cups according to the difficulty of obtaining them, and reaching the "full achievement" unlocks the Platinum Trophy, which is equivalent to Microsoft's 1000/1000 points. The Platinum Cup has given "full achievement" a subtle sense of qualitative change at the psychological level, and today "trophy" has become synonymous with game achievement.
Other emulators have tried to add their own features, and Steam launched "Exchange Cards" in 2013 as its own community achievement system, which exists in parallel with the game achievement system. Ubisoft has made a set of "Club Challenge System", the rules for the development of challenge projects are basically the same as the in-game achievements, but it is nothing more than the process, skills, brush volume, etc., but for a long time, the completion of the club challenge can get virtual currency U points, U points can be used to exchange for discount coupons, game props and other more direct rewards.
The only platform that is less attentive to the achievement system is Nintendo. This aspect is subject to objective conditions, before the launch of the Switch, Nintendo's digital version of the game also "only recognizes the machine and does not recognize the account", and the achievement must be bound to the account. The development of network services and community services is slow, and it is naturally impossible to build an achievement system.
On the other hand, this may also be related to Nintendo's game philosophy. After Sony launched the trophy system, IGN asked Shigeru Miyamoto about this, he said: "I don't like to use external factors to attract people to invest time in games, I hope that players play games just because they enjoy the game." ”
Nintendo often also has some challenge objectives built into the game, such as Super Mario: Odyssey, which has a total of 880 "moons", and the full collection requires many difficult challenges, but there are very few moons required to complete the level.
However, many players are more willing to accept that the "full collection" does not match Nintendo's "happy" concept, if in "Zelda Legend: Breath of the Wilderness" after a lot of hard work to find all the "ahaha", the game gives a reward is only a golden poop, which is ridiculed as Nintendo's attitude to the achievement system.
Why the achievement system is needed
"If you play for the sake of achievement, sometimes you do feel like you're being played." Player Xiao Luo told Pizza Jun. He will first look at the "achievement strategy" of the more favorite games to avoid missing some achievements, and to use specific skills to brush the number will also be deliberately paid attention to when playing, targeted and time-saving. Even so, he occasionally tires out of the dense array of accomplishments.
Xiao Luo's Steam homepage showcase chose the "achievement showcase", more than 8 years ago, the platform calculated the "average completion rate of the game" of 64%, "should be counted as half of the achievement party, in the ordinary players OK, the higher proportion can only be admired." I think that whether or not to value achievement depends entirely on the level of the obsessive-compulsive disorder index, and sometimes the sense of accomplishment of 'achieving perfection' is not as good as the frustration of 'it seems to have no meaning', making a game complete is like laboriously completing a huge task. ”
Players have a variety of reasons to pursue game achievements, and the more common reason is to "love" a game, and what can be directly obtained is self-satisfaction.
Try "full achievement" only occasionally, and the satisfaction may be stronger. Another player, Xiao Liu, told Pizza Jun that although he was an "all-platform player", he never paid attention to the achievements of the game, the only exception was "Monster Hunter: World": "Unconsciously found that there are already many achievements, at the instigation of friends, I want to simply take a platinum cup, there is actually a social need factor." After getting it, I also took a photo and sent it to Weibo. ”
Xiao Liu also believes that "Happy Brushing Trophies" with friends in Monster Hunter: World has effectively extended the life of the game, "I don't know how long we have experienced in the ecology of the 'New World', maybe this is what Capcom wants to see." ”
For the top powerhouses in the "trophy hunter" world, there are some additional wins and losses that dominate the "achievement". Saudi player Hakoom, nicknamed "Trophy Emperor", was awarded the Guinness Book of World Records in 2018 with 1,691 platinum trophies, and just this month, he announced that his number of platinum cups had reached 3,000.
In an interview with EuroGamer, he said he wanted to be the "strongest player": "The Platinum Trophy in his profile is always the most conspicuous. I challenge every game... When I was in the top ten in the world, I wanted to be number one. ”
Developers need game achievements for very different reasons than players. In addition to satisfying personal tastes, some strong style makers can assist self-expression through game achievements, such as Hideo Kojima's design of an achievement called "Abandoned" in Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain, in which the player has to destroy the nuclear weapons they have built, which does not have much impact on the game experience, but expresses the theme of opposing nuclear war.
More game manufacturers are utilitarian, and a variety of achievements are designed to extend the user's play time. Want to achieve is always inseparable from a "liver" word, the problem of fatigue is not in the achievement itself, but depends on the way the design is careful, some of the brush class achievements mentioned above will be too obvious to the utilitarianism, so that the original intention of "rewarding players" has become tainted.
The main reward characteristics that can still be clearly reflected are skill achievements and process achievements involving "hidden plots", and when players achieve high score ratings in the game, complete specific kills, or find a plot that is not easy to achieve, it is natural to get a "trophy". It's just that most games today have only one virtual trophy for achievement rewards, which doesn't enhance the experience in the game.
In addition, "hardcore players" tend to pay more attention to the achievement system than "light players", and the achievement system has become a means for games and platforms to maintain their core users, and if the core users have spent a lot of time, they always need some proof to "show their identity". As we all know, the overall difficulty of the game as an entertainment product is declining, and the games released on arcades and previous generations of consoles are quite difficult in themselves, and there is little need for an additional achievement system to provide challenges for players, while after many years, the process achievements involving each level are the most accessible.
At this level, the achievement system actually replaces the challenges required to "complete the game" itself in the past, allowing players who are keen on it to continue to have a clear pursuit.
What really matters is how much happiness you can bring after the challenge. Since its birth, the achievement system is ultimately the "head" outside the game, and walking according to the force and enjoying happiness may always be the most correct way to open the game.