As long as there have been games, there has been challenges, achievements and tasks that you wouldn’t normally do within a normal playthrough. Completing the original Mario without ever dying, rushing through Sonic in the fastest time, collecting all the ultimate weapons in Final Fantasy. While they didn’t always pop up with a message saying “You did X, have Y points” there have been times where games had their own in-game or in-company tracking systems for such, the most commonly known was that of the Pokédex keeping a number of all Pokémon caught.
These achievements and milestones helped gamers continue to play games far beyond their normal playtime, a simple game like Pokémon could last 2 to 4 times as long if you wanted to catch them all. Besides just the time invested in gaining 100%, plenty of trophies came with difficulty, from having to complete games at their hardest difficulty settings to completing them without ever changing equipment. If you’re a gamer, you’re bound to find an achievement that speaks to you or brings you some amount of joy.
Sadly, some games and some developers forget about trophy lists or merely leave them until the last second to fill a quota set by the console. But achievements are not something that should be forgotten, nor should they have only a single day dedicated to them as so many gamers play games solely for their trophy lists. There are even some games that list hunters or lazy people always run to, the 5-minute platinums.
Good Trophies
An example of a good trophy is one that makes the player do something they wouldn’t normally do, or find aspects of the game they never knew existed. This makes the game feel more unique, as well as giving the player more variety in their gameplay. The My Brother Is An Italian Plumber trophy is just such an achievement, having to jump on enemies to kill them isn’t really something players think of in a shooter game, but adding another way to damage enemies as well as throwing in a reference helps improve the comedic effect of an already funny game.
Challenge run trophies are also amazing for getting players to play through your game, again and again, experiencing it in different ways as well as finding new angles to appreciate its mechanics. Kingdom Hearts Final Mix does this well with the trophies Undefeated, Unchanging Armor and Speedster. These 3 trophies have you completing the game without using a continue, sticking with the starting equipment and completing the game within 15 hours, all of which are achievable on their own but can be combined in 1 run for an even harder challenge.
Bad Trophies
Grinding for the sake of grinding is hardly ever fun in achievement hunting, especially ones that take upwards of 100 hours to do. Some bad examples of this are Perfect Sphere Master in Final Fantasy X HD. This trophy requires you to fully level up all characters, which means you will need to fill in every sphere node in each grid, which takes so much time to gain the exp and spheres for, on top of how long it takes to actually traverse the sphere grid to find the missing nodes.
Timed or online required trophies, these can be some of the worst and most infuriating of all for players who are gunning for that 100% achievement rating. In a day and age where multiplayer sections of games are getting their separate trophy lists, it can’t be so hard to always keep them separate. However, some games are tied to their online segment that it is impossible to space them out. The worst ones imaginable are those that can no longer be obtained, or have 0.01% chance of acquiring, with online servers going down you can no longer gain their achievements, for example Disney Infinity 2.0 servers are closed, Ecolibrium no longer has challengers for its Competitive spirit trophy, old Fifa games servers all closed down and many more other games. Then there is the Emperor! Trophy in Elder Scrolls Online, become the emperor, amongst millions of players. This trophy has only been obtained by 225 players on console as tracked by trueachievements.
Press B to Jump, an old phrase that some gamers may remember, this is what we can attribute to some achievement lists. Avatar: The Burning Earth has 5 achievements in the game, all of which are getting a hit counter of 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 you can get 1000 achievement score in 2 minutes flat. Clicker games are also very popular, but when you make a £1 game on PlayStation with a trophy list, please make it better than “Tap X times” like with My Name Is Mayo, where the trophies are pretty much tapping or hitting objects.
I could go on and on about good and bad achievements, but I think you will get the idea behind it all at this point. While these are the thoughts of many, they aren’t the thoughts of all. Some gamers will want easy lists, whereas others want challenging ones, some people hate achievements as a system. Putting some amount of effort into your list will, however, go a long way with your fan base. Clearly mark what is a hard or easy trophy, using the bronze, silver and gold ratings, don’t just put them all at bronze. Don’t make your achievements just X hits, or becoming #1 in the whole world.
A good trophy list should contain around 50% of story related trophies, as it rewards progress. 10% minor grinding trophies, to push you towards epic spells or ultimate weapons. 20% challenges, that allow the player to approach the gameplay differently, making them use more items or plan new tactics. 20% comedic and secretive achievements, allowing your players to experience new parts of your game, become more invested and even appreciate them more.
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