Saturday, March 13, 2010

Achievement unlocked

Paraphrasing part of Sirlin's recent GDC write-up:

If achievements are removed from a game, the decrease in desire to play is proportional to how shit the underlying gameplay is.

Makes sense to me. Reading stuff like this makes it much easier to resist the temptations of the XP/GP overlord lurking inside my router.

4 comments:

mbp said...

Thanks for the link Melf. It is so true.

I don't know if I am unusual in not to giving a hoot about in game achievements but it is depressing to see them polluting otherwise good games.

mbp said...

Sorry for the double comment but I meant to give some context. I am currently playing Operation Flashpoint Dragon rising. It seems good so far. Op Flash is all about hyper-realistic combat - sneaking through woods on your belly so an not to be spotted and stuff like that. Except that the login screen has a big list achievements like headshot kills and number of people boats blown up and dumb ass stuff like that. If you actually play to try and get these achievements any sense of realism goes out the window.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link, good read and quite true.

There are more and more kinds of achievement systems, but sometimes seems to have been put in place instead of working more on the gameplay.

root said...

Rats and pellets! Trying to sort out what's fun and what's just addictive is a science in and of itself.