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The problem with Multiplayer Achievements

Multiplayer achievements have a limited life expectancy, if you’re as much of an achievement whore as I am – and I mean that in the sense of completing games more than boosting my gamerscore – you quickly come to realise that after the initial buzz from a new game wears off, people head back to their regular haunts leaving servers desperately empty.

Take a look at some of the titles from the Xbox 360 Top Live Activity List: Gears of War 2 – almost 1 year old, Grand Theft Auto IV – 16 months old, Call of Duty 4 – 19 months old and even Halo 3 which is 2 years old next month. These games are what people know, what they love, and each has a solid community behind it that people aren’t going to abandon on a whim.

Developers filling their games achievement list with a multitude of online achievements seems like a gimmick to get you to use it and fill up server slots. Instead they should focus on making an awesome multiplayer that people will enjoy playing, there is nothing worse than having half of your team focused on ranking up and whoring objectives to gain their achievements before buggering off.

26 August 2009, 04:24

Comments

Ashley Baxter

26. August 2009, 05:45

Gah, how I hate multiplayer Achievements. Look at Call of Duty 4; not a single online Achievement for it, yet it’s consistently on the Top Live Activity List. Gamers are playing it for the right reasons, which means the boosting bastards and their unethical friends are no where in sight. Having said that, my favourite game to play online is Rainbow Six: Vegas, and I loved chasing most of the multiplayer Achievements for that.

A lot of shooters are designed to be played competitively online. Big games like Gears, Halo, CoD, Vegas etc. So I don’t think we’ll ever see those servers struggle for players. But other shooters – the smaller ones – are victims of what you’ve written about.

MrQwest

30. August 2009, 08:02

Couldn’t agree more Sam. I was browsing through my games list this morning hoping to finally 100% some of the games I’ve been playing. Unfortunately some of these games do feature online multiplayer achievements and most of the games lack any sort of community now.

It is quite frustrating for the obvious reasons! More to the point though, when I initially played these games, I wasn’t a member of XBL so couldn’t grab any of these achievements when the games where more popular!

Like you’ve mentioned, this is probably just a gimmick to get users to boost numbers.

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