You have “furthest you have fallen without dieing” or “you have hugged X amount of people” and “you have said lol x amount of times” plus grindy ones like “you have completed 100,000 quests”.

I would prefer if many of the achievements are simply absurd things that you’d only try to get when pissed… might give a game a new breath of life.

achievement unlocked, aggro whore: you have aggro’d the entire map!

Meh. I hate leveling! My “character” is just fine. If games companies don’t stop mistaking tabletop RPG’s least imaginative innovation

Seeing how the levelling and character building process is generally seen as one of the most fun aspects of the genre, maybe you should consider playing something different? Or read a few books indeed, that can’t hurt ;-)

It’s sad because WoW was already a giant achievement machine. Achievements you can show off to your friends and peers (taking the form of loot and items) is what the entire game is based on. The new XBL achievement system is just kind of limp.

I just want to be able to play my game in peace without having to worry about pulling off some statistically near-impossible feat or ridiculous grindathlon. Try going back and picture a classic like Deus Ex or Half-Life with achievements: for example, a counter displaying how many headcrabs I managed to kill with the crowbar seems stupid and inconsistent with the overall concept of total immersion Half-Life was striving for. Just doesn’t feel right, if you ask me.

Btw, while on the topic of Blizzard, here’s what Diablo III’s lead designer had to say about those pesky fan-altered screenshots: http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/08/04/diablo-iii-designer-turns-tables/

I don’t know about anyone else but for me I don’t want achievements in my games because I don’t care about them. I don’t want to have any notification of any lame ass achievements in my game. If I can turn them off then fine I’m okay with that. If I can’t then I’m not going to buy your game. It’s like advertisements. I don’t watch advertisements. I’ve mocked them since I was 6 and continue to do so to this day.

It’s the same thing with DRM/Securom/selling overheating GPU’s (GTX 280). If I don’t like it and if I can’t do anything about it them I’m not going to buy it.

Diablo isn’t really much of a game anyway unless you like clickfests and with it being W3ed/WOWED it probably won’t be worth playing. I guess we’ll see when it comes out.

This, incidentally, is why I don’t feel like achievements work on PC – they’re a brilliant idea on 360, but that’s because Microsoft can and did mandate their inclusion in every single game on the platform, with a central tracker and thorough integration. The next best thing on PC (minus the three or four games that use GfW Live) is Steam – and as far as I know the only games that use Steam achievements to date are a) Valve’s own Orange Box games (so far discounting HL2 and Episode One, despite those games having achievements on 360 that could be transferred quite easily), and b) a handful of indie games like Audiosurf and Penny Arcade Adventures. Not exactly comprehensive even over the limited selection of games that use Steam as a platform.

Insomniac Games & Naughty Dog (Sony only studios) as far as I know came up with proto-achievements back on the PS2 but called them skill points & gave you extras such as cheats, game art, how it was made etc as a reward.

That always spurred me on to get them as there was an actual reward instead of just inflating a score or just collect them all which seems to be the trend of achievements now. I wish other games would take a page out of their book.