Achievement Unlocked 4.18.08 Time for Answers

Posted by Rod Oracheski on 04.18.2008

With the drought of releases continuing, let's answer some e-mails. We'll also check out a tool you can use to find people cheating for Achievements.



Another week down in the Grand Theft Auto IV wait and reviews are starting to pop up around the web, while podcasts are flooded with talk about hands-on time with builds.

Like many gamers, I've been trying to keep my head down and avoid potential spoilers. There are an awful lot of reviewers these days who think nothing of dropping major plot point spoilers, even in reviews that are hitting the stands or the web prior to the game's release. While I think the majority of my excitement for GTA IV has to do with the same 'can you believe what just happened?' gameplay moments that past games in the series had, along with a healthy interest in the multiplayer options this time around, I'd still rather not have the story ruined before I get my hands on it.


With the spring drought of games continuing, though you really should check out Ikaruga on Xbox Live Arcade, I figured I'd answer some of the e-mail that I've received in recent weeks, starting with this one from Devon:

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Devon L.: I've had my 360 for a while now and share games with my friends. We try to see who can get the most Achievements but don't really know much about them. Are they for anything else?

Rod: Nope, you've pretty much hit on the only real point to Achievements and Gamerscore - comparing it to your friends and, if you're on Xbox Live, to others. There have been a few Gamerscore-related contests put on by Microsoft, along with other corporate partners, and I think there's a website dedicated to Gamerscore challenges between members, but I'm not positive on that.

Achievements are just a standardized system for tracking the same kind of challenges that gamers have always made up to give games more depth. When video games started out, they all kept score in a very obvious way - the scoreboard. As the medium evolved, we got more and more games where scorekeeping just didn't make sense and the notion of a scoreboard has, by and large, vanished from games. With no scoreboard, gamers use other things to challenge themselves - beating levels while using only one weapon, for example, or doing it without dying.

In the end, it's all just the same thing - an incentive to become better at the game or to try playing it in different ways. That's assuming we're talking about a 'good' set of Achievements, of course.

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Adam D.: What's your favorite and least favorite Achievement?

Rod: I'm going to cheat on this one a bit and divide it up a bit more. My favourite Achievement requirement - though it's one that I haven't managed yet (but WILL!) - is for the 'Little Rocket Man' Achievement from Half-Life 2: The Orange Box. Carting that little garden gnome throughout the game so you can send him into space is an amazing feat, and anyone who's earned that Achievement has my respect. I also considered 'Your Show Sucks' (shoot every TV in one level) from Call of Duty 4 and 'Now offering non-stop flights' (suplex someone off a ladder and out of the ring) from Smackdown vs Raw 2008 - both because they are perfect examples of the kind of old school challenge gamers would put upon themselves.

My favourite Achievement name is probably 'Body Armor' (use the Harpoon gun to pin 5 gang members to one vehicle) from Crackdown. There aren't many that make me laugh when I read the name and requirements, but that's one of them.

My favourite Achievement art is Completionist (complete the majority of the game) from Mass Effect, though Aperture Science (earn all gold medals in Portal) and 'Have Gun, Will Travel Part I' (travel to Japan) were also right up there. I'd use any of them for my Gamerpic if I had the chance.

As far as least favourite Achievements, I'm not going to single anyone out and I'll instead just say it's the ones that are lazy. Level completion Achievements are lazy. Kill [x] number of enemies - that's lazy. It's fine to have some of those mixed in with good ones - nobody expects a list to be nothing but perfection, though it'd be nice - but when that's the entire list...lazy.

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Adam M: Would you buy a game just for Achievements?

Rod: A few months ago I'd have said no way. The other day though, I was in a local store that sells used games and saw some old sports games for $5 each. A friend and I are having a friendly 'stay ahead of the other guy' competition with our Gamerscore, though I've fallen behind a few thousand, and those easy 1,000 point games are awfully tempting at $5 a pop.

I'll still say it's doubtful though. I don't deny that it weighs into my decisions on whether or not to pick up a multiplatform game on the 360 over the PS3 though. Anything extra is a bonus.

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Jim G.: What would you like to see developers do with Achievements?

Rod: (Jim had a ton of questions, which I answered via e-mail - I cut this one out for inclusion) I'd love to see developers using Achievements to affect the game, like BioWare did with Mass Effect and Petroglyph did with Universe at War. It would also be nice to see future games from a developer key off the Achievements from older games - unlocking items that would otherwise take hours of play to get, for example, if you had a certain Achievement from another game they made.

Mostly I'd like to see developers finding the 'fun' in their game and making the Achievements around that. If you have an open-world game set in a city and testers spend all their free time causing accidents - find a way to make that an Achievement, because that's what people enjoy doing. Reward us, as much as possible, for doing things we want to do already. You can lead us around a little bit, but make sure the journey is worth it.

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David R.: How does Microsoft find Gamerscore cheaters? What do I know they won't delete my Achievements by mistake?

Rod: I'm not sure how they detect it, though it probably helps that the majority of cheaters are blatantly obvious about it, going from 0 Gamerscore one day to 200,000 over the course of a few days. There's a new tool, which I'll talk about after the e-mails are done, that might point to one way they're detecting cheating - but the actual method isn't something I'm aware of. There's a lot of attention on Gamerscore cheating these days, so it's probably a priority for those at Microsoft who are responsible for the system.

Given the number of Gamertags that flew into the top 10 for Gamerscore, yet haven't been reset, it appears that Microsoft requires absolute certainty before taking action. While it sucks that this means those losers get to sit on the top of the charts for a while longer, it also means you're pretty unlikely to get the boom dropped on you unless you earned it.

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Trevor T.: How can you say the Grand Theft Auto list sucks? It's got some really good ones!

Rod: Hey, keep in mind first off that I didn't say it sucks. I was disappointed that the list I saw at the time didn't seem to reflect Rockstar's characteristic humour and style. Since then I've seen another list that is claimed to be authentic and it was better - still not perfect, but better. Time will tell on this one, but with the game going gold I would imagine we'll see confirmation of the Achievement list soon.

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Lee L.: Best game for getting quick Achievements?

Rod: LOL - look everyone, a new Gamerscore Whore! Try to rent Avatar - you can get all 1,000 points in only a few minutes. Early sports games were also easy to go 1,000/1,000 on.

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Catch yourself a cheater

As I said earlier, the recent crackdown on Gamerscore cheaters has focused attention on those who boost their score via non-legit means, even spawning a website devoted to exposing cheaters.

It's also brought about a tool that can potentially help you identify those who've cheated their way to the top of the charts. I'm not sure who came up with it, but you can find the full instructions here. What it does is is show you the time each Achievement was unlocked, providing the person was online at the time it unlocked - simply by viewing their Xbox.com profile.

I tried it out myself, and it works very well. I even took the time to check the profiles of some of the top Gamerscores and wasn't surprised to find that, of the ones who haven't already set their profile to PRIVATE - like that will prevent Microsoft from finding them? - most of them showed signs of cheating. Unlocking a dozen Achievements over the course of a few seconds, that's just not normal.

Give it a shot and let me know what you think of the tool.

Achievements sell games

The marketing side of games is the biggest part of the business - there's a reason the marketing people are generally paid more than the programmers, after all. At the 3rd Annual MI6 Conference on game marketing, held in San Francisco earlier this month, Achievements were discussed in depth.

Turns out that - duh - Achievements are influencing sales and helping with word of mouth marketing. The Electronic Entertainment Design and Research study also showed that being too cavalier about your Achievement list can lead to potential customers becoming disinterested. No developer wants their game to be downgraded to 'rental' status because they gave the Achievement list short shrift, do they?

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On the topic of Achievements, Doug Zartman, Designer at Wideload Games, provided answers for the column this week. The team, which previously did Stubbs the Zombie, is working hard on Hail to the Chimp, a politically charged party game. Yes, you read that right - a party game based on political machinations. Obviously this is a team with a sense of humour, as the GRR News website shows.

Here's what they had to say about the Achievements for Hail to the Chimp:

411mania.com: What kind of thought process goes into the Achievements list - naming the Achievements, picking the tasks associated, and creation of the artwork?

Zartman: With Hail to the Chimp we got a head start on thinking about Achievements while designing our flair system. Flair items are items of clothing and handheld objects that you can pick up in game and choose to wear or carry in future games. They're collectible, you can customize your character with them, you can fight over them, mix them into costumes, etc. Some flair apppears randomly, but some is earned - when you play in an unusual way (like, you use teleporters much, much more than the average player does) you get a piece of earned flair, which can either be a badge of honor or a badge of shame depending on what you got it for.

Earned flair is a kind of achievement, but is a collectible item instead of Gamerscore points. So we had already given a lot of thought to which player behaviors to track and reward by the time we started on achievements. While there is some overlap between earned flair and achievements, earned flair tends to be more about how you play, and achievements are more about reaching milestones in the game.

As to figuring out the range of them - you figure out the easy ones, the hard ones, and the hidden ones, and distribute the rest around those. Naming them was pretty straightforward because of the game's political theme - political jargon is a rich vein to mine from.

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411mania.com: What Achievements are the development team's favourites?

Zartman: The "Part of the Solution" Achievement - 100 points for every copy of Hail to the Chimp you buy. There's no better way to crank up that Gamerscore. (Although, come to think of it, we might have taken that one out.)

"Some Friend" is when a player often finishes a cooperative teamup by immediately attacking/betraying their former partner. I'm looking forward to players seeing that pop up on the screen after the umpteenth time they've betrayed someone - that should be pretty funny. There are some cool hidden ones, like... uh, never mind.

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411mania.com: Assuming the popularity of Achievements continues to grow, will you give the list and associated aspects more thought in future titles? What would you do differently, if that's the case?

Zartman: Well, we gave it a lot of thought this time - we did it late in development, but it wasn't an afterthought, that's just logically when you should do it, when the game content is pretty final.

I'd like to think about more random/funny ones for the next game. More nice surprises.

The 411: Another team that started working on their Achievement list fairly early on, and kept a sense of humour about it. It sounds like 'Some Friend' is exactly the kind of 'reward us for doing what we do anyway' Achievements I talked about earlier, and that makes me wonder what the rest of the list looks like.

Thanks to some friends hounding me, I've been playing Chromehounds quite a bit lately - and that's an unintentional pun.

I picked up quite a few Achievements that I never expected to get after the game had its initial run of popularity, and remembered what a blast the game was when you were playing with a good squad.

It's unfortunate that the game was targeted towards such a small pool of potential players - only the most hardcore mech lover is going to put up with the sluggish movement of the heavier Hounds, and the build-a-Hound menus are probably beyond the comprehension (or interest) of people who thought Mechassault was cool and decided to give this one a try.

It's pretty cheap now, so if you're into the 'giant mech stomping on little guys while fighting other giant mechs' style of game, check it out. The first time you see a full-fledge night-time battle in a city, with missiles arcing over the dark outlines of buildings and huge explosions rocking the landscape, you'll probably be hooked.