QUOTE(Software2 @ Jun 3 2007, 10:36 PM)
And a search on xbox.com for your username reveals
your gamerscore as well!
The theory continues to hold strong!
Actually, I don't even have my own xbox 360, just thought I'd throw my two cents in
. My xbl account was tjconnol and mainly only ever played Halo 2 on the Original Xbox. But anyway, now I play about once every other week at my brothers (360) and so I'm not interested in replaying the same games over and over. I'll play a good game and beat it, then move on.
I think that Raphael sums it up pretty good in the IGDA forums:
QUOTE(Raphael @ 04-30-2007 07:40 PM)
Yeah, at the heart of my frustration is the fact that I am not a replayer. Or, I should say, replayability doesn't factor much into my enjoyment of a game. I rarely finish games (there are just too many and most peter out part way through), so replaying them is not a huge priority for me.
For me, the most valuable replayability a game can offer is to be a very high-quality, memorable experience, one that I look back on fondly, recommend to my friends and colleagues, and then go back to revisit a couple of years later. Games I have recently replayed: Deus Ex, Half-Life 2, Halo, Max Payne, etc. The great games are always great, and you can always learn new lessons from them even if they do not contain inherent replayibility (as a feature of their gameplay).
Achievements seem to have been designed to really give people a reason to go back and experience the games more, and I'm not sure if I appreciate this (personally).
I'm not the type of gamer who feels compelled to become better and better at a particular game. I rarely go back and replay a game at a higher difficulty level (in fact, I personally find games that encourage this to be a throwback to old design conventions and attempts to artificially (cheaply) extend the experience and perceived 'value' of the game.
Am I in the minority? I often wonder.
People play games for different reasons. To put a number of points or value to the method that someone choses to play the game or the type of gamer they are, i.e. playing all the way through CoD and getting just 20% of the total points, almost makes them feel like they've been cheated even though they beat the game.
But, then again I guess if you don't care about achievements or dislike them and just chose to ignore them, then all of this is irrelevant
Like one poster stated "Achievements ... are less of a record of my prowess and more of a list of suggested things to try in the game."
QUOTE(highbomber @ 10:58 PM)
but to say that they bring us back to the stone ages of video games is ridiculous. Achievements may resemble a high score setting, but that is only if the developer has a poor understanding of the system, and lacks imagination.
I think that high scores were mainly from pinball machine/arcade era, and were introduced to add a reason to replay a game and a method to compete/compare with others. As a convenient result, they could get more money in the machines
. So they are kind of comparable to achievements, except since you don't have to pay each time you play, maybe the idea is a little outdated as a method to make more money. So now it's more useful just for comparison/competition, which not everyone cares about, so not everyone sees a need for them. But maybe it also helps sell certain bad games to people who love gamerscores & achievements, so still similar. High scores allowed simpler games that people would play repetitively instead of in-depth games that people would play for a long time, all the way through (how many arcade RPGs existed vs. fighters/shooters/etc). In a similar fashion, I think that achievements give some developers this option of trying to create a simpler, lower quality game and use achievements to get value out of it instead of making a complete, long, deep game. Not all, but some. Which would be fine for the Live Arcade games, since usually you just want to play them for a while and that's it, not invest hours upon hours, but some developers do this with retail games, which I don't think is good.
Although I do strongly agree with highbomber that it definitely depends on each developer and game, which makes achievements in general hard (for me) to classify as good or bad. Like he said, they can be used to encourage exploration and immerse players even deeper in a game, or to cheaply try to extend game life or market profits, etc.
My problem is that if you don't want to explore every single detail or spend hours killing the same thing over and over, it does kind of suck to just beat a hard/fun/long game then see 'oh, by the way you only got 5 of 25 of things done that you could have. go play it again.' Depending on how they're implemented, they can enhance or cheapen any game, so lets just hope that with each new game they'll get better and better at doing it right, because they're definitely not going away.
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Topic: Game developers debate Xbox achievements (Read 722 times)