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silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
I will probably never finish Bejeweled 3's achievement list. This is despite enjoying the game very much and thinking of it as a stellar example of a match-three game, with plenty of different modes for different players to enjoy. Because Bejeweled asks me to do the extremely highly improbable as part of their achievements and trophies list. Despite match-three generally getting seen as a "causal" genre of games, several of the modes of Bejeweled 3 are meant to reward quickness in matching gems, rather than strategically looking at the board and deciding on the best match for the situation. The Diamond Mine, Ice Storm, and Lightning modes are all time-based, and each offer four tiers of achievements related to total score in the mode and a particular activity unique to the mode.
To put it mildly, these modes are stressful to anyone who doesn't have enough pattern recognition skill to know what their next move is going to be as the last move is resolving itself, and at least one of the achievements requires someone to make twelve vertical matches in a row, each match coming almost immediately in the heels of the last. To have a prayer at achieving this, the player not only has to know where the next match is and move toward it, they also have to know that pressing keys on the keyboard will move gems in the direction pressed, so that one doesn't have to click and drag them into place (which is too slow to keep a combo going.)
Furthermore, the high scores and the chain combos rely not only on pattern recognition and decisive movement, but luck that the correct sequences of gems drop in so they can be matched easily and time maintained / combo continued. A good run toward twelve vertical matches could be stopped by all the available matches being horizontal without any lessening of skill on the part of the player. Or the player having to frantically scan for the single available match that is far away from the progress they want to make, wasting time while waiting for correct gems to drop in and be put to use. Many of the platinum-level achievements in Bejeweled 3 rely on having one game where everything falls into place correctly and there are no issues that get in the way. It would be like an unmodified very random RNG turning up maximum values 10 times in a row. Sure, it's mathematically probable, but it's not likely to happen. And if you want to have a complete set of achievements, it gets really old fast having to play 1000 games for the possibility that one of them might align exactly correctly to achieve it.
Luck-based achievements are terrible things to implement, unless the game has been programmed in such a way that the player is going to get lucky (or unlucky) with enough regularity that the achievement can be earned through normal play. Yes to achievements that are "land a critical hit!", no to achievements that are "land 50 critical hits in a row!" unless you have also programed a weapon into the game for each of the PCs that always hits and always critical hits.
A lot of game designers don't have many, if any, purely luck-based achievements where something improbable randomly happens and there's a reward for it. However, they tend to make up for their lack of luck with achievements they believe are based on skill, but are equally as frustrating to players than ones based on pure luck. The Bejeweled 3 achievements are of this kind - after all, a sufficiently skilled player should be able to do this under time pressure, right? Except for the randomness of the jewels that drop in to replace the ones that go out.
Many of the "skill" based achievements aren't things like "successfully land a high-risk move" or "beat the game within a time frame that allows you to make an occasional mistake," but instead are "defeat the deliberately unfair bonus boss at the highest difficulty level" or "complete the game in a time where you have to have supernatural knowledge of what is going on so that you never miss a beat." Games that set achievements like that seem to be thinking that players will invest the necessary time and dedication into their game to memorize and get skilled and be able to do any and every thing possible in the game that is thrown at them so they can collect the complete set of achievements. What they actually do is send people to walkthroughs and forums to discover if there's a way to achieve the thing through cheats or cheese. Counterintuitive gameplay or exploiting a flaw in the AI routine is often what makes these achievements possible in the first place, and much of the time, it's not deliberately intended for the routine that breaks the AI to work. (Sometimes it is, that's usually a Puzzle Boss instead.) Because, with the amount of games that exist in the universe at any given time, the reason your game is getting played is usually because it's fun. (Or, if you're NIS, because you're up front about the fact that you have the story game, and then you have the post-game grind for all the other content that is additionally present, or the grind to find the alternate endings to the story that require fighting extremely powerful characters to achieve. And even then, they usually have a mechanism that allows the player's party to grind levels fairly efficiently.) When the game stops being fun and starts being a chore, it should be for something with an actual payoff, like competing in tournaments for cash prizes, rather than for a digital badge that's going to go into your collection.
A game that I think got achievements right is Super Smash Brothers Ultimate (it's the first time, I think, that they got it completely right on the achievements). While I will dock them points for having a section of achievements that are related to playing the game online (never do this, especially if you charge people for an annual subscription to play your game online, unless your game is meant to be played solely online with or against others, at which point, I'm probably not buying it unless it came with a bundle), all of the achievements they have are actually achievable to someone without having to become a super-powerful Smash player. Including the "defeat the hardest level CPU" set of challenges, which would otherwise be a problem. (And, I think, the "Cruel Smash KOs" achievement is cumulative over play sessions, rather than having to do it all in one.) The defeat high-level CPU challenges are set up to specify that certain rules must be followed to set up the situation, but all the other rules are free for the player to choose. So, instead of having to do "No items, Fox Only, Final Destination" and win against a CPU playing the same, I could set what items I wanted to have appear on the stage, which both myself and the computer player could take advantage of. I could choose the character to play, and the character that would face them, and I could choose what stage the match was played on. Which meant I could fight a top-tier CPU using my strongest character and playstyle on a stage that was suitable for that character and playstyle, instead of being required to replicate what someone else's idea of skill is. (There are some other achievements that are "do this task with this character" that are difficult for that character to do, but they do not rely on luck or exploitation of little-used mechanics or secrets.) Which, I suppose, is really where I get steamed when it comes to the impossible task achievements. They're often set up in ways that are "disadvantage yourself to the extreme, advantage the opponent to the extreme, and find a way to win against them anyway" in such a way that a person who is a casual player or otherwise just wants to enjoy the game will not be able to complete them, and if they are the kind of person that doesn't like leaving achievements undone, it will annoy them that it's still not complete, and probably won't be, unless cheats or cheese. I like completeable achievement games. A lot.
(Also, the Tt-designed LEGO games are really rather good about having an achievement list that's doable through normal gameplay, and they don't penalize the player if they use the cheats to do things like wildly increase the value of each stud to assist in getting the "collected enough studs on the level" achievements toward a full set of gold bricks. And the difficulty is set so that people of all skills can feel like they're making progress and getting through the story of the games. They're really well-made games, all around.)
I will probably never finish Bejeweled 3's achievement list. This is despite enjoying the game very much and thinking of it as a stellar example of a match-three game, with plenty of different modes for different players to enjoy. Because Bejeweled asks me to do the extremely highly improbable as part of their achievements and trophies list. Despite match-three generally getting seen as a "causal" genre of games, several of the modes of Bejeweled 3 are meant to reward quickness in matching gems, rather than strategically looking at the board and deciding on the best match for the situation. The Diamond Mine, Ice Storm, and Lightning modes are all time-based, and each offer four tiers of achievements related to total score in the mode and a particular activity unique to the mode.
To put it mildly, these modes are stressful to anyone who doesn't have enough pattern recognition skill to know what their next move is going to be as the last move is resolving itself, and at least one of the achievements requires someone to make twelve vertical matches in a row, each match coming almost immediately in the heels of the last. To have a prayer at achieving this, the player not only has to know where the next match is and move toward it, they also have to know that pressing keys on the keyboard will move gems in the direction pressed, so that one doesn't have to click and drag them into place (which is too slow to keep a combo going.)
Furthermore, the high scores and the chain combos rely not only on pattern recognition and decisive movement, but luck that the correct sequences of gems drop in so they can be matched easily and time maintained / combo continued. A good run toward twelve vertical matches could be stopped by all the available matches being horizontal without any lessening of skill on the part of the player. Or the player having to frantically scan for the single available match that is far away from the progress they want to make, wasting time while waiting for correct gems to drop in and be put to use. Many of the platinum-level achievements in Bejeweled 3 rely on having one game where everything falls into place correctly and there are no issues that get in the way. It would be like an unmodified very random RNG turning up maximum values 10 times in a row. Sure, it's mathematically probable, but it's not likely to happen. And if you want to have a complete set of achievements, it gets really old fast having to play 1000 games for the possibility that one of them might align exactly correctly to achieve it.
Luck-based achievements are terrible things to implement, unless the game has been programmed in such a way that the player is going to get lucky (or unlucky) with enough regularity that the achievement can be earned through normal play. Yes to achievements that are "land a critical hit!", no to achievements that are "land 50 critical hits in a row!" unless you have also programed a weapon into the game for each of the PCs that always hits and always critical hits.
A lot of game designers don't have many, if any, purely luck-based achievements where something improbable randomly happens and there's a reward for it. However, they tend to make up for their lack of luck with achievements they believe are based on skill, but are equally as frustrating to players than ones based on pure luck. The Bejeweled 3 achievements are of this kind - after all, a sufficiently skilled player should be able to do this under time pressure, right? Except for the randomness of the jewels that drop in to replace the ones that go out.
Many of the "skill" based achievements aren't things like "successfully land a high-risk move" or "beat the game within a time frame that allows you to make an occasional mistake," but instead are "defeat the deliberately unfair bonus boss at the highest difficulty level" or "complete the game in a time where you have to have supernatural knowledge of what is going on so that you never miss a beat." Games that set achievements like that seem to be thinking that players will invest the necessary time and dedication into their game to memorize and get skilled and be able to do any and every thing possible in the game that is thrown at them so they can collect the complete set of achievements. What they actually do is send people to walkthroughs and forums to discover if there's a way to achieve the thing through cheats or cheese. Counterintuitive gameplay or exploiting a flaw in the AI routine is often what makes these achievements possible in the first place, and much of the time, it's not deliberately intended for the routine that breaks the AI to work. (Sometimes it is, that's usually a Puzzle Boss instead.) Because, with the amount of games that exist in the universe at any given time, the reason your game is getting played is usually because it's fun. (Or, if you're NIS, because you're up front about the fact that you have the story game, and then you have the post-game grind for all the other content that is additionally present, or the grind to find the alternate endings to the story that require fighting extremely powerful characters to achieve. And even then, they usually have a mechanism that allows the player's party to grind levels fairly efficiently.) When the game stops being fun and starts being a chore, it should be for something with an actual payoff, like competing in tournaments for cash prizes, rather than for a digital badge that's going to go into your collection.
A game that I think got achievements right is Super Smash Brothers Ultimate (it's the first time, I think, that they got it completely right on the achievements). While I will dock them points for having a section of achievements that are related to playing the game online (never do this, especially if you charge people for an annual subscription to play your game online, unless your game is meant to be played solely online with or against others, at which point, I'm probably not buying it unless it came with a bundle), all of the achievements they have are actually achievable to someone without having to become a super-powerful Smash player. Including the "defeat the hardest level CPU" set of challenges, which would otherwise be a problem. (And, I think, the "Cruel Smash KOs" achievement is cumulative over play sessions, rather than having to do it all in one.) The defeat high-level CPU challenges are set up to specify that certain rules must be followed to set up the situation, but all the other rules are free for the player to choose. So, instead of having to do "No items, Fox Only, Final Destination" and win against a CPU playing the same, I could set what items I wanted to have appear on the stage, which both myself and the computer player could take advantage of. I could choose the character to play, and the character that would face them, and I could choose what stage the match was played on. Which meant I could fight a top-tier CPU using my strongest character and playstyle on a stage that was suitable for that character and playstyle, instead of being required to replicate what someone else's idea of skill is. (There are some other achievements that are "do this task with this character" that are difficult for that character to do, but they do not rely on luck or exploitation of little-used mechanics or secrets.) Which, I suppose, is really where I get steamed when it comes to the impossible task achievements. They're often set up in ways that are "disadvantage yourself to the extreme, advantage the opponent to the extreme, and find a way to win against them anyway" in such a way that a person who is a casual player or otherwise just wants to enjoy the game will not be able to complete them, and if they are the kind of person that doesn't like leaving achievements undone, it will annoy them that it's still not complete, and probably won't be, unless cheats or cheese. I like completeable achievement games. A lot.
(Also, the Tt-designed LEGO games are really rather good about having an achievement list that's doable through normal gameplay, and they don't penalize the player if they use the cheats to do things like wildly increase the value of each stud to assist in getting the "collected enough studs on the level" achievements toward a full set of gold bricks. And the difficulty is set so that people of all skills can feel like they're making progress and getting through the story of the games. They're really well-made games, all around.)
no subject
Date: 2019-12-13 12:22 am (UTC)