I’m sure my fellow gamers of the previous (and previous again) console generation remember the good old days before the tempting magic of paid DLC. Remember when you’d play through your favorite game on the hardest difficult mode, just to see if you could do it? Then you did, and that adrenaline rush you felt after barely defeating that cheap final boss crashed over you like a tall ocean wave, and you couldn’t wait to sprint into school the next day and brag to all your friends. Maybe you unlocked a new game mode or a costume for doing so! Maybe you found a cool, hidden Easter egg as payment for your dedication and hard work! Now, those bonuses that you dumped dozens of hours into unlocking are now unlocked thanks to your wallet. Also, you get a little blip at the top of your screen with a clever little name and/or a number to add to your PSN/Gamer score/Steam account. Has this ruined our definition of gamer accomplishment? Or rather, is this simply the next step in gaming evolution? Let’s talk about it, friends.
[promo title=”Losing Sight”][/promo]
It’s become a habit of mine to check the Trophy list of every single new game I buy or grab off PlayStation Plus. I suppose, being an American, I’ve grown up in very competitive environments, and I suppose that attitude was amplified growing up with video games. I scroll through the list, pull up the comparison pages, and go through my friends list to see who unlocked what. There was a point (very recently actually) where I’d be downloading games simply because it had an easy Platinum or a group of easy trophies to ramp up my score. I wasn’t exactly paying attention to the story, I was only half-absorbed into the gameplay, and I would find myself getting bored a lot more quickly, all because I wanted this little bar to increase so I can reach a higher number that didn’t necessarily unlock anything. Thanks to DLC, there aren’t a lot of games at all that have hidden unlockable content.
Want to play as that cool new character? $3.99.
New levels? New weapons? They’re both bundled for $9.99.
I’ve looked up in several Trophy/Achievement forums and noticed that there are some gamers that buy terrible games simply to get a platinum. They’d trope through licensed tie-ins, rip-offs, online-only downloadables and so much more just to make that number increase. Have we lost sight of what gamer accomplishment should entail? Of course, this isn’t the case for everybody.
[promo title=”I Challenge You!”][/promo]
If there’s a game that I particularly enjoyed, it’s ‘Hitman: Absolution’. If you’ve never gotten into the ‘Hitman’ franchise, it’s a third-person stealth/action series that places you in a series of open environments and scatters different sorts of situations and tools for you to discover and experiment with to dispatch a target or a series of them. In ‘Absolution’, you are faced with a number of different challenges assigned to each stage, but only a select few (as well as the completion of all of them) are attached to Trophies. Rather, your score is tracked at the top of the screen, where it’s actively compared to your friends’ high scores, as well as the average score worldwide.
This gave me plenty of incentive to play through a stage dozens of times to complete all sorts of these challenges. I’d often call my friends to let them know I beat their score, or I completed a challenge that none of us could figure out. Of course, one can always search up solutions on a local forum or cheats page, but I think the player owes him or himself the pleasure of discovering these through pure skill and determination alone. Even though it didn’t necessarily ramp up my PSN level, I relished in that sense of accomplishment.
I’ve learned to love developers that take the time and effort with their Trophies and Achievements. For example, in the recent release of Obsidian’s ‘South Park: The Stick of Truth’, there’s a bronze Trophy for finding Jesus when playing as the ‘Jew’ class, labeled “Are we cool?” Also, in Square Enix’s recent ‘Tomb Raider’ reboot, there’s a Trophy for dislodging a certain number of enemies with your arrow counter that you unlock in the game. With this counter, Lara dodges her enemy and stabs her foe in the knee with an arrow. The title of the Trophy: ‘Former Adventurer’. I absolutely love quirky and hand-crafted Trophies like this. The developer can surprise you, make you laugh, challenge you, and give you that wonderful sense of accomplishment when distributing these Trophies properly.
[promo title=”Play it again, but better this time.”][/promo]
A developer could learn from a nice set of Achievements. They can promote multiple playthroughs, and with the price of new titles these days, who doesn’t love some substantial replay value? These can also promote some inadvertent advertising for your game: I often hear groups of gamers laughing about funny Achievements they found, or swapping tips and tricks of how to complete a certain challenge. “Dude, just come over. I’ll show you.” “You have to play this game, it’s insane!” “The achievements are so hard to get in this game. I’m not quitting though.”
Of course, there are those cases where a Trophy looks ridiculous and impossible. I’m sure you’ve seen one that falls under something like “Complete the game in one sitting, within three hours, on Murder-My-Face difficulty, without dying, without buying a new weapon, without letting anyone in your party die, without selling an item, and with one eye open.” No thank you, sir. I’m not dancing this dance today. I shall play this game at my leisure, thank you very much.
[promo title=”Trophies do what Nintendon’t.”][/promo]
Wii & WiiU owners, have you noticed that you don’t have an online achievement tracking system? Developers and workers within Nintendo don’t include these because they legitimately feel as though they can limit someone’s playstyle.
“When they create their games, Nintendo’s designers don’t tell you how to play their game ir onder to achieve some kind of mythical reward,” -Bill Trinen, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Nintendo of America
Again, this reverts back to the classic way to play a game: simply to play it and enjoy it. You sit down, controller in hand, and dive into the magic escapism that is the realm of video games. I’m not necessarily saying Nintendo has the other competitors beat in terms of practicality in gamer accomplishment, but what I will say is that Nintendo has been standing their ground in terms of being mainly a game-producer. The WiiU isn’t an all-in-one entertainment system like the XBOXONE or a hardcore gamer platform like the PlayStation 4. These are developers that are simply content with creating games and sharing them, even as they suffered lack of sales, and slipped up with new hardware ideas.
It’s an interesting take and an aspect of admirable integrity that I still find in Nintendo, but the question remains: Have Trophies and Achievements Ruined Gaming?
In my opinion, no. Or, at least, not yet. Developers understand our craving for depth and challenge, and whether or not their Trophies reflect that, isn’t something we should be thinking about primarily when entering a new title. Again, I enjoy when a developer has fun and shows off their creativity, as well as their appreciation for challenge. Trophy it up! That’s okay! If you love Achievement-hunting, that’s perfectly okay if you enjoy it! If you play through a game just to experience the story and gameplay, that’s perfectly fine as well. Competition isn’t everything, and video games don’t necessarily have to be all about competition. Escapism, distraction, fun; no matter how you play, we are all gamers.