Completing entire tech tree in minecraft modpacks. For those who dont know, many popular modpacks for minecraft has a questlines, usually its main progression chapters, explaining how to play the game, and many secondary queslines for specific stuff or mods. And many of this mods are optional for the main progression, so completing them or even using them at all is just useless extra work.
Regarding collectables-based challenges, in my experience, all collectables that don’t unlock content or aren’t some kind of upgrade are a waste of time.
I remember collecting all the figments in Psychonauts 1, how frustrating and time consuming it was and how it was near useless to the regression of the game. I love Psychonauts and I would like to play it again over and over, but I would not collect those pesky figments ever again.
If the collectibles aren't satisfying to obtain on their own, I don't think putting an unlock behind them makes them retroactively better.
A good collectible is something like Strawberries in Celeste, each one requires you to take a more difficult path or do an additional screen. They're fun to go for, and I think it actually would've detracted if some unlock made them feel like a required task rather than a bonus challenge.
On the whole, achievements encourage players to do stuff that isn’t fun. Sometimes they’re funny or encourage good gameplay, but too often they’re just busywork, mindless random drops, or insane investments in time/skill.
Achievements (for me, at least) are just a reason to spend more time with a game that I enjoy. In most cases, I have trouble enjoying a game if I don’t have goals to work towards (either game-imposed or self-imposed). If I finish the main part of the game, and am not tired of it yet, achievements give me goals that I can follow if I want to keep playing.
Definitely agree that there’s too many games that have achievements that are just in no way worth the time and aren’t even fun as an auxiliary goal, though. The best ones are the ones that get you to do things you otherwise wouldn’t (e.g. playing a non-standard playthrough of the game). The lazy ones (‘Kill X enemies, Earn Y dollars’) are just busywork or earned ‘automatically’ while doing other things and add nothing.
Trophies can be very fun when they incentivize the player to interact with the game in ways that you normally don’t do during a regular play through.
Most games have trophies designed by some corporate drone and consist of a handful of trophies giving for completing the storyline and the rest for token actions that you’ll inevitably do while playing. They fucking suck!
Ratchet and Clank did it right back in the day before trophies with their Skill Point system. Little fun challenges that you wouldn’t normally do. Gave you points to unlock some skins and cheats.
Is that really so much to ask for… yeah I already know the answer.
Most games have trophies designed by some corporate drone and consist of a handful of trophies giving for completing the storyline and the rest for token actions that you’ll inevitably do while playing.
Those are basically just publicly accessible analytics for how far people typically get in a game.
After someone on Lemmy recommended Dwarf Eats Mountain (it’s okay), I checked out the idle game genre for the first time.
On one extreme, Magic Archery was completed in under an hour and all seven achievements were earned during normal gameplay.
But most other idle games, ho boy. They tend to have several hundred achievements, many of which would take literal weeks if not months to achieve, and often require resetting the game back to the start dozens of times due to prestige mechanics that are necessary for late-game progression.
Action games, for the most part, have well-thought achievements, TBH. If designed well, they can nudge you towards the intended way to play the game and by the time you’re done, you will have mastered the gameplay or got really close.
In Hi-Fi Rush, for example, some achievements encourage you to parry, parry counter, air juggle… etc.
Too many people seem too focused on getting 100%/Platinum though, and I feel like that’s almost always going to end up in a kind of exploration grind, or just having achievements for playing the game.
The best achievements imo is when you do something random and get an achievement for it, then youll be able to see how many other players managed the same.
I enjoyed the Tokyo Drift achievement in Sea of Thieves. I was running from a larger ship and naturally thought of going full steer around a rock and dropping anchor. It worked! We lived.
When I finish a game naturally I look at the list of stuff I didn’t do yet, and think “how much time will this take? Will I even remember doing completionist stuff in 5 years or would it be better to start a new game?”
I 100% RDR and killing cougars with a knife still haunts me. It’s exactly as it sounds. Go do melee combat with a gigantic pissed off cat that almost always comes in pairs, sometimes a trio.
I fucking hate how if certain animals come at you at a particular angle, there’s literally nothing you can do. Sure they give you the button-mash prompt, but it does literally nothing, and you still get mailed to death. Every. Single. Time.
You can beat factorio with extremely inefficient gameplay, layout, etc. There are two achievements in that sort of “taught” me how to play better. First was the one that limited how many items you could handcraft, and second was the speedrun achievements. Both were doable but forced me to automate more and plan things out in advance, and I can’t remember any other game’s achievements that qualitatively changed how I played.
I think something that makes a challenge worth it or not in a game is a combination of how fun it is and how much time it will take.
I recently got all the achievements in Another Crab’s Treasure. Most of the achievements you get naturally from playing the game, and I only had to hunt down a handful once I completed the game. All I had to do was fight 1 optional boss that I missed, grind a little bit to buy shells from a store, and play a couple of hours into NG+. Hunting those down was worth it because the combat is fun, and it showed that things are different in NG+ (I had to fight a brand new boss that wasn’t in the regular game), plus it didn’t take more than 3-4 hours.
On the other hand, I also played Schedule 1 again (post cartel update, but before shrooms were added). I love the game. I love the process of starting small and doing everything myself, and eventually building up to buy other properties, hiring employees, and refining the process to be more efficient. But man, that achievement to get $10 million is fucking nuts. I had all the properties producing drugs, the dealers and I were overflowing with product and I still haven’t gotten the $1 million achievement either. The game stopped being fun because everything was built up and I was basically there to restock the properties. Also actually getting to $10 million would have taken forever, so I gave up on it. I’ll definitely go back and play the game again, but I think I’ll wait until there’s another update after the one that added shrooms.
Gosh, y’know, these days breathing gives you an achievement because gamers like to get achievements to have achievements. Why do gamers like to have achievements? Sense of pride and accomplishment, I suppose. And because I am very simple, I’m the same - I crave that dopamine of the li’l 🎶Di-Ding. And platinuming a game is of course more dopamine. It’s just very useless in most games, it’s nothing but a number somewhere in some statistics. Paradoxically, I think nobody needs achievements and I’m annoyed at how important they’ve become, and at the same time I’m disappointed if there are none.
Challenges that give me equipment that simply has some better stats are … well, challenging. Especially when I don’t get around to them until after I finish the story. That’s when I care the least about increasing my ice damage by 2 points.
Make me explore the world to find things, that’s my jam. Especially if the things I find add to the lore. … No I can’t think of any examples right now.
I played this game twice, and tried to get to the end twice, and in both times I just WALKED AWAY. The original was actually playable and beatable in comparison.
One moment it’s a shooter, then it becomes a driving game, then it becomes one of the earliest walking sims with long stretches of nothing, then a horror game, then a tactical shooter, and it wasn’t good at any of them - it was all just cobbled together. Valve would have had a much better game if they sold just Ravenholm, the only part that actually evoked strong feelings in me.
And by this point in time I can’t help but think the funny letter G guy is just a Mary Sue to glue the game together with very little character or substance besides “man in black”.
I firmly believe the only reason this game is “beloved” is the same reason that iPhones sell just because of the logo of the company that made them. (And also because of this game every fucking company that breathes has an online DRM launcher)
Fear by Monolith and its expansions on the other hand, they were so much better despite the aiming system being unintuitive in comparison to HL the 2. Everything just clicks. I just loved Fear. But I’m sure this won’t save me from “Ubisoft target audience” allegations.
I firmly believe the only reason this game is “beloved” is the same reason that iPhones sell just because of the logo of the company that made them.
It’s more nostalgia than branding. I’ll entirely agree that half life hasn’t aged great, but what’s important is the historical context. The games were groundbreaking for the time, especially HL2 with its physics engine and gravity gun. I remember playing it just days after release then being shocked and amazed at those different systems. There just weren’t many games with that level of polish tackling such a wide scope.
Just like with watershed TV/movie/music, it seems quaint and overhyped as their innovations become the norm.
I once saw someone somewhere comment that HL2 is actually a tech demo meant to show off the physics stuff. Which I wholeheartedly agree with, and even that didn’t win me over. The game doesn’t feel like a shooter meant to be enjoyed, rather it feels like Valve flexing its muscles only because they can.
Yeah gameplay wise the game basically leaned a lot on novelty. But they are wrong to say that it lacks world building and lore because it’s scant on narrative. That’s like saying “the Quiet Place lacks world building because there is barely any narrative”. The game is excellent in using game mechanics to tell a story. Instead of relying on the storytelling mechanics of film.
It’s much more rare nowadays in new video games that have this style of physics or visual storytelling. It’s a game that will always be a fresh experience to me anytime I replay it.
This makes me think that the guy ran through the game instead of playing it. Just because what happened isn't spoonfed it doesn't mean it's not there.
Reminds me of all the haters of Dear Esther.
One of the things that don’t exist anymore in NH but was still a thing in NL is villagers can move in and most importantly out without you noticing, because you can only convince them to stay if you catch them the day they decide to move.
In NH they’re basically stuck with you forever until they tell you they consider moving, and then you can tell them not too. And you can also try to choose a new villager by meeting random ones on desert islands (though you can still just leave it completely to chance too). Depending on who you ask, some prefer the bit of simulated independence, others can’t stand the idea of their “dream villager” leaving if they missed the day.
By the way the same masked rabbit is living in my NH town right now! She’s called Grisette in French.
Damn. I think I kind of fall into the camp of simulated independence. I wish they had given the player a toggle. I mean, I imagine it’d be a bit of work code wise, but I can’t imagine it’s impossible
The masked rabbit I also had move in on New Horizons. I haven’t used it for any screenshots but I caved and bought the switch version just to try it. She moved in pretty recently lol
NH tends to be “softer” in general, and I do regret some choices too, including that one a bit, but I think it would have been a lot harder to maintain to go back to all those little choices and put toggles on them. Especially with all the complaints around everything that was “wrong” back around NH’s debut (with people arguing a lot about how wrong it was).
There has been a lot of QoL added to updates, which makes me think they did hear some of the most common annoyances people had, but if you weren’t there around the first months, you can’t imagine the level of drama going on.
Including stuff that were only problems because of people making up their own rules and getting upset when it was not streamlined enough.
I don’t hear a lot about that anymore, but there was a lot of people trying for a better online player economy (…yeah, not sure why). Their problem was the most common currency, bells, was too easy to cheese/get through cheating. So they turned to another “currency”, the Nook Miles Ticket. Since you get it from miles, and miles are rewarded for actually imteracting with the game a lot, it felt more “valuable” to them (hell, they put proof of work into freaking Animal Crossing).
Since normally tickets have only one purpose on-game and that’s visiting a singular mystery island, the miles redeeming machine only gives one ticket at a time with a fairly long interaction. For normal use, it’s completely fine. But of course people wanting to use them as money complained s lot about how long it is to spit out a hundred “NMTs”.
I think I kind of get what you mean when you say softer. Maybe not In a full understanding, but I can grasp the idea of it.
I can’t really say I’m a fan of an online economy. I am not a big online game person. Give me multiplayer I can play with my friends and I’m happy. I don’t need anymore. Though, I also suppose it can be implemented in an optional way (though, this is Nintendo we’re talking about. Optional online mechanics I feel are kind of rare for them)
I’m trying to imagine spitting out a hundred of the tickets in my head. A lot of the game’s terminology is lost on me but if I’m thinking of the right thing (The travel ticket thing) I can’t imagine what I’d do with that many.
That’s the one, the thing that let you go to random deserted islands, usually for materials. It was just never meant to be printed en masse and hoarded like capital.
I think the idea of needing an economy between players in AC is a bit ridiculous too anyway. My only “trades” with other players, if you could call them that, were stuff like “you can go pick some of my extra blue roses, and please get me that cool red godzilla variant from your town”.
truly dull sections - yes I’m looking at you the vehicle sections … makes playing through HL2 a slog. Just a few hours in, I didn’t want to play any more. I was done.
Totally agree with this. HL1 is one of my favorite games ever but HL2 was just boring. I tried it a few times and never finished. Opposing Force and Blue Shift are my Half Life 2 and Half Life 3.
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