To be honest, I could just title this blog "Why Xbox One is the WORST console I ever bought", because I'm in that mood tonight. I'm really upset with Xbox right now, because thanks to their rampant glitches, I have to end a nearly 10 year long tradition.
You see, back when I bought my very first Lego game for the 360, Lego Star Wars, I never cared much for finishing a game all the way through and grabbing all the achievements I could. But, I fell in love with someone over Xbox Live and we started playing games all the time together, and she wanted to achievement hunt, so I decided to start going after achievements with her.
Long story short, our relationship didn't continue, but my compulsion for 100 percent playthroughs and 1000/1000 achievements for Lego games kept right on going. So every Lego game I bought I bought for the Xbox 360, which I then played through until 100 percent completion and sought all the achievements. This tradition carried over to the Xbox One, even though I preferred to play on my PS4. In fact, I rarely played my Xbox One, and four times it's gotten attention was because of Lego games. It's pretty pathetic, honestly.
The tradition died today. Why, do you ask? Well, I've been playing Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens for the past week and a half and just got 100 percent completion, so I go to the achievement list to see what achievements I need to unlock to get 1000/1000 (well, it's now out of 1250 thanks to DLC, which really irritates me). That's when I notice that several of them are for stages that I already completed. I'd have to replay through them in hopes that the achievement would unlock like it's supposed to, IF it would even unlock at all.
I did some research into this and it appears to be an issue associated with Xbox Live, which may have been compounded by the fact that the game's already ridiculously glitchy. The game would hang and crash, sometimes have audio skipping during the opening intros for chapters, and several times would reset itself when I woke the Xbox One out of sleep. Whatever the reason, I'm just so done and tired of this shit. I'm not going to replay several fucking levels over again to just to get a few extra fucking achievements. Sorry for the profanity, but I'm pissed and fuck a filter.
So it also turns out that my achievement list doesn't even show every game that I've played, because one I know that should be on there is a 1000/1000 for Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie (fuck, that's a long title), and it didn't even show on my list period. Then, I see one for 950/1000 for Viva Pinata, a game that I do own BUT NEVER FUCKING PLAYED. How the fuck do you not give me credit for a game I 1000'd, but then 950 me for a game I NEVER STARTED. I HATE this achievement system!
Achievements are what's wrong with gaming. Not everything that's wrong with gaming, but a good part of what's wrong with gaming. It's making you game for the wrong reasons. You open up your game and play it, but then instead of just having fun with it, you start looking at all these arbitrary goals to achieve. Kill 100 enemies with this weapon. Put a car in a ridiculous place. Die a certain number of times. You're doing shit you would never have any intention of doing otherwise. Hell, most achievements are just given to you for showing up and playing the fucking thing. VERY RARELY are achievements even used cleverly, like in The Simpsons Game, a game that takes a shot at the achievement system itself by giving you an achievement just for pushing the start button.
I don't even keep up with my Xbox One anymore. I just noticed they rearranged everything on the dashboard and did a few things for achievements including trackers and leaderboards. It's bad enough that people have to keep stroking their e-penises, but now there's monthly leaderboards to see who can get the biggest e-penis at the end of the month?!
I hate achievement farming. My score (if it's even fucking accurate) right now is 61,313. This may seem a lot, but this is a score that was achieved over 10 and a half years. If you break that down, that's about 486 points per month, which isn't half the points a typical game offers. But, I did try to boost my score back when I was really active. By boosting, I mean doing shit in games I'd never do and playing games that I never would. I used to buy a lot XBLA games just for a quick 200. Stupid, but not nearly as stupid as people who buy Barbies games, and definitely not as stupid as people who pay other people to play games on their accounts to raise their scores.
As of today, the highest gamer score is 1,542,480 by Stallion83, the same Stallion83 that became the first gamer who broke the 1,000,000 mark back in 2014. In JUST three years, he's amassed over half a million more points! I couldn't find enough to play in 10 years to even break 62.000! What was he playing? Everything?! Regardless of quality? He purposefully endures shitty games just to stay on top, which he currently is? He's become a slave to this. Every achievement hunter has become a slave to this. I get people who find a game that's so fun that they'll play the hell out of it and do everything they can... but if you HONESTLY tell me they're having just as much fun on EVERY game they're playing, you're lying. You're fucking lying....
Ok, ok... enough vitriolic anger rage blogging. Back to the title. Nintendo doesn't do achievements. And I'm glad they don't. They don't need to do the same things Sony and MS are doing, and this allows something to happen to their games that achievement systems don't allow. Nintendo allows the joy and fun of their games to occur organically. You want to spend all your time in Zelda because you WANT to be there, not because there's an achievement for finishing the 120th shrine. You want to drive yourself crazy trying to earn every gold cup in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe because you KNOW you can do it, not because there's a 50 point achievement carrot being held in front of your nose. There's no constant pressure to compete with someone else's gamerscore that will make you do things in games you don't want to do and play games you don't want to play. There's just the games. Just the gameplay.
I hope Nintendo never implements an achievement system. I get the idea behind achievements, because sometimes they encourage you to do more than you normally would but on the flip side of the coin, they're also used to pad the game's length making you do things you honestly would never do to begin with. It can be used to measure one's enthusiasm when it comes to gaming because you can see which ones they loved playing based on how many points they earned but again, the downside is that it can also be used to judge a gamer's passion and establish a sense of elitism among their peers. I remember a falling out that happened on a forum I used to post at. A poster who eventually became a staff writer wrote a review for a game and another poster tried to discredit him for not having completed a certain amount of achievements for it. As if an achievement score is somehow a certification of a reviewer's score...
Just throw the whole system out. I can guarantee you gamers will have more fun on the whole when they discover things about their games that excite them instead of going to XboxAchievements.com to research what they need to unlock while they play. Please Nintendo, don't ever make your fans wade through this muck.
No comments:
Post a Comment