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Achievements: the next form of alternate advancement
Rungar
Member RarePosts: 1,132
I think achievements is the next form of alternate advancement. If you think about what an achievement is, its basically a stripped down quest that you don't have to find, interact with, skip the dialogue or return for the reward. Its just there and as you play the game you will naturally gain some achievements just for doing things.
The interesting thing about achievements is that you can get them for every activity in the game. Whether its combat related or fishing or just visiting places so it supports all possible playstyles. Achievements can also be added to a game on the fly and structured to have some skill based component such as things like no death runs, speed runs etc for dungeons. This is a better representation imo of growing a character but is also a benefit for developers since the ideal way to do that is to experience all the content, which makes it a very efficient and fully integrated system.
Of course there are a few tricks needed to make it work properly.
1) you need to retain experience gain as a legacy achievement as a buffer system as not all players enjoy all things. This buffer would need to be about 1/3 of the system and affect certain parts of the system.
2) Achievements would need to be categorized ( 6-9 broad categories) and specific such that achievements in adventuring leads to better adventuring and achievements in combat leads to better combat.
3) achievements must be universal such that gaining an achievement on one gives it to all your characters, however the rewards can be deployed individually. This lets you experience the whole game on whatever character you choose.
such a system would work best in a level-less system featuring a skill capture theme combined with a basic archetype (i.e mage, fighter, rogue) class system that combines the the best parts of class systems with the flexibility of skill based systems for choosing your subclass or build. So the alternate advancement would start from day 1 as you go out in the world and work on your archetype and gather the skills the game offers to create your build.
Achievements tend to come fast and furious when you start out the game and experience everything anew but slow down at a certain point when more skill based achievements (or grinding intensive) are added to the mix or different avenues of play need to be explored. This also promotes doing certain content like dungeons and other content multiple times as you may not succeed the first time you do it which is another boon for developers and promotes skillful play over and above just grinding it out.
The interesting thing about achievements is that you can get them for every activity in the game. Whether its combat related or fishing or just visiting places so it supports all possible playstyles. Achievements can also be added to a game on the fly and structured to have some skill based component such as things like no death runs, speed runs etc for dungeons. This is a better representation imo of growing a character but is also a benefit for developers since the ideal way to do that is to experience all the content, which makes it a very efficient and fully integrated system.
Of course there are a few tricks needed to make it work properly.
1) you need to retain experience gain as a legacy achievement as a buffer system as not all players enjoy all things. This buffer would need to be about 1/3 of the system and affect certain parts of the system.
2) Achievements would need to be categorized ( 6-9 broad categories) and specific such that achievements in adventuring leads to better adventuring and achievements in combat leads to better combat.
3) achievements must be universal such that gaining an achievement on one gives it to all your characters, however the rewards can be deployed individually. This lets you experience the whole game on whatever character you choose.
such a system would work best in a level-less system featuring a skill capture theme combined with a basic archetype (i.e mage, fighter, rogue) class system that combines the the best parts of class systems with the flexibility of skill based systems for choosing your subclass or build. So the alternate advancement would start from day 1 as you go out in the world and work on your archetype and gather the skills the game offers to create your build.
Achievements tend to come fast and furious when you start out the game and experience everything anew but slow down at a certain point when more skill based achievements (or grinding intensive) are added to the mix or different avenues of play need to be explored. This also promotes doing certain content like dungeons and other content multiple times as you may not succeed the first time you do it which is another boon for developers and promotes skillful play over and above just grinding it out.
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Comments
integrating the game into the achievement systems is really an evolution to both quest and experience systems. Most people are done with quests now. Look at a game like lost ark where questing is levelling. A total slog. Similarly players are done with pure grinding. Next step is to incorporate achievements into the experience system.
Achievements (when done properly) is the next logical step since its completely integrated into every facet of gameplay and can feature skill based components. It also spreads out your characters advancement from just killing things to all manner of possible things.
doing literally anything in the game will get you something, unless you've completely exhausted all the achievements.
Lost Ark is successful because its free, it works, and has good production quality. Its a mediocre game. It doesn't really have that great ideas in the levelling department. They just shifted focus from grinding enemies to grinding quests which likely seemed like a good idea 10 years ago when it was in development.
For instance good collectibles would make an open world game much interesting. Or combat ones in action games.
But then there are achievements that are designed for sheer torture. Some are done in a good way, that you would actually prefer that torture in the end, but most are just not knowing their own fucking game well enough to set those bars.
Yes I am looking at you Diablo II Resurrected, I'm not going to play you for another 1000 hours again. Not just due to your Nightmare achievement being absolutely dumb, but you are a fucking old game, realize your appeal.
That being said, everytime new content is added to a game achievements are added with that content. There is no need to complete every achievement but they would be there for those who were interested. Some people might prefer challenge achievements over grinding achievements but both are viable. Some achievements you might have to "go around" either because you cant complete them or are unwilling (grinding) and because of the legacy exp there would always be some you can skip altogether since there would always be more achievements possible than you would need.
the other thing it does is give you a possible focus for any particular game session. Today I will work on X. Thus your play sessions might be quite varied in focus since you could get rewarded for so many different things. There are no rails to it. Just pick a direction and go. Tomorrow you might work on something else.
I cant speak to other games but a system similar to eso integrated with the advancement process would be a very interesting system to me.
Frankly, it has surprised the shit out of me that so many seem to be against the change. Surprised that so many seem to care about it enough to fight over it lol.
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Although the big fight against "Alice in Wonderland" came across as just silly / stupid. Why Asian game devs include this weird ass shit is just beyond me. They need to add an alternative ending for "grown ups.".
Sure, much of the questing is standard fare, but Lost Ark definitely has its moments, in fact although I reached level 50 last night definitely looking forward to finishing out the mainline before jumping into the "end game dungeons."
Not even sure I'll Powerpass my next character, an Artillerist as I rather enjoy blowing stuff up en masse, see no real need to rush through.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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Compare that to Call of Duty or Battlefield... you start out as noob fodder and have to grind to unlock better weapons, skills, and attachments.
In a MMORPG, some character titles are fun to get and display. Guild achievements are pretty focused for many (not all) guilds.
I think it is becoming the norm for games to have a deep achievement system... and this, as others have said, is one place where Steam really shines.