That’s not an “achievement”

Done properly, xbox “achievements” are a great idea, motivating you to try new things and generally get the most out of a game.

Time-based achievements – “finish the game in less than X hours” (which punishes you for enjoying the game by taking your time), or “play the game for X hours”, on the other hand, undermine the whole concept.

Take this one I just noticed in Command & Conquer 3:

100 hours? For 100 gamerscore? By comparison, completing one of the campaigns is only 80 gamerscore. And seriously, who wants to play C&C3 multiplayer for 100 hours? That’s ridiculous. I haven’t played COD4 for 100 hours, and that’s the best multiplayer game in the history of the system.

Hell, look at the name of the “achievement” – “No Life”? Well, quite – but why require anyone who completes your game to prove it?

Ugh.

Prince of Persia finally over; QTEs still boring and annoying; achievements depressing

I did quite like the way the Prince of Persia ending battle was performed through the eyes of the enormous boss. That was both a cool and effective way of conveying the menace of the creature you were fighting.

I also thought it was a spectacularly pretty game, and I loved the soundtrack.

Sadly, however, I didn’t finish the game with the sort of positive feelings towards it that characterised my response to the ending of Sands of Time. There was joy, yes, but only in the sense of relief that the frustrations were finally over.

Here’s me over the last couple of hours of play:

Yes, you’ve said that already.

And again!

Please, please stop saying the same stupid things over and over!

Take that! I pressed the “A” button!

Yes, well may you recoil at my ability to hit the “B” button when bluntly told to do so.

Oh no! My inability to hit “Y” within half a second of suddenly being ordered to do so has caused the villain’s health to entirely regenerate, thereby making the last five minutes entirely pointless!

Yeah! I sure can press “X” when told to!

Watch me press “A”!

Yes, Elika, well may you be impressed by how deftly I risked RSI to hit “X” really quickly.

God I hate quick time events.

Also – like GTA’s stupid “I hope you raced through this sandbox game and didn’t explore at all” time-based achievement, Prince of Persia has two achievements that punish you for enjoying your time in its world (if you were able to). One punishes you for using the Elika checkpoint system (instead of saving and reloading); the other punishes you for taking your time to collect light seeds.

I got both achievements, but only because I wanted it to be over and played as quickly as possible.

Developers: no more of these “here’s a reward for racing through the game” achievements, please. (Particularly ones that are worth more than finishing the game.)

And you know what I think about QTEs.

Grand Theft Auto 4 (Xbox 360)

Culled from two posts at An Onymous Lefty:

Rockstar Games appear to have caught George Lucas Syndrome: they’ve been so successful in the past that no-one is willing to call them out on stupid, stupid decisions in their new products.

For example, GTA 4 was riddled with poor design decisions that should have been obvious, if anyone had play-tested the thing and been honest about it:

• Unnecessarily irritating prolonged loading times placed at stupid moments, such as when you’ve just died and want to reload a save (you have to wait till it loads you back at the hospital before you can do that, as they suddenly and pointlessly disable the start menu), and when you are trying to find a multiplayer game (it loads for thirty seconds and then tells you you’ve been disconnected, and spends another thirty seconds loading you back into the singleplayer before you can try again).

• The staggeringly clumsy multiplayer interface. The multiplayer game is amazing. It’s just that to get to it you have to wait patiently while GTA IV loads, tries, loads, loads, tries, loads etc. Then, unlike say COD4, it doesn’t let you know which other player is speaking into your headset – so if you get an irritating person just singing or making other disruptive noises, you can’t figure out which one they are so you can mute them. And there’s no quick way to check your online stats while you’re waiting for a match.
• The fact they’re still making us endure imprecise third person controls in an era where precise control is available – the now well-established first person two-analog-stick system. Forcing you to use old-school controls means you regularly die because of Nico’s frustrating inability to change direction quickly, and as you wait for the camera to catch up. Niko can only run forward and backward: if you want him to step back and to the left, for example, he has to actually turn before he can do it. Getting him to climb a ladder can be an exercise in frustration. You can’t hold the camera in place so you can look to the side while running, either – it keeps automatically moving behind your character. It’s annoying! They’ve built this amazing virtual city but you can’t explore it like you would any other 3D environment, with proper 3D FPS controls. (Which would be extremely easy for any halfway decent programmer to implement, by the way.)
• Counterproductive xbox “achievements” that punish you for playing the game the way they claim it’s supposed to be played – one of the major unlockable achievements for GTA on the xbox is completing the game in under 30 (real time) hours. This is not particularly challenging – unless you’ve actually been playing the game the way they’ve suggested you play it, as an experience to be explored, before you actually get around to tackling the missions seriously – in which case you’ll miss the deadline. And have to start from scratch.
• Poorly-designed missions where the goal is confusing until you’ve tried and failed – for example, missions where you’ve got to chase and kill a character will sometimes require you to actually shoot them down on the road before they can escape; others expect you to just tail them until a pre-arranged scene occurs and they can be easily dispatched, for example on foot after they crash. You won’t know which this
• Long missions with no mid-mission savepoints or checkpoints – you can find yourself playing a ten or fifteen minute mission, something going unpredictably wrong stupidly at the end and having to do it all over again. Given how slow the game is to reload, and how long it takes to just drive back to the mission start point (if you use the “instant restart” selection after dying it takes more time out of your 30 hour deadline), that’s extremely annoying.

The upshot of which is that half a year later, I still haven’t had the patience to finish the thing. Or felt like playing it for months.