#3: Achievements That Ruin Multiplayer Games
Multiplayer must be carefully balanced — you don’t want players doing stupid activities, you want them to focus on the match, work as a team, and not do stupid stuff like use terrible weapons just to earn an achievement. Lots of games, even today, force players to do dumb things online to earn achievements.
The best example of this is the ”Grab Bag” achievement for the 2007 Turok reboot — this ludicrous achievement required cheevo-hunters to kill 1 creature, 1 enemy, 1 teammate, and yourself all in the same session. Yes, you have to kill a teammate and yourself. This achievement was later patched out, but… come on, man.
Games like Battlefield 4 require you to use specific guns for kills online, or to earn 10,000 kills with each class — whether you want to play as those classes or not. Achievements like this trick a small number of players to help boost each other; which makes perfect sense, nobody wants to use a gun / class they hate! But boosting those numbers can completely destroy the fun of online matches.
#4: Achievements That Force You To Wait Around For Hours
The most common achievement type on our list — and the one we’re most likely never going to get rid of. Developers just can’t help themselves, and ask way too much from players. Thief (2009) is a short game, and has an achievement asking you to complete it in over 15 hours. Why?!
Mortal Kombat 9 has one of the worst offenders in ‘My Kung Fu Is Stronger‘, asking you to accomplish lots of tasks with every single character in the game. Most are pretty straightforward; get 100 fatalities, win 100 matches, use 150 X-Ray attacks. That’s all normal, but you’ll also have to rack up 24 hours of in-game play with every character. That’s absurd! There are 27 character, so it would take almost a month — and that’s only if you were leaving the console on MK9 and doing nothing else!
This also fits with any absurd in-game challenges ain’t nobody going to bother finishing. Doing everything possible in Just Cause 2? That means finding all the random cars (some that only spawn during specific missions) and destroying every individual breakable thing on the entire map? That would take 100s of hours! How about the ur-example of the pointless flags in Assassin’s Creed? Sometimes even I have to stop myself from achievement hunting.
Delve deeper into the dark world of terrible, awful, insanely bad achievements on the next page.
