Recently I spent four hours with my best friend and two other excellent gamers playing the Gears of War 2 horde mode on Xbox Live so that we could finish all 50 waves of a map we chose (if you’re wondering we used Avalanche). In the never ending quest for achievements, we realized that by completing all 50 waves we would get an achievement. It was a fun, intense experience that ended by collective over-the-headset cheers and hoots. Since the game’s release I’ve attempted to complete this mode several times, one night actually making it to wave 49 on the Day One map. But this day, this day all that would change. Upon getting to wave 50 there was a bit of a delay before the sound so many of us recognize was made, followed by the visual reward/crack of seeing the little logo show up that says what the achievement is. After that, even if your Xbox crashes you will still keep that achievement. By now you’re reading along thinking, “Man you must have gotten one hella achievement for all that videogame labor right?” Wrong. After 4 hours of relentless  alien killing and amazing teamwork you know what we got?

30 points

That’s right.  THIRTY ^%$%#$@&^*^(^!!!!!  ACHIEVEMENT POINTS!

All the cheering and joy was suffice it to say, instantly diminished, when we saw what was a remarkably small number of points awarded for investing so much time in a game. Here’s the thing, I understand there are1000 points to dole out for an Xbox360 game and somebody somewhere has to determine what they’re going to be, how many you’ll get for offline play and how many you’ll get for multiplayer, yatta yatta yatta. But for us 360 folk the issue is that there is an amazing amount of imbalance with this system.

From the start of the 360 launch, achievement points became a badge of honor. It was a way to show just how great a gamer you were by having a number in the thousands or 10 thousands next to your gamer tag. It’s also shows that some people have a lot of free time and are basically achievement junkies. Nintendo doesn’t have ‘em, Sony well, let’s not even go there so for the 360 this is a cool thing. There are many, many games that have come out that seem to have a fair distribution of achievement points so that you can get some playing alone and some when you’re online. There are some that have way too many that rely on things you do online and then there are those that are simply in no way equal to the amount of time spent trying to get the achievement. And there’s the rub.

If I plop down $60 for a game and put my time and effort into it (if it’s a good game) then the expectation is that I’ll get achievement points based on what I do right? It seems to be something that would be common sense. If you’re doling out 100 achievements in 10 point  increments then it doesn’t matter what you do. That being said if there’s a game like that then it should only take you 2 hours to finish. The problem comes when you go back and look at your list of achievements and see that there are some that are worth 30, 50, 100 or 150 points. Those are the ones you want.  You probably also make the assumption if you don’t look at the list that some tasks would be worth a lot. For example, you would think, that completing 50 horde waves would be worth 100 points or at least 50. It’s not easy to do, and you need to have four or five players that work together and stick through all the waves. Some maps, like “Avalanche”, if you have a strategy and work as a team you can accomplish this goal. But to reward you with so little for so much — ridiculous.

Here are just a couple of the other ridiculous points on Gears of War 2 list that will blow your mind.

Play 1,999 multiplayer games — 30 points. Do you know how long it takes to do that?

Kill 100,000 enemies in any mode — 50 points. Are you kidding?

Now in defense of  Gears of War 2, the developers did build in a counter that keeps track of these numbers so that you don’t have to sit there with a pencil and pad and keep track of all this crap. In fact a little tab periodically shows up to let you know how far you are to getting to that number. Granted you get 150 points for finishing the game on the insane mode but there are some achievements that remain questionable. Like the fact that surviving 10 rounds on the aforementioned horde mode is only 10 points less than completing all 50. Seems a bit unbalanced doesn’t it?

Look this may sound like me being whiny about stupid points that make me look like a serious gamer or me wanting my icing on my game cake, but if you’re going to go through the trouble of building this into your system, then put some time and logic into it. Here are some even more offensive violators of the achievement system that will literally make you want to throw your controller at the screen trying to get them.

Burnout Paradise – Score more than 1 million points in Stunt Run   — 25 points (seriously)
GTA IV – Be on the winning team in all ranked multiplayer modes — 10 points (there’s a lot of them)
Bioshock – Successfully invent at least 100 items (not easy) — 10 points

Halo 3 – Score over 50,000 points in Campaign meta-game on the 7th  mission - 10 points (yet you get 25 points for finding a skull — c’mon)

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 – Kill 50 enemies in multiplayer adversarial with at least 6 players present — 10 points
And the list goes on ….

Now this is not to say there aren’t games that have a much better point distribution system like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare that offers a good chunk of 40-point achievements. But when you look at that list and see something like there are 50 achievements worth 1000 points you have to wonder will you ever get all of them? I often find myself accidentally getting achievements because I realized a long time ago that outside the ones you totally expect (finishing campaigns, boss battles) you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to get every achievement in every game.

I love getting achievement points and always feel some sense of accomplishment when I get them but to all the developers out there — think hard about how you assign these. If it sounds ridiculously hard to do or something that would take a long time, then give us some decent points. And the same goes for those Xbox Live Arcade folks too!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 12:33 am and is filed under Gaming News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.