Best/Worst Achievements you've seen

[Kit]

Title says it all, what are your favourite and least favourite achievements you've encountered?

The best for me are the Batman ones as they seem to go nicely with the pace and replay value of the game - riddler trophies, perfect freeflow combo etc. They are a great fit.

Borderlands is another which seems to get them right in terms of replay value etc... with raid boss battles.

The ones that really do my head in though are multiplayer ones. I seem to get 99% of the way in the single player then there's some 'get to level 90 in multiplayer' bull**** or 'get '7 million kills.' These ones end up destroying the concept entirely to me as the idea is to have fun or show skill - there's no skill in playing 1000 hours online with a bunch of **** no lifers.

[noobish hat]

Can we talk about talk about trophies too? I just got a platinum in Minecraft on the Vita. That was a lot of fun, especially because Minecraft has no gameplay objectives - it was nice to have a set of missions to do. Some of them were quite longwinded, too, like gathering all the materials, weapons, enchantments, etc. for killing enough endermen to get enough pearls to open the ender gate after you find that. Of course you also have to go to a nether fortress and killl enough blazes to get enough blaze powder to craft the pearls into eyes of ender, and that in itself is very dangerous and requires a lot of preparation. It was like a real adventure!

On the other hand, I also just got a platinum in Uncharted on the Vita, and that was a big chore for the most part because half of the trophies are for finding 100% of the collectibles, and there are like a million of them - very tedious having to play through an entire level again because you overlooked one piece of wall with a charcoal rubbing on it.

[speedlolita]

The best achivements are ones you set for yourself and work to achieve. I don't need some arbitrary checklist telling me how to play my games.

[Asura]

Not sure whether this is "secret" knowledge anymore but there are a lot of things about achievements that some people don't know.

They tend to come in 4 categories. An achievement tends to cater to...

• "Killers" - Particularly likes killing/defeating other players. A "true" example finds little interest in fighting AI.
• "Achievers" - Do something difficult, i.e. attain a load of points. People who like to achieve for the sake of achievement.
• "Socialisers" - Interact with other players. Achieve something together or simply be together at a critical moment.
• "Explorers" - Players who like to uncover what is hidden, such as finding all the secret areas of a map.

This is based on the Bartle Test, and a single achievement can potentially appeal to multiple types (though not usually more than two).

A fifth category, which is often left out, are "experiential" achievements, which aren't really achievements at all but rather funny/amusing things that happen. For example, in Sega Tennis, if you get a back-and-forth going, after 5 hits you get an achievement called "Sega Rally". You could argue it's an "achiever" category but it's so easy that it's more of a joke.

Also, there are a few other achievement oddities that some people aren't aware of:

• All Achievements have a points rating, but it was possible for early 360 achievements to have a rating of "zero". These were to be awarded for doing negative things. To this day, I believe DOA4 is the only game which has one, which is for losing 5 games in a row in Ranked.
• Many 360 games have an achievement for "getting all other achievements"; this is usually because they're multiplatform and it matches the Platinum Trophy requirement on PS3 in terms of logic.
• Some 360 games were sold on the premise that their achievements were easy (one of the Naruto games did this, where you could get all of the achievements easily in about 2hrs).
• Most 360 games have an achievement that you get in the first 5 minutes of playing. This is because some publishers would measure how many people had this achievement, and use it to work out a ratio - "Game copies in existence : People who'd played the game". This is the source of some news a few years ago, such as the Heavy Rain publisher saying that the second hand market had affected their sales, as they believed that for every copy in existence, perhaps 30 people had played the game.
• Well-designed games tend to have achievements that can be completed multiple times - so instead of "unlock Sub Zero", you'd have "play as Sub Zero". This is so that if the achievement functionality glitches, the situation will probably fix itself. Often games have multiple ways to get achievements that are potentially glitchy; for example SSF2THDR has an achievement for "win 100 ranked matches", but it checks this at the end of every match - I got the achievement at around 118.

Hopefully someone's interested in that stuff.

[Fader209]

I ended up turning the notifications off for trophies/achievements as they took me out of the immersion in most cases.

The worst type were the ones which awarded you for starting the game (e.g. Taking your first step etc) just so they showed up in your game history even if it was a terrible game, most likely for the reason that Asura stated above about data collection.

[Dogg Thang]

I declared myself out on the whole achievements thing pretty much right at the start of my encounter with them. My first 360 game was Dead Rising and I can't remember what my first achievement was but it was something really stupid that I happened upon by accident, like falling off something or similar. Then I went looking to see what other kind of achievements there were and they just seemed ridiculous. I failed to see how they added anything beyond a forced and cynical extra gamification. For me, if that wasn't a part of the main structure of the game or a goal that actually felt it meant something beyond an alert, then I didn't see the purpose.

And since then, I have had no interest. But you know, if my first encounter had been one where I felt the achievements meant something (and I have no doubt some games must have implemented them well), then my relationship with the whole concept could have been very different.

[MrKirov]

I don't mind them. In games I really enjoy it gives me another thing to do to spend time with the game. There are well earned platinums which I feel proud to have put the effort in to get.

[Mayhem]

but it was possible for early 360 achievements to have a rating of "zero". These were to be awarded for doing negative things. To this day, I believe DOA4 is the only game which has one, which is for losing 5 games in a row in Ranked.

It isn't. I encountered one in GH3 when playing on someone else's 360, so I went Googling... here's a list, there's quite a few!

http://www.xboxachievements.com/forum/showthread.php?t=102710

[Darwock]

Best are still the first trophies I ever put major effort into, the ones from Warhawk and it's expansions. They mostly added an extra dimension to the game, rewarding and encouraging unusual scenarios in the gameplay. Sadly overall it was let down by the 'achieve x rank' type trophies that made platinum practically impossible.

Worst are the ones from TxK. Beat the entire game in survival mode?? I'd be willing to bet no human living today can do that. The other tough trophies are glitched, incredibly hard to do and then fail to unlock? Not even going to try.

[chopemon]

The best achievements are the ones that open your mind to different ways of playing the game. The crowd surfing achievement in Dead Rising for example. I totally didn't realise you could deflect crossbow bolts in Resi 5 with your knife until I saw the achievement for it.

Getting cheeves for completing levels or a certain number of kills is always dull but the ones that make you think about the game in different ways help expand your play experience.

They can also be valuable in cooperative games when you and group of friends can work towards something together. It may only be an arbitrary number, a title and a png that pop up, but it's a goal to work for together.

[fuse]

There's good and bad things about the system, and writing off the entire notion of achievements, as some often do, is pretty silly if you ask me.

I would agree that immersion-breakers are the absolute worst. I think I'm a little desensitised to it now, but I can completely understand why some people chose to turn the notifications off.

On the other hand, in some games it's a great way to measure how your skills are developing. From recent memory, I loved Spelunky's trophies, as it was a way for me to track a few of the bigger goals in an otherwise quite arcade-style game. Even being able to look at which trophies were most common amongst other players helped, as it allowed me to understand in what order most people find themselves able to reach these goals.

[Kit]

They tend to come in 4 categories. An achievement tends to cater to...

• "Killers" - Particularly likes killing/defeating other players. A "true" example finds little interest in fighting AI.
• "Achievers" - Do something difficult, i.e. attain a load of points. People who like to achieve for the sake of achievement.
• "Socialisers" - Interact with other players. Achieve something together or simply be together at a critical moment.
• "Explorers" - Players who like to uncover what is hidden, such as finding all the secret areas of a map.

I think I'd be an achievers type player as the arkham/resi 4 stuff is the most fun.

I've done the online 'kill everyone eva' type games and that type of genre is in no way healthy - if you sink 1000 hours online you likely have some sort of mental issue in my eyes.

[Asura]

It isn't. I encountered one in GH3 when playing on someone else's 360, so I went Googling... here's a list, there's quite a few!

http://www.xboxachievements.com/foru...d.php?t=102710

That's fascinating! I had no idea there were so many.

[chopemon]

Some other cheeve trivia: Condemned is the only retail 360 game to not have the full 1000 points (outside of boxed copies of arcade releases). It has 970 points and 30 were supposed to come from DLC which never got made. MS changed the cheeve laws to prevent this happening again and every game has to have 1000 with 250 points per quarter via DLC. I think the per calendar quarter restriction might have been lifted though.

[VR46]

I've been trying to get to 100% in Forza 5 in the last few weeks (at 91/98 at present), pretty much down to the grind now so progress has slowed right down.

Has anyone got any more in Forza 5?

As someone else mentioned not keen on lots of multiplayer achievements really, and it's only really with racing games I pay much attention to the achievements list.