I miss the old way, when achievements were how you unlocked stuff like secret weapons and skins. Now you unlock things with a credit card and achievements are just a skinner box.
the old way, when achievements were how you unlocked stuff like secret weapons and skins
That still happens, which is entirely part of the "FOMO" problem. Players now "need" to take advantage of seasonal achievements or miss out for another year. WoW has meta achievements like "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been" which requires played to earn an achievement from 8 different seasonal events, Xmas, Easter, Halloween, Valentine's Day, Octoberfest, etc and if you miss even just one of the smaller achievements you have to wait until next year for it to come around. For mount collectors this can be particularly annoying since the meta reward is a mount. For completionists it's a similar problem albeit one more focused on earning the achievement rather than the end reward.
The heavy shift to "seasons" in most games is like this and WoW is probably one of the biggest offenders around not just because of the above which can still be continually earned in subsequent years, but limited season only exclusives based around various achievements. Maybe the one saving grace is that these things still aren't purchasable, however what is purchasable in WoW these days is likely magnitudes worse such as those recent mounts requiring either 6 month->en entire year or sub paid, or into the triple digits in price.
At least What a Long is so shockingly easy, and has been in the game for nearly 20 years, that its barely even a concern for most people.
I was there when it was brand new, and short of a few hairy specific achievements in it, it was a throwaway background thing you did just to get people engaged with the holiday (that they would ignore otherwise because back then it was just flavor with little reward). No one really stressed on it, and anyone who cared about getting it was gonna play all year anyway. So they just had to spend a few hours in the weeks long holiday to be done with it, and get all the numerous other prizes (the meta title per holiday, the numerous other specific rewards you could buy every year from the holiday vendors).
A much worse version of what you are talking about is the Anniversary/Xmas rewards. Because those are not only just once a year, but they are only that year. If you aren't playing November-December 25th, you just don't get to have it. And it wasn't until like 2022 in that they started letting you get old Christmas gifts as rare drops from a holiday boss, and the Anniversary ones were only available again during the recent 25th event, and only some of them.
The old way was no defined achievements at all. The “achievement” was doing something interesting or stupid in a video game in order to entertain yourself and your friends. Now every behavior is part of a predefined checklist. It’s completely soulless and inverted.
The old way was no defined achievements at all. The “achievement” was doing something interesting or stupid in a video game in order to entertain yourself and your friends. Now every behavior is part of a predefined checklist. It’s completely soulless and inverted.
Or he’s just old. I played video games before achievements existed. When they are introduced, I couldn’t imagine anyone caring about them at all. Fast forward a couple decades and some people are basing their entire identity around securing arbitrarily defined “achievements” in video games. We used to do weird whacky stuff in games just for the fun of it - just as pure ace raw creative expression. Now even “drawing outside the lines” is meticulously predicted and codified behavior.
One of the earliest iterations with Mass Effect on the 360, which showed them as literal roguelike upgrades to all future games you played. Halo 3 used it as a metric towards unlocking armor.
So it was just another version of unlockables at the time it came out, but like all things Microsoft they just lazily let it rot into the lowest form possible.
Seems to track with when I started seeing it in some other games I played around that time in 2007. WoW added achievements part way through TBC which came out in 2007 so that looks to be the time of infection.
WoW's achievements came with the Wrath pre-patch, 10/14/08. I know because I was there and had like 80% of them unlock instantly on that day so my panel has that date 100s of times. It was actually a highly requested feature because of how popular they were on the 360 at the time.
Even now, its one of the more positive features in WoW, just because it now works like a "journal and tasks and challenges" panel from other games would. Giving you all your larger goals to work towards besides straight up quests, and functioning as the check box for your unlocks.
It's just one of the ways they try and keep you playing longer. Just like "seasons" or events where you have to unlock the content by playing every day or playing a certain amount of time. Or like how DLC slaps a new coat of paint on an old game and allows them to dip back into your wallet again.
At some point around 15 years ago it seems like all the game companies decided putting out new games was too expensive and they would focus on extending the life and income stream from every game they released as long as humanly possible.
Except for sports games. They've always had the changing team rosters as an excuse to release a new version every year, and sports fans eat that shit up.
I'm so fucking glad there are people out there who know how to crack existing games that then did this shit. Stellaris was pricey enough beforehand but then putting it all behind a season pass was just an absurd level of greed from an already greedy developer.
The trophies must hit some kind of psychological itch on people. Like loot boxes or some shit. You happen to be immune to it.
That's literally how they're designed now.
I miss the old way, when achievements were how you unlocked stuff like secret weapons and skins. Now you unlock things with a credit card and achievements are just a skinner box.
That still happens, which is entirely part of the "FOMO" problem. Players now "need" to take advantage of seasonal achievements or miss out for another year. WoW has meta achievements like "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been" which requires played to earn an achievement from 8 different seasonal events, Xmas, Easter, Halloween, Valentine's Day, Octoberfest, etc and if you miss even just one of the smaller achievements you have to wait until next year for it to come around. For mount collectors this can be particularly annoying since the meta reward is a mount. For completionists it's a similar problem albeit one more focused on earning the achievement rather than the end reward.
The heavy shift to "seasons" in most games is like this and WoW is probably one of the biggest offenders around not just because of the above which can still be continually earned in subsequent years, but limited season only exclusives based around various achievements. Maybe the one saving grace is that these things still aren't purchasable, however what is purchasable in WoW these days is likely magnitudes worse such as those recent mounts requiring either 6 month->en entire year or sub paid, or into the triple digits in price.
Learning about the “mount” meta was shocking. I honestly can’t fathom caring about that shit even a little bit.
At least What a Long is so shockingly easy, and has been in the game for nearly 20 years, that its barely even a concern for most people.
I was there when it was brand new, and short of a few hairy specific achievements in it, it was a throwaway background thing you did just to get people engaged with the holiday (that they would ignore otherwise because back then it was just flavor with little reward). No one really stressed on it, and anyone who cared about getting it was gonna play all year anyway. So they just had to spend a few hours in the weeks long holiday to be done with it, and get all the numerous other prizes (the meta title per holiday, the numerous other specific rewards you could buy every year from the holiday vendors).
A much worse version of what you are talking about is the Anniversary/Xmas rewards. Because those are not only just once a year, but they are only that year. If you aren't playing November-December 25th, you just don't get to have it. And it wasn't until like 2022 in that they started letting you get old Christmas gifts as rare drops from a holiday boss, and the Anniversary ones were only available again during the recent 25th event, and only some of them.
The old way was no defined achievements at all. The “achievement” was doing something interesting or stupid in a video game in order to entertain yourself and your friends. Now every behavior is part of a predefined checklist. It’s completely soulless and inverted.
There wasn't an in-game checklist, but unlocks basically worked the same.
The old way was no defined achievements at all. The “achievement” was doing something interesting or stupid in a video game in order to entertain yourself and your friends. Now every behavior is part of a predefined checklist. It’s completely soulless and inverted.
Or he’s just old. I played video games before achievements existed. When they are introduced, I couldn’t imagine anyone caring about them at all. Fast forward a couple decades and some people are basing their entire identity around securing arbitrarily defined “achievements” in video games. We used to do weird whacky stuff in games just for the fun of it - just as pure ace raw creative expression. Now even “drawing outside the lines” is meticulously predicted and codified behavior.
One of the earliest iterations with Mass Effect on the 360, which showed them as literal roguelike upgrades to all future games you played. Halo 3 used it as a metric towards unlocking armor.
So it was just another version of unlockables at the time it came out, but like all things Microsoft they just lazily let it rot into the lowest form possible.
Seems to track with when I started seeing it in some other games I played around that time in 2007. WoW added achievements part way through TBC which came out in 2007 so that looks to be the time of infection.
WoW's achievements came with the Wrath pre-patch, 10/14/08. I know because I was there and had like 80% of them unlock instantly on that day so my panel has that date 100s of times. It was actually a highly requested feature because of how popular they were on the 360 at the time.
Even now, its one of the more positive features in WoW, just because it now works like a "journal and tasks and challenges" panel from other games would. Giving you all your larger goals to work towards besides straight up quests, and functioning as the check box for your unlocks.
It's just trained ocd/autism
It's just one of the ways they try and keep you playing longer. Just like "seasons" or events where you have to unlock the content by playing every day or playing a certain amount of time. Or like how DLC slaps a new coat of paint on an old game and allows them to dip back into your wallet again.
At some point around 15 years ago it seems like all the game companies decided putting out new games was too expensive and they would focus on extending the life and income stream from every game they released as long as humanly possible.
Except for sports games. They've always had the changing team rosters as an excuse to release a new version every year, and sports fans eat that shit up.
I'm so fucking glad there are people out there who know how to crack existing games that then did this shit. Stellaris was pricey enough beforehand but then putting it all behind a season pass was just an absurd level of greed from an already greedy developer.