This is an opinion piece by writer Travis Northup. IGN opinion columns represent the writer’s personal views, drawing on his own experiences and research to explore the exciting world of video games. During a recent visit to Phantom Blade Zero developer S-GAME ahead of the action RPG’s release, the studio showed off a rather interesting difficulty option that unlocks once you’ve beaten the game, called 66 Day Mode. Here, you have just 66 chances to complete the entire campaign, turning the protagonist’s heart condition into a clever gameplay mechanic that truly dedicated players can take on as the ultimate challenge. Excitedly, another member of the press said, “Oh, that achievement will be fun to chase,” to which a developer quickly chimed in to say, “No, no. There is no achievement. All achievements can be acquired in a single playthrough on any difficulty.” as accessible and harmless as possible. Because? Because they have learned that there is a growing population of gamers who take them into account in their purchasing decision, sometimes they even choose to skip games they would have otherwise enjoyed if collecting all the digital trophies is not a guarantee or requires them to go all out. The result of this threatens a landscape that is worse for everyone, whether players who have become increasingly involved in the grind of tasks to complete or developers who have a financial incentive to design components of their game around the desires of the achievement-seeking community (undermining the entire point of achievements to begin with). Achievements, of course, have been around since the Xbox 360 debuted in 2005. Within three years, both PlayStation and Steam had their own equivalents. However, despite being well aware of their two decades of existence and the obsession that can surround them, until recently I had never personally spoken to anyone from the achievement-seeking group. I met someone new while playing tabletop RPGs, and while chatting during character creation, I noticed this person had a Steam Deck with them. I asked them what games they were excited to play and they said, “I’m thinking about getting the new Castlevania game… just waiting to see what the achievement list looks like.” I took the opportunity to investigate their view of the world and how they enjoy games. They explained that for them, checking off their to-do list in a game was cathartic, and if they were pushed too hard to complete the list, it stressed them out and made them not want to play at all. For as long as role-playing games and quest logs have existed, there has certainly been an element of checklist and completionism in the nerd space, as many of us have a compulsion to do and see everything a game has to offer. That’s part of the game’s design now more than ever thanks to the growth of the live service: Fortnite wants you to log in daily to check off a list of jobs that may not even be in the game modes you want to play that day, but you do it just to get that XP hit. That influence has also extended to offline single-player games, such as Ubisoft adding an in-game list of daily and weekly tasks to check off in recent Assassin’s Creed games, asking you to perform repetitive tasks unnecessarily instead of focusing on the more engaging content those games offer. I’ve always considered those journals optional extras at best and chaff to be ignored at worst. So I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t at least a little depressing to hear that, for some, the medium has been reduced to a Trello-like task board that they prepare for in advance and play while referencing a guide to make sure they don’t miss any of the trophies along the way. For me, the point of games as a medium is discovery, experiencing your own personal version of an adventure or story and, well, playing. It feels like an increasing number of players have forgotten the gameplay part, like those who follow the instructions of a LEGO set step by step instead of using those building blocks to create something unique. Not including an achievement for the hardest task in a game completely defeats the purpose of achievements. Tasking for fear of alienating a particular group, or calibrating an entire list of achievements so that they can be easily achieved in a single playthrough, completely reverses the goal of achievements, where players were incentivized to seek out secrets and beat more challenging content. Not only that, if this strategy becomes widespread over time, you’ll have taken something that’s supposed to be fun and turned it into something that exists purely as a marketing tool for the developer. “How easy will it be to get all the achievements?” becomes just another bullet in some PR manager’s press release to persuade those with an acquired addiction to these virtual badges to spend time and money on their game. I certainly have my own opinions about those who place so much importance on achievements that they determine what games they play, but even those who casually enjoy aiming for the highest accolades and searching for the most elusive secrets have lost something when the achievements to pursue those challenges no longer exist. But there’s a much bigger question at play here: how the habits of achievement hunters are actively affecting the game’s development. It seems that many developers who design the games are not so enthusiastic about this. I’ve started asking designers and directors about their relationship with achievement whenever I can, and the most common feelings from my limited sample range from mild annoyance to outright antagonism toward them. Sam Barlow, a designer who worked on the Silent Hill series before creating independent works like Her Story and Immortality, recently took to social media to voice his opinion on the matter, writing a thread of posts that describes the friction quite well: And herein lies the problem: When players start earning achievements seriously, especially considering what games they choose to buy, developers need to start taking them seriously too. And if they want to use achievements to encourage players to look for interesting things they’ve hidden in their game or remove more challenging content, as most developers I’ve spoken to seem to want, then they find themselves at odds with the “easy checklist” that a segment of players are looking for. Now, what was a minor annoyance that non-achievement hunters could mostly ignore has real consequences for all of us, because the fear of losing in the achievement hunter market could actively influence the actual game design. In the case of Phantom Blade Zero, the design impact is pretty clear, as S-GAME has stated that the 66 Days mode has no unique weapons, enemies, or unlockables associated with it, not even a fun cosmetic item for those who beat it to show off. It’s definitely possible that there were completely unrelated reasons for this decision, but my conversations with the team certainly made it seem like not angering achievement hunters was at least part of the reason here. When players start taking achievements seriously, especially considering what games they choose to buy, developers have to start taking them seriously too. I don’t have the time, patience or skill to do the demanding things that are sometimes required. It’s certainly an angle I’ve heard some developers focus on when describing their approach, including some of the S-GAME developers regarding Phantom Blade Zero. And some will likely make a genuine effort to simply remove barriers for those who care about achievement – a small price to pay to appease those who do, especially when most developers don’t seem to care about it. But that change also removes any sense of real achievement for those who want challenging or interesting objectives beyond those presented within a game. And in any case, if accessibility is a factor, it’s certainly secondary to what game creators really care about: selling their game to as many people as possible. Whether you think it’s a good thing or not, you have no incentive to play Phantom Blade Zero’s 66 Days mode other than your own satisfaction, and that’s at least partially influenced by the commoditization of achievements as a selling point rather than a fun list of optional activities. And if achievements no longer exist as digital bragging rights for exactly the kind of quest that 66 Day Mode represents, then what good are they? Perhaps this new era of unchallenged achievement is simply the invisible hand of the market doing its thing. Maybe developers, who could use a little help avoiding studio closures and layoffs these days, can benefit from those who care about achievement by selling a few extra copies. But whether it’s the clinical way a growing number of gamers are using achievement lists as glorified Jira tasks, the dwindling number of achievements that are actually worth bragging about, or the impact of achievement-seeking culture on actual game development, it seems to be making things worse for all of us. And I, for one, think it’s a shame for something that started out so intentionally silly and fun. Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read coverage of his games here.
