my achievement addiction
I don’t really know what it is about video game achievements that drives me to obtain them. I’m something of a collector so the idea of getting all of the achievements available in a game is definitely appealing to me; though there are games where this is impossible given my skill, or lack thereof (namely shooters).
For example: I’ll never get 100% in anything like Call of Duty or Battlefield; veteran difficulty, in the case of CoD, is just too tough. And barring some sort of unbelievable stroke of luck I’ll never be the first MVP in a Battlefield 3 multiplayer match; though I have obtained 2nd and 3rd MVP a couple of times.
The advent of achievements in World Of Warcraft certainly had an effect on my habits when I played the game: there were a number of things that I did in order to obtain an achievement that I wouldn’t have bothered with normally. This was mainly limited to exploration and daily quests linked to professions (cooking and fishing mostly). Getting every achievement in WoW would be impossible given the ones given out for the first person to max out a class on a server. I remember being on the game after the Cataclysm expansion came out; some people hit level 85 less than two days, probably less than 24 hours, after the expansion was released. It might not have been a single person playing on the account but still, yikes! Thank goodness I have enough of a life that I’d never have the time to do that.
Now on to what started it all: achievements on Xbox 360 games. The little popping sound I hear when I’ve earned an achievement gives me a little mental high and drives me toward the next achievement with that much more haste. Though, as I’ve said above, getting all 1000 points in a game (barring any extra points from DLC), can be quite difficult if not impossible. In one case, Two Worlds, a game glitch prevented me from obtaining the last two achievements. Some place with a weird name like Beaver Kettle Cave was glitched and zapped me elsewhere in the game world, so 95% or so was the best I could do (all but two achievements).
It’s not that I strictly do achievements simply for the sake of getting them, though there are times where that is the case; the best examples being Alien Archivist: the collection of all the alien recordings in the Mothership Zeta DLC for Fallout 3, and Mill Worker, finding all 100 ingots in The Pitt DLC for the same game. Mothership Zeta was hands-down my least favourite DLC for Fallout 3 because it was so linear. I didn’t get the achievement the first time I played through it and the second time was more of a chore than anything. Still, I wanted 100% in Fallout 3 so I did it. Finding all of the ingots in The Pitt was a pain too but not so much as the recordings.
Here’s the really interesting thing, at least I think it is: once I’ve obtained the One With The Shadows achievement in Skyrim, I’ll have three games where I’ve obtained every achievement. And each one of those three games was developed by Bethesda Game Studios (Skyrim, the previously-mentioned Fallout 3, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion). Bethesda is, without a doubt, my favourite game developer, followed closely by Blizzard (I got eventually got tired of WoW but Starcraft 2 is awesome - even though I’m lousy at RTS games, and I can’t wait for Diablo 3 - the achievements for the Diablo 3 beta are what inspired me to write this post). Every achievement in Oblivion was a blast and, aside from the two I mentioned above in Fallout 3, the rest were fun to work on. And Skyrim has been simply amazing. I really miss the rank achievements that Oblivion had for the various guilds, but I can understand why they didn’t want to have the exact same thing for Skyrim. Skyrim itself has achievements that inspire you to explore the game more and having that basically meaningless yet still addictive reward makes it even better.
So, in closing, many achievements are fun and can entice players to do more in a game than they would have otherwise. Some are unattainable for mere mortals like myself but that’s life. So I say bring on the Skyrim DLC and Fallout 4, and may your gamerscore/trophy count/Steam achievements grow ever higher.
cheers
