Tag Archive - achievement

Forza, forza, forza!

November 2, 2011 in Gaming, Xbox with 0 Comments

I’ve been playing Forza 4 rather excessively last week and made it to the final of ten seasons in World Tour mode while at the same time the statistic tells me I only completed 5.3 % of the career events indicating the insane amount of car class – event type combinations in the Event List which is also part of career mode.

The World Tour features an adaptive opponent AI difficulty, meaning if you drive a slow, not upgraded car so will the computer. You don’t even have to win to progress but if you do the AI will get a little harder to beat next time. This system actually works quite well often giving you the impression that your skill allowed you to only barely win a race.


Picture: Ran out of skill.
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Achievements: What are they even good for?

March 7, 2011 in Gaming with 1 Comment

Achievements, Trophies, Accolades — however you want to call them — they are here to stay. Every major gaming system has them and more and more games are building their own systems as well. They can be a nice thing to have for a gamer, a meta reward besides playing the game. They can also present a welcome challenge or get you to do things you didn’t think of or even knew were possible.
Where it gets ugly is when you feel compelled to do things you might not even enjoy for the sole purpose of earning an Achievement. Developers and publishers can exploit this by giving you Achievements for very hard and/or repetitive tasks to make their games appear not as short as they truly are. Achievements that are very easy to get on the other hand can be used to drive up sales of games that are otherwise not that good.
As with a lot of things Achievements/Trophies/Accolades can be used for good and bad by both gamers and the gaming industry.

To summarize:

The good:

  • Friendly competition
  • Higher completion rate
  • Incentive to try new things

    • The bad:

  • Unhealthy competition
  • Finished-but-not-done feeling
  • Grinding and not having fun

    • The ugly:

  • Bogus Achievements to extend short games
  • Easy Achievements to sell crappy games