{{
`${userDetail.user.displayName}${userDetail.user.cachedBungieGlobalDisplayNameCode ? `#${standardizeBungieGlobalCode(userDetail.user.cachedBungieGlobalDisplayNameCode)}` : ""}`}}
{{getUserClans()}}
Edited by Hylebos:
1/21/2013 7:49:48 PM
26
Destiny Discussion: Bleep Bloop! Achievement Discussion Unlocked!
[quote][b]Bungie.next Edit:[/b] [url=http://www.bungie.net/en-US/View/community/Forum/Post?id=4022707&path=1]Click here[/url] to see the original post unbutchered by the way comments are now sorted in Bungie.next[/quote]For being nothing more than a number that pads the size of your e-peen, Gamerscore and Achievements have a profound effect on a gamer's behavior. Some of you might think that Achievements are pointless, and that their selection is entirely arbitrary, but a good developer knows that Achievements will be chased and pursued by the majority of the population. Developers can take advantage of these completionistic tendencies to leverage the most out of their games.
In this thread I wanted to reflect upon a variety of Achievements from Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo Reach to discover their various applications and to evaluate how successful those particular Achievements ultimately were. By first looking back upon the past we might be able to discover the road forward and predict the sorts of Achievements that Bungie might include in the Destiny Universe.
Before we continue, I highly encourage the reader to refresh their memory of Halo's Achievements. Provided below are lists of Achievements in each game for your convenience:
[quote][url=http://www.xbox360achievements.org/game/halo-3/achievements/]Halo 3 Achievements[/url]
[url=http://www.xbox360achievements.org/game/halo-3-odst/achievements/]Halo 3: ODST Achievements[/url]
[url=http://www.xbox360achievements.org/game/halo-reach/achievements/]Halo Reach Achievements[/url][/quote]A perceptive reader might notice that there are no more than 50 Achievements collectively worth more than 1000 Gamerscore in the base game. This is one of many guidelines that Microsoft gives to developers to try to maintain the integrity of their gamerscore system.
Naturally the restriction on the number of Achievements is the more important of the two limitations because it restricts the number of different experiences that we can create for players. It's why it's essential to maximize the impact of those 50 Achievements; every nambly pambly achievement implemented takes up a slot that a good achievement could otherwise occupy.
Now that's not to say that every Achievement needs to be super hardcore and memorable, afterall, the primary application of Achievements is to encourage gamers to discover the different features of a game. As mundane and unmemorable as some of these Achievements might seem, they are an important tool for turning an uninvested player into a fan. For example, consider the following:[quote][b]Halo Reach - A Storage Solution (5G)[/b]
Used the File Browser to upload a file to your File Share.[/quote]For those of us who frequent Bungie.net, uploading content to our fileshare is second nature, and this is probably an achievement we unlocked without trying and one that we quickly forgot about soon after. But for an uninvested player, this achievement is a gateway to bigger and better things.
[i]A Storage Solution[/i] serves as a carrot on a stick that motivates players to teach themselves how to upload content to their fileshare. Some gamers might not have even realized that they have a way of sharing user created content with friends were it not for this achievement. And once they've taught themselves how to use this valuable tool, who knows how far they will go? Before long our uninvested gamer might be uninvested no longer and is now a proud member of the Bungie community, and it's all thanks to a single mundane Achievement.
However, not every achievement can get away with being super easy, otherwise completing the achievement set wouldn't be much of an achievement now would it? As a result, the second major application of achievements is to challenge gamers and encourage them to step outside of their comfort zones to improve their skills. It seems pretty self explanatory, but here's an example anyways:[quote][b]Halo Reach - A Monument To All Your Sins (150G)[/b]
Completed every mission in Halo: Reach alone, on Legendary.[/quote]This achievement is a side addition to the usual [i]Campaign Complete: Legendary[/i] achievement that has been in previous Halo games. Whereas those achievements could be unlocked if you played with stronger friends who did all the fighting for you, this Achievement does a good job at taking things one step further and issuing a personal challenge that will push many gamers to their limits.
The final application of Achievements is to create unique and memorable situations for the player to encounter. Personally the achievements that have been the most memorable for me were difficult ones that I struggled to overcome, or ones that placed me in interesting and oddball situations like:[quote][b]Halo 3: ODST - Vidmaster Challenge: Classic (25G)[/b]
Finish any level solo on Legendary, on LIVE, with no shots fired or grenades thrown.[/quote]A shooter usually requires you fight back against your opponents to complete a level, so finding myself forced play the pacifist and avoid mortar fire like a madman as I floored it through Uplift Reserve was a very memorable experience because it was so different from the rest of the achievements in the set.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Out of the three Bungie games that we are examining today, I definitely think that Halo 3 had the most difficult and interesting achievement set. Unfortunately, difficulty is not neccessarily a good thing, especially as many of Halo 3's multiplayer achievements were very flawed. For example, consider:[quote][b]Halo 3 - Two for One (5G)[/b]
Score a Double Kill with a single spartan laser shot in a ranked free for all playlist (Online).[/quote]The problem with multiplayer achievements like this is that they have less to do with personal skill and more to do with being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Not to mention, while they seem difficult, it is very easy to cheese on these achievements and unlock them with the help of a cooperative opponent. If you're going to make a challenging achievement, you should make it so that there are no easy ways out, otherwise it cheapens the experiences of anyone who tries legitimately.
You'll notice that Bungie did a relatively good job of removing asinine multiplayer achievements like these from their future games, save for the exception of DLC Achievements, which always seem to feature their fair share of ridiculous multiplayer objectives. To be fair, there's not much else you can do when making Map Pack Achievements, perhaps aside from hiding skulls on them, which was done in the Mythic Map Pack. It's one of the reasons that I'm looking forward to the Comet Expansions that are set to come out each year after every Destiny game, if they are more than just simple multiplayer maps, we might get the chance to finally see a decent list of DLC achievements.
Another problem with Halo 3's achievement set is that while it did a good job distributing achievements evenly between Campaign and Multiplayer, there was a distinct lack of Achievements created to help new players discover features compared to the future Halo games. It would have been easy to create room for these sorts of achievements by combining several similar campaign achievements into one, or by cutting out some of extraneous multiplayer achievements, but ultimately I feel that their final list of achievements were very understandable.
Afterall, way back when they still hadn't realized that Forge was going to take off like it did, or that sharing custom content would become such a huge part of the community. In their minds, Campaign and Multiplayer were probably the two major parts of the game and teaching players how to use their fileshare probably wasn't the highest priority on their list. Overall I feel that Halo 3 was a very good first stab into the world of Achievements.
In particular, the Skull Achievements were very memorable experiences that I would have like to have seen built upon more in ODST and Reach. While some of the skulls were barely hidden off the beaten path, some like Tilt or Tough Luck involved an elaborate series of jumps that took you well outside of the normal playspace and into unknown and exciting territory. Especially if Destiny has a large emphasis on exploration, I would love to see entire sections of the map created just to hide a single achievement, filled with jumps and extra enemies to help guard the out of the way location.
[url=http://www.bungie.net/en-US/View/community/Forum/Post?id=4022707&path=1][b]Thread continued on Post 2[/b][/url]
-
Edited by Hylebos: 1/21/2013 7:52:11 PM[b]Thread continued from Post 1[/b] Fast forward to Halo 3: ODST. At this point Bungie has realized that achievement sets can be used to teach the player rather than simply challenge them. In particular, I feel that ODST struck a better balance between challenging achievements and instructional achievements than Halo 3 or Reach. And whereas Reach's instructional achievements simply taught you about different features in the game, ODST's achievements taught you about different ingame strategies in a very organic way: [quote][b]Halo 3: ODST - Stunning! (5G)[/b] Stun a vehicle with an overcharged plasma pistol and quickly kill the driver.[/quote]It might not even occur to the average gamer that they could disable vehicles using the Plasma Pistol, but thanks to this helpful achievement, now their abillity to fight against enemy vehicles in the Campaign, Firefight, and even Multiplayer is now greatly improved. Another thing that ODST did that Halo 3 didn't was that its achievements clearly told you in their descriptions that unlocking that particular achievement unlocked certain maps or player permutations. Such information is always nice to squeeze in, assuming that there are enough characters remaining in the description. My favorite ODST Achievements were the ones the involved the Audio Logs which told Sadie's Story, developed by Fourth Wall Studios. Not only was the process of finding all the Audio Logs a bit like looking for skulls (though they couldn't be hidden quite nearly as well as the skulls were for obvious reasons), but I very much enjoyed Sadie's Story, and getting to listen to the next chapter was always a reward in itself. I definitely think that Destiny should continue the trend set forth by the Halo 3 Terminals, ODST Audio Logs, and Reach Datapads, and include its own side stories woven into a series of hidden collectables all over the world. Unfortunately as balanced as it may be, ODST's achievement set is not without its own blemishes. The particular blemishes that I'm thinking of usually take the form of achievements like: [quote][b]Halo 3: ODST - Both Tubes (5G)[/b] Get 10 Rocket kills on Kizingo Boulevard.[/quote]"Get <integer> <kill type> on <campaign level>" is a fairly lazy formula that will only end up creating a series of unmemorable achievements. It's unfortunate that Bungie didn't put a little extra effort into this region of the game, but otherwise I don't have a ton of problems with the ODST Achievements. Finally we come to Reach, Bungie's latest game and their last entry into the Halo universe. In my mind, Reach's biggest innovation in terms of Achievements was actually the Challenge system. While achievements like "Score a triple kill!" or "Get 20 headshots on this Campaign level!" made for particularly lame and unmemorable achievements in the previous Halo games, in Reach, they can be used for decent Daily Challenges, freeing up a ton of space for better things in the achievement list. Whereas you can only ship a game with 50 achievements, you can conceivably add an infinite number of Daily and Weekly challenges to the game, which allows you to save your best objectives for the achievement list, and shunt the rest of the filler into the Challenge system. Reach took advantage of the extra space to include plenty of great instructional achievements which helped to take the player on a tour of Campaign, Multiplayer, Firefight, and other subsystems, hitting on new features here and there with many of their achievements. Unfortunately, Reach's biggest problem achievement-wise was that the balance between instructional achievements and challenging / memorable achievements was not nearly as good as it was in ODST. A lot of the campaign achievements in particular felt pretty bland, and could have easily been replaced with something a little more inspiring. I was especially disappointed to see that there were no achievements involving hunting down some of the golden BOBs, or anything encouraging gamers to find the hidden datapads in the campaign. Reach is also unfortunately the home of my least favorite achievements in any of Bungie's games:[quote][b]Halo Reach - Firestarter (10G)[/b] Scored 50,000 points in a Firefight game.[/quote][quote][b]Halo Reach - Blaze Of Glory (25G)[/b] Scored 200,000 points in a Firefight game.[/quote][quote][b]Halo Reach - Heat In The Pipe (75G)[/b] Scored 1,000,000 points in a Firefight game.[/quote][quote][b]Halo Reach - Game, Set, Match (25G)[/b] Completed a Firefight set on Legendary without dying.[/quote]Remember how I said that if you're going to make a challenging achievement, you should make sure that there are no easy ways out, otherwise it would cheapen the experiences of anyone who tries legitimately? Yeah. Turns out that you could unlock all four of these otherwise difficult achievements in a single sitting by turning on god mode in Firefight's custom settings. WHOOPS. ...To be fair, Bungie did comment on this issue in the [url=http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&cid=28689]first weekly update after Reach launched[/url], and although I'm somewhat unsatisfied with parts of their response, I understand that it was probably just an honest mistake, and I trust the folks at Bungie enough to not repeat it again. So if those were my least favorite achievements, then what do I consider the golden standard that Bungie should attempt to pursue in their future endeavors with Destiny? Take a look: [quote][b]Halo 3 - Vidmaster Challenge: Annual (0G)[/b] After 9/25/08, complete Halo on 4-player Legendary LIVE co-op, with Iron, and everyone in Ghosts.[/quote][quote][b]Halo 3: ODST - Vidmaster Challenge: Endure (25G)[/b] In Firefight, on any mission, pass the 4th Set on 4-player Heroic LIVE co-op.[/quote]I personally found these two achievements to be the strongest and the most memorable out of all the other achievements that Bungie has created. A key element that sets them apart from the rest was that not only were they challenging, but they required actual teamwork to complete properly. Nothing quite makes a memorable experience even more memorable than having friends to share it with, and especially if Destiny turns out to be as social of a game as we believe it to be, I would love to see more achievements that bring the community together. I feel that this area in particular has a ton of unexplored design space that is just waiting to be tapped. Ultimately I feel that Destiny's achievement set will resemble Reach's the most, which makes complete sense. Destiny will be a completely new intellectual property filled with all sorts of unknowns for the average gamer to discover, and it's important to shape the game's achievement set carefully to help guide gamers through the new world . With that being said, Destiny is the first of four games, and it's important for it to start the series off on the highest note possible, and creating a better balance between memorable achievements and the instructional achievements can only help in that regard. Destiny is the start of a whole new era, and while we can only dream of the challenges that it will bring, I hope this thread has given the reader a good idea about some of the Achievements that we might see in the new world! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thank you for reading all the way to the end of my thread! As usual, I'm terrible at writing succinctly, and as ever I appreciate your patience and interest. If there were any parts of my thread that you feel need clarification, simply let me know, and I can go into additional detail. If you feel that there were any parts of my thread that you thought were wrong, you should definitely let me know! Our viewpoints evolve by butting heads with each other, and it would be a shame to pass up the chance to see what other community members think about this topic, just make sure to present your reasoning with civility and understanding. One limitation of this thread is that it only looks at Achievements from Bungie's games. I'm not much of an achievement hunter myself, so I didn't know if there were other games out there that handled achievements better than Bungie did. It would be particularly interesting to hear the viewpoints of anyone who has completed a ton of achievements from a wide variety of games. What are the best achievements that you've ever completed, and why? And while we're on the subject of Achievements, today is my 5th Bungie.net Anniversary! I've grown a lot as a person and I've had a tremendous amount of fun over these past five years, and I'm looking forward to another five years with this marvelous community and Bungie! Thanks for everything! ~Hylebos
