For a while now, Achievements have become widely popular, and can be found in almost every game. An achievement is defined as an in-game reward for completing a certain task (e.g. pick up more than 1000 gold coins on the map), or attaining a certain status (become level 60).
Achievements can have several roles:
- Give the player a measure of progress other than wealth or levels / experience
- Entice them to play the game in ways they would not have thought of, or provide new challenges (like finish a level without killing a single ennemy)
- Add some fun ("You died crashed by a blue cow! Congratulations!") or mitigate failure
- Grant prestige.
While all of them are valid, games are over-using them to the point of being ridiculous. You are now rewarded for hundreds (if not thousands) of things, most of which nobody even cares about (apart from the players who want to complete 100% of them, in which case they become a tedious task). The satiric game Achievement Unlocked may not even be that far from the reality.
My grip with achievements is that what I see as their main goal has become completely dissolved: grant prestige. When you achieve something, it is usually something significant (nobody ever achieves eating their breakfast in the morning, so no one cares whether you have a badge that proves you did). And you want other players to know at a glance that you've earned something great.
Currently, not only are achievements so numerous that the ones that matter are lost among the hundreds of insignificant ones, but they are usually hidden somewhere in your public profile tab. By hidden, I mean that another player has to perform the action of viewing your profile to see them.
In The Five Orbs, I plan to add some achievements, for meaningful things (like completing the skill tree, or winning a tournament, or being in the top-ranked players for a season), and make them visible. The current plan is to allow the player to choose 2 or 3 achievements they want to highlight, and these will be visible on the player's avatar during a fight. Ideally, each achievement will have its own unique graphical representation (hence the need to limit their number), so that you will be able to tell at first glance what your opponent is proud of having done.
And in addition to that, nothing wrong with adding some other achievements just for fun - but they have to be clearly separated from the "real" ones.
How do you feel about achievements?
