Either one or both works.
Mine is completing the Pokedex in the original Pokemon games. All you get is just Professor Oak giving you a wink and a small few second cut scene. And a congratulations text. Imagine spending all of your time then, getting all 151 and even 252 pokemon just for that? Yeah no thanks, I never completed the pokedex.
Going the Joja-Route in Stardew Valley. I say this mainly because, it is what you make of it. You forfeit being able to complete the Community Center by earning things, when you sign your soul away to Joja. What I would’ve liked is seeing Pierre go out of business completely. I just think that would add a route of depth in the game where you have to make ends meet through Joja because Pierre is permanently closed.
But, that doesn’t happen, he’ll still be in business despite his depression about Joja running things. Kindof ruins the whole concept of doing it for the achievements even.
I think the jump rope and volleyball moons in Mario Odyssey were pretty bad. They didn’t really connect to the gameplay and just felt tedious to get.
I do challenges for the fun of doing them, not for the reward.
Dark Souls at level 1 is absolutely worth doing if you’re replaying the game. It’s a lot of fun, and much easier than you’d think during your first time playthrough.
Surprisingly enough, playing Getting Over It 50 times over for the achievement is one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had. The skill curve is just awesome to experience, my time dropped from 18h all the way down to 10 minutes.
Challenge not worth doing : all achievements on Rayman Legends. The game itself is amazing, but to get the last achievement you need to play daily procedural levels for MONTHS unless you’re a god at the game (and I’m pretty sure the top times are always cheated anyway, so you’re never getting the highest point reward anytime ever)
I didn’t do all the optional bosses in expedition 33. I finished the plot and was so powered up the story bosses didn’t even get a turn. But fighting the billion hp “dodge 13 hits in a row or die” just wasn’t fun for me.
I’ll only answer the first one.
Achievement systems full stop. People who value completion through achievement systems are fucking uncreative persons who need to find a different hobby or reconsider why they enjoy theirs. From a dev standpoint it’s just a way of lazily padding a game.
I’m not talking about completionists of actual game content like collecting all the stars in a Mario game, or catching the 151 pokemon, but moreso the “silver trophy” for killing 2000 grunts or whatever bs achievement ideas they decided to arbitrarily create. You’re diluting the art form.
Beating Dark Souls 2 without dying or using a bonfire rewards you with a ring that makes your right hand weapon completely invisible.
It isn’t worth it at fucking all, since there is a spell that does the same thing and is way easier to obtain (even in 2025 despite being a multiplayer rank reward). The spell and ring also have ZERO effect on PvE and it rarely matters in PvP when the animations of your body instantly reflect the size of your weapon to a good enough player. Like, I don’t need to see your Ultragreatsword to know that’s what you are swinging when your arm starts hefting the weight.
Filling out your arsenal with adversary weapons in warframe gets easier the more you do, and a lot of them are really worth while… but maxing them out? Hell no, that’s 5 forma a pop, and the valence bonus is NOT worth re-grinding out. I’m glad DE has made the Infested Adversaries easier to deal with, so the valence bonus is easier to max out but good god. that’s too much forma.
I’m at 99% of RDR2 for like 2 years now because I can’t be bothered to do the dominoes part of the gambling challenge.
That dominoes shit makes no sense to me. I’ve tried to look up the rules multiple times online and then I go into the game and try to make a legal move and the game won’t let me.
Whoever programmed that shit was on crack.
Same, no idea wtf I’m doing with that one.
I 100%'ed Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. That was pretty fun with secret characters and levels to unlock.
I draw the line at whether it’s something that can be done naturally, as a result of playing the game and enjoying it enough to put in that much time. I’ll entertain trying to 100% a game that has an achievement to farm 1000 of some herb, if it’s something that I’ll just come across in due time by making full use of all the game mechanics, and presumably see some form of in-game payoff for my efforts. I’ll instantly become content with just seeing the credits if an achievement to get a similar quantity of something is just an excuse to pad play time by making me grind some monster drops just for the sake of getting that last achievement.
Breath of the Wild: getting all 900 or whatever Korok seeds. The reward is a golden Korok seed whose shape makes it very obvious that you’ve been cleaning up Korok poop this whole time. Pretty funny prank for Nintendo to pull tbh.
I’m glad Nintendo did that. Almost all completionist achievements are shit compared to actual substance in a game especially one as rich as BotW. Give the achievement hunter their dessert.
Any challenges from Ubisoft games.
Hey, that’s not fair. If you complete the original 150 Pokedex, you also get a little diploma you can print on your GameBoy Printer.
On the whole, achievements encourage players to do stuff that isn’t fun. Sometimes they’re funny or encourage good gameplay, but too often they’re just busywork, mindless random drops, or insane investments in time/skill.
Too many people seem too focused on getting 100%/Platinum though, and I feel like that’s almost always going to end up in a kind of exploration grind, or just having achievements for playing the game.
The best achievements imo is when you do something random and get an achievement for it, then youll be able to see how many other players managed the same.
I enjoyed the Tokyo Drift achievement in Sea of Thieves. I was running from a larger ship and naturally thought of going full steer around a rock and dropping anchor. It worked! We lived.
But dodging 100 random lightning bolts is fun!!
Achievements (for me, at least) are just a reason to spend more time with a game that I enjoy. In most cases, I have trouble enjoying a game if I don’t have goals to work towards (either game-imposed or self-imposed). If I finish the main part of the game, and am not tired of it yet, achievements give me goals that I can follow if I want to keep playing.
Definitely agree that there’s too many games that have achievements that are just in no way worth the time and aren’t even fun as an auxiliary goal, though. The best ones are the ones that get you to do things you otherwise wouldn’t (e.g. playing a non-standard playthrough of the game). The lazy ones (‘Kill X enemies, Earn Y dollars’) are just busywork or earned ‘automatically’ while doing other things and add nothing.
Yeah I agree with this. Most achievements just don’t have the fun or inquisitive nature they should and are pretty much meaningless.
Trophies can be very fun when they incentivize the player to interact with the game in ways that you normally don’t do during a regular play through.
Most games have trophies designed by some corporate drone and consist of a handful of trophies giving for completing the storyline and the rest for token actions that you’ll inevitably do while playing. They fucking suck!
Ratchet and Clank did it right back in the day before trophies with their Skill Point system. Little fun challenges that you wouldn’t normally do. Gave you points to unlock some skins and cheats.
Is that really so much to ask for… yeah I already know the answer.
Most games have trophies designed by some corporate drone and consist of a handful of trophies giving for completing the storyline and the rest for token actions that you’ll inevitably do while playing.
Those are basically just publicly accessible analytics for how far people typically get in a game.
They weren’t trophies but I liked the challenges for Titanfall 1 that allowed you to ascend to the next level.
They were mainly using different weapons that I probably wouldn’t have tried because they didn’t seem as good as the easier to use weapons.
Action games, for the most part, have well-thought achievements, TBH. If designed well, they can nudge you towards the intended way to play the game and by the time you’re done, you will have mastered the gameplay or got really close.
In Hi-Fi Rush, for example, some achievements encourage you to parry, parry counter, air juggle… etc.
After someone on Lemmy recommended Dwarf Eats Mountain (it’s okay), I checked out the idle game genre for the first time.
On one extreme, Magic Archery was completed in under an hour and all seven achievements were earned during normal gameplay.
But most other idle games, ho boy. They tend to have several hundred achievements, many of which would take literal weeks if not months to achieve, and often require resetting the game back to the start dozens of times due to prestige mechanics that are necessary for late-game progression.
Super-bosses that award ultimate weapons… like why am I going to use this weapon now that the biggest challenge is done?
It’s for the secret boss!
You killed the ultimate boss; now with their drop you are the setting’s ultimate boss. You just need to wait for another plucky young upstart to rise and take you down.
Diablo spoiler?
Ehhhhh… Kinda, not really. The wizard goes mad, the rogue aligns with evil and the warrior failed to contain the big evil and is possessed by it.
Doesn’t sound like final boss to me.
I may be wrong, didn’t follow the series much, but wasn’t Diablo2 BBEG the player from the first one turned evil?
Yeah, as I said, it was the warrior, who took diablo’s soulstone with himself, but succumbed to evil and was possessed by Diablo. So, yeah, kinda turned evil. Still, at that point I wouldn’t call that body the player from the first game.
Afaik originally in D2 we were supposed to kill him and that would be it, but the animator company decided that it would be cool to animate some dude piercing his forehead with a stone, and since there wasn’t anymore dev time Blizzard North decided to go with it. That gave way to to justification for the corruption/possession of the D1 warrior character and thus the story of D2 and kinda D3.
Oh, btw, Blood Raven, the second quest you do in act 1, is the rogue from D1; and the summoner you encounter at the end of the arcane sanctuary, the one who had Horazon’s journal, is the mage from D1.
Or many of the Soulsborne games.
Tap for spoiler
Replacing Gehrman in one of the Bloodborne endings being the most direct example.
Rarely even happens in-universe.
There is sadistic satisfaction to be had from absolutely nuking enemies who gave you trouble before.
I also like collecting shiny things.
You might need them for ultra-bosses that reward ultimate ultimate weapons.
You can beat factorio with extremely inefficient gameplay, layout, etc. There are two achievements in that sort of “taught” me how to play better. First was the one that limited how many items you could handcraft, and second was the speedrun achievements. Both were doable but forced me to automate more and plan things out in advance, and I can’t remember any other game’s achievements that qualitatively changed how I played.
