The Xbox 360 introduced the gaming world to achievements — a codified system so all your friends could see exactly how much time you devoted to video games. Steam and PlayStation eventually adopted their own in-game challenges to spread the joy of unlocking pointless rewards. We’re all used to achievements now, they’re everywhere! And as ubiquitous as achievements are, publishers still force incredibly annoying, obnoxious, and just plain terrible achievements in their games.
Here, we’re talking about the types of achievements we hate the most. These terrible achievements fall into 10 general categories of badness — whether they’re boring, untraceable, or simply impossible, they’ll fit somewhere on our list. We couldn’t figure out how to list every achievement that’s ever pissed us off, so we had to categorize. These are the achievements that drive us completely insane.
Stuck at home? Revisit some lists on Gameranx:
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- 10 Games Where New Game+ Changes Everything
- 10 Ridiculously Funny Trophies & Achievements We Just Had To Unlock
#1: Multiplayer Achievements In Singleplayer Games
When you’re trying to unlock everything in a predominantly singleplayer-focused game, it’s super annoying to find a bunch of pointless multiplayer achievements for an online mode nobody even wants to play. This problem has actually been improving in recent years, but there are still examples — who wants to play the online mode in a game like Spec Ops: The Line?
Do you even remember there was an online mode in Batman: Arkham Origins? It existed, and has a bunch of achievements nobody will ever unlock — especially because the multiplayer servers have long-since shutdown. Oops.
Even games like Tomb Raider have this issue. Bioshock 2 had a completely pointless multiplayer mode, too! Developers, you can make these features, but please don’t force us to actually play them. Doom Eternal, I’m lookin’ at you.
#2: Achievements That Give You Odd Numbers
A scourge from the early days of Xbox achievements, your perfectly round Gamerscore can easily be infected by the cruelest thing imaginable — an odd number. Odd numbered achievements leave an almost permanent mark on your Gamerscore, wrecking your big number and putting an annoyingly random digit at the end. Nobody wants to have 2,563 Gamerscore! If it doesn’t end with a 0, we don’t want it!
NOTE: Gamerscore that ends with 5 is passable, but please don’t make this a habit developers.
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter is packed with random-ass Gamerscore numbers. Completing singleplayer campaign chapters nets you 8 GS, or 2 GS, or 16 GS, or 36 GS, or 25 GS. Are you starting to see the problem? These might be even numbers, but if you throw in a 5 GS, everything is thrown into chaos. I’m going to have a conniption just thinking about these terrible numbers.
Delve deeper into the dark world of terrible, awful, insanely bad achievements on the next page.
