New Xbox 360 Achievements Policy: Good? Bad? Meh?
I'm not a gamerscore whore. I'm way too lazy to get worked up about a number that reflects what hoops I've jumped through in various games...for me it detracts from enjoying the game and makes me feel like a hamster in a wheel. I get why achievements are so popular, I just don't need to add another arbitrary obsessive-compulsive disorder to my all-you-can-eat buffet of neuroses. But the hive mind disagrees with me, it seems. So does Microsoft, which has stepped up its Achievement standardizing process...no longer content to merely brick cheaters' systems.
2old2play dropped an Achievements wish list not too long ago, and while the Xbox gods haven't answered every prayer individually, it looks like they're trying to keep the fun of the Gamerscore system alive while reining in the insanity with some basic rules for game publishers:
1. All regular disc-based games MUST have 1,000 Gamerscore in the base game. This means that any consumer who buys a retail game will have the opportunity to unlock the full 1,000 Gamerscore without having to pay for any add-on content. Note that a publisher may decide to deliver a portion of this Gamerscore via add-on content, but the add-on content will always be free to the consumer.
2. Game publishers will have the option to deliver another 250 incremental Gamerscore on top of the 1,000 via add-on content from Marketplace. This add-on content could be either free or paid. So if you complete a game and earn the full 1,000 GS, you could by getting new add-on content earn up to a total of 1,250 points from a game.
3. Xbox Live Arcade games will operate in similar fashion, but given the size of these titles they will allow you to earn up to 200 Gamerscore from every game and up to another 50 points from add-on content.
No word on how this affects the 160+ Xbox 360 games already out there, but some poppin' fresh new games are playing catchup with updates that raise their maximum-possible-Gamerscore to 1,000... Crackdown, for instance, which shipped with 900 possible points and now has the pleasure of finding some way to give you an extra free 100 Gamerscore points. Whee.
I know a lot of you must be fans of this addictive reward system that has absolutely nothing to do with anything and which I find silly and annoying. So tell me: is this change a good thing or a bad thing?
Addicted to Achievements? [GamerscoreBlog]
tiny dancer
Posted to Video Games on 5 February 2007
· Comments (4)
Other stuff like this: achievements, gamerscore, lone isle of sanity in a sea of gamerscore madness, microsoft, xbox 360
I wish they'd score them based on difficulty.
I mean, I am not gonna go through and do all the super hard stuff, in say, Dead Rising, just for 10 points. And yet often, the most insane achievements are just like that.
I'm with you on not needing to obsess about my Gamerscore. I just want to play games and have fun. Once my Gamerscore was over 1,000, I could rest easy. I did not look like a noob any more. After that, more points is just icing on the cake.
As for the changes, they sound good to me. I thought this was the way it already worked but sounds like they might have been having trouble with paid content and additional gamerpoints.
It's more valuable to me to play a game to unlock extra content, not goofy achievements. I love unlocking new wardrobes for my characters. It's like I get to go shopping. And we love our shopping.
I really could care less about the Gamerscore. I like the concept of achievements, to show off specific things that you've done, but assigning points to them is just... meh.
so let me get this correct.. m$ continues to pull the carpet from under users feet and rewrite all its own rules as it sees fit, and users are still shocked?