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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]

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  • You make long threads just for the sake of making threads long at this point bro. It's a no-go. >.< Long as they don't follow 343's map specific BS or focus on multiplayer ('challenge' be damned because it isn't a 'challenge' to get something based on luck... it's just annoying.). And that's all I have to say about that. [Edited on 01.05.2013 8:07 PM PST]

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