When achievements were integrated and added into the Xbox 360 system through gamer points and the achievements that granted those points, I was very excited as I loved doing things that added to a total lifetime score. I bought one of the systems about when Elder Scrolls 4 : Oblivion was released because that was the single game that I wanted a Xbox 360 for. While it was very expensive, I ended up spending a very long time in Oblivion and I loved every moment of it. Besides enjoying the game, buying a 360 also introduced me to the achievement system, and while I consider myself a long time gamer, I hadn't really seen a similar system ever except for maybe on a few web pages, making it quite revolutionary for me, and it was something that I ended up really enjoying. From the first achievement I got in Oblivion I was pretty much hooked on the system, at the same time I was enjoying the game far too much to actually care too much about achievements until I bought a few other 360 release titles, Call of Duty 2 if I remember right. From then on I alternated between spending time exploring Oblivion and playing Call of Duty 2.
In CoD2 while I pretty much ignored achievements save for being excited when I got one for simply playing the game, it wasn't too long (well, it was longer than most games nowdays anyway) until I had actually completed the game at which point I still wanted to play it, which led to me looking through the achievements. I noticed there were a few that required me to play and beat the game on the higher difficulties, so with maybe alittle bit of hesitation but not much mainly because I hardly ever played games above the normal difficulty before the Xbox 360, I set out to try the harder difficulties. I can't exactly remember the name of the difficulty before Veteran but I don't remember it being too difficult and it took almost the same amount of time as it did for me to complete the game on normal, probably due to my previous knowledge of where all of the enemies would spawn and such. So with that, I ended up getting my achievement and still loving the game, that's when I had the idea to go onto Veteran mode to get the final achievements, however as I found out, Veteran was the most punishing experience I did then, and it still probably is.
I specifically remember the start of one mission where the player and their allies gets ambushed, unfortunately the time between getting out of the ambush zone to safe cover isn't scripted or a safe zone, and enemies could definitely shoot you, that fact paired with the fact that on Veteran the enemy AI seemed to almost miss and instantly fire at you when you got out of cover, as well as throw grenades at you constantly when you weren't able to be shot made getting out of that first area probably the most repetitive, annoying, and frustrating experiences of my life. I would pretty much take 3 steps and then die, and then try different things and then die, and I even tried to fire back once and then died anyway, but eventually I managed to get to a check point and thanked goodness for it. In the end however, no matter how frustrating it actually was, I managed to beat the campaign on Veteran and above all of the other times I played through Call of Duty 2 that playthrough was probably the most satisfying.
In the Elder Scrolls part of the story, there weren't that many achievements that I wasn't able to get mainly because I did wanted to do pretty much everything from the start, even the Dark Brotherhood quests which were clearly evil and I normally don't do evil things in games but I decided to do it first so I could get it out of the way and think of the rest of the game as my character redeeming themselves. The main part however is that all of the achievements were tied to getting to either ranking up in a faction which you do simply by completing the particular faction's quests, or gotten from progressing to a certain point in the main story, the game itself was very compelling for me to play and Elder Scrolls 4 : Oblivion probably remains the most pleasant and easiest game to get all of the achievements for.
That also gave me kind of a wrong mindset about achievements however, and while this was after I already completed Call of Duty 2 on Veteran I had thought that achievements couldn't get much harder, so I went onto playing and renting other games to see if I could max them out. The first game that I had problems getting all of the achievements on was Perfect Dark Zero mainly because I never could get used to how the gun play was, it felt too floaty compared to what I was used to in like Call of Duty or even Oblivion, infact I think I prefer Oblivion's bow mechanics to PDZ's gunning. That isn't to say that it was bad however , I still managed to put up with it to get through the story on normal, I tried it on harder difficulties but I just didn't like the game enough. On the other hand, there were also achievements that could be gained through playing multiplayer matches with bots, but those achievements also asked for a great deal of things such as 1000 flag captures or 1000 kills with a gun, it made getting those achievements very repetitive, and I never was able to finish it as my first 360 broke before then, and I lost all of my progress with the achievements, so I just sold the game and moved on.
The real breaker of achievement hunting for me was Ghost Recon : Advanced Warfighter, where it had an achievement to be ranked on the top of the global leader boards for various game modes. I knew that I never would be able to do that even when I heard about people who would trade boosting their scores to get that high, I simply didn't want to bother with it, and it didn't take much thought to just forget about GRAW's achievements in general. Since then there have been a few other games that have had similar achievements, as well as even more achievements that I don't like such as in Team Fortress 2 where you have to kill a enemy doing a taunt, normally no one will ever taunt in a position that allows them to be killed, I've played the game about 30 hours so far according to Steam Stats and not once did I kill a enemy while they were doing their taunt.
Despite all of that I still enjoy achievement hunting quite a bit. When I went back to WoW during Wrath of the Lich King I was very pleased to find out that WoW had adapted an achievement system at well, in fact a lot of my time at level 80 involved me doing achievements. So while there are some achievements and I don't try to complete a entire game's achievements often anymore, achievements are still fairly enjoyable and I do them when I can.
No comments:
Post a Comment