Jeff Gerstmann

Honestly pretty insightful! These all make a ton of sense and seem very fair; the goal of achievements is to be achievable! They can be super meaningful if used in a clever way and encouraging exploration and continued play is most certainly a good thing.

What about games that have an online part and once servers are shut down those achievements become unavailable? Forza being the big one for me, I have wondered if there could be a way that as long as you have completed the campaign before the server shutdown, you are maybe gifted the online achievements? but, likely open to abuse I suppose

I cannot remember the game it was, but I remember an FPS in that late-2000’s era of games having an achievement that was something like “Frag one of the developers in an online match”. Like literally how tf were you supposed to be able to do that with any sort of reliability???

Reminds me of the Trophies / Achievements in Overwatch, which always seemed antithetical to the point of the game to me. The tail on that game demands that you become intimately familiar with a subset of heroes and commit to playing a role, or have a main character in a role that you play well, in order to succeed in ranked play - which is the core of the game.

But the achievements essentially require some form of sub optimal play that relies on enemy players to be compliant in a competitive shooter. Such as the "knock 3 enemies off the map while wall riding with Lucio", which requires a specific healer to engage 3v1 (sub optimal), perform a somewhat inconsistent move while considering positioning, more than half the enemy team to have no mobility to get back on the map and be together at a point where they can be knocked off, and get lucky with a bunch of enemy players gathering at the edge of a map to begin with when there just arent a lot of places to pull that off.