Like many of the people who frequent this site, I’ve been gaming for a very long time. The earliest memories of my childhood started while gaming was in the transitional phases between the fifth and sixth console generations, and in my house we had two PS1 models (the original chunkier model, and one slimmer “PS One” model), and not too later we’d get a PS2 as well. Perhaps due to nostalgic bias, the fifth and sixth console generations are ones in particular that I have my own personal soft spot for. They remind me of happy, simple times of just being a kid.
The seventh console generation, however, gave birth to one of my favorite parts of modern gaming: achievements, or Trophies for PlayStation users (for the sake of brevity, they will be referred to as “achievements” at all times from now on). Achievements breathe their own new life into a game. Namely because it just feels satisfying to our reptile brains for the game to congratulate us on doing a task. It might encourage you to play a game in a new way, and it can also just be a way to show off (either to yourself or your friends) that you’ve accomplished something difficult and meaningful. People like to say that gaming was better “back in the good old days”, but for as many things as there are to complain about modern video games, achievements are definitely not one of them. The Xbox 360 recently turned 20 years old too, which is where the feature first originated, so we can see how long the concept has come.
But like most things in life, not every iteration of it is good. There are lots of fun achievements out there, but there are also a lot of achievements that absolutely suck. Today, we’ll be looking at a few types of achievements that just make us all roll our eyes and sigh in frustration, knowing that fully completing the achievement list is now impossible. In some cases, literally.
It is also worth noting that achievements can be part of two (or more) of these categories at the same time.
Online Achievements In General
You probably saw this one coming, right? Obviously this doesn't apply to games in which the core philosophy of it is to be played online, but online achievements appear absolutely everywhere when they really don't need to. I'm very biased here because I've always been a predominantly single-player gamer by heart, and I realize the irony of saying that on a website that is predominantly known for card games which are inherently multiplayer games, but games in which I partake in multiplayer are the exception not the rule.
So because I don't care for the online modes of the games I play, any online achievement is just a slap in the face to me. I bought the game so I could play the game by myself. Oftentimes, you'll find predominantly single-player games that have a random multiplayer mode tacked on and wouldn't you know it, the online mode has achievements. Multiplayer modes for single-player games are generally not very deep or engaging and if no one cares about the mode, then you have no one to get the achievement with. Even if you do enjoy playing online with other people on games with good multiplayer modes, the online serves of games aren't going to last forever (without intervention from the community), so you're now on a strict time limit to grab the achievements before they become permanently unobtainable. Did you buy a game late when the multiplayer servers for that game have already shut down? Pick it up now and you can't get those achievements.
Online achievements also run into another problem in that the achievement is not only reliant on your own skill, but also the other players. In the event that the online achievements require you to achieve a certain skill or victory threshold, this is reliant on either being extremely good or lucky at the game, or joining online groups dedicated to helping people unlock these achievements by boosting them with a friend. It’s not like players in a matchmaking game are going to roll over so you can unlock that extremely difficult achievement where everything needs to line up.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and Quake 4 are both infamous for their achievements "World Champion (Multiplayer)" and "Number One" respectively that unlock when you’re the number #1 ranked player in the world? Yep - These achievements require you to be the best player in the entire world at that game. To add insult to injury, these achievements are only worth 40 and 20G respectively for Xbox 360 players. I realize that both of these games came out within 6 months of the 360 releasing, so Microsoft still didn't really understand how achievements should be made, but surely we've learned at some point within 20 years that online achievements are an inherently flawed concept, so why do we keep making them?
Difficulty Achievements That Don't Stack With Lower Difficulty Ones
Completing the game is an achievement in and of itself, so it’s a perfect candidate for an official achievement. As a result, it’s probably one of (if not the absolute) most common achievement types. You beat the main game, and now you have the means to brag about it to your friends. If the achievement is for beating the game on the hardest difficulty, then all the better. You’ve proven your mastery of the game and now have the shiny little mcguffin to prove it.
Some games will recognize that not everyone plays the easier difficulties, so any achievements that unlock upon completing the game on a certain difficulty will also unlock achievements for completing the game on lower difficulties too. Not everyone throws their gamers a bone though. Some games won’t unlock achievements for beating the game on easy or medium difficulties when you unlock the achievement for beating it on hard.
This is slightly more tolerable for games where you need to complete multiple playthroughs to earn all of the achievements anyway, but if you're playing a new game in a genre/franchise that you're already good at, you'll already be good enough to do it on a harder difficulty the first time. Civilization V and VI for example, both have an achievement for beating the game on all of its difficulties (all 8 of them!), but while the ones in VI unlock the lower difficulty ones too, the ones in V do not, so the transition from V to VI is smoother than my transition which was from VI to V.
It doesn't specify in the achievement (even though the other difficulties do specify it), but the Civilization VI achievement will unlock the lower difficulty ones if you don't already have them, whereas the Civilization V achievement will not.
This results in you needing to do unnecessary extra playthroughs of games that, if you’re good enough to complete on the hardest difficulty, will be boring to play for when you go for the achievements for lower difficulties. If you add multiple achievements for beating the game on certain difficulties, please make the higher-difficulty ones unlock the lower-difficulty ones if you don’t have them. Just, please do that.
Arbitrarily Missable Achievements
We all know what missable achievements are, and we know that they suck. There’s this one achievement that required you to do some sort of niche interaction that you don’t have an infinitely long window to do, you’ve missed it and now you have to slog through a new playthrough for a chance of getting it. Maybe there was a collectible that could only be obtained during a specific part of the main story and you can’t go back once you complete that part. There's no way you could've anticipated this the first time unless you researched the achievements of the game before you bought it. Said games sometimes don't even have a level select feature and thus, you need to start a whole new playthrough to get the missable ones.
This however is a category that just gets worse and worse. While all missable achievements kinda suck, a lot of them at least keep their missable achievements within the main game itself. There's another lot of games though where this is simply not the case. You may have run into some achievements that are locked behind timed events based on the time of real life because it celebrates a certain holiday and if you didn't get it, you'll have to wait a whole year (or sometimes even multiple years) for another chance of getting it. They get worse when they're once again, online, and now you're putting a limited window within a limited window. Garry's Mod is quite well known for its achievement that requires you to play the game with Garry Newman himself. Reportedly, he doesn't play the game anymore, so your chances of getting the achievement legitimately are next to zero.
If you thought that was bad though, they still get worse. I don't know how common this is on other platforms, but on Steam, I've seen a few games with achievements that you can only unlock by preordering the game or by playing it during early access. - DiRT Rally 1, I know you're 10 years old and you're no longer buyable on Steam (sadly for me), but your early access achievement still sucks. If that wasn't bad enough, it still gets even worse. MLB 2K10 and 2K11 are both known for their "Mid-Summer Classic" achievements which you had literally one day to get before they became permanently unobtainable and you get no platinum!
Speedrunning Achievements
Speedrunning is really cool. Seeing a real person interacting with a video game you really love in a way that feels almost unhuman to exploit every deep mechanic in a game to beat it as fast as possible is something I’m in awe over. Speedrunning has always been an extremely popular part of gaming communities, and as a result, many games are designed around trying to beat stages as fast as possible. Some games implement achievements for trying to beat certain sections of the game in a certain time frame, and those can be a lot of fun…
… but then there are speedrunning achievements that absolutely suck because they’re built in a game that either don’t encourage you to move fast, or they expect you to beat the entire god damn game at breakneck speed. Stray has the achievement “I Am Speed”, which falls under both categories. This achievement requires you to beat the game in under two hours. The problem is that Stray is not a game about moving fast. It’s an immersive game that encourages you to interact with your environment as much as you can, which results in this achievement contradicting other achievements which are about trying to find as many things to interact with as you can. Speedrunning achievements in general often find themselves in games where the actual speedrunning requires a fundamentally different approach to the game than everything else.
Then there’s how long you’re expected to grind and stay focused in the speedrunning mindset. Completing a certain platforming stage in under 5 or 6 minutes? Fine. Drive one lap of the Nurburgring Nordschleife in under 7 minutes or so with a particular car? Sure, I can do that. Beat the entire fucking game within a certain number of hours? Hell no! Did you miss the multi-hour cap for getting the achievement by merely a few seconds? Sucks for you. Have to do a whole ‘nother playthrough for a chance at that stupid speedrunning achievement. Hope you enjoy trying to 100% Hollow Knight in under 20 hours because that’s an achievement. Amazingly, a whole 5% of people who have opened the game on Steam have that achievement.
Insane Luck Achievements
Sometimes, you'll find an achievement that isn't even a test of skill by any stretch of the imagination. It's just how lucky can you get, and if you happened to get lucky at that specific time, you get the achievement. Now, when I'm talking about RNG achievements, I don't mean something like Fallout New Vegas's "The Courier Who Broke the Bank" achievement, that requires you to get banned from all the casinos on the Strip. Even though that is based on randomness, it's fairly easy to game your way to it with a high-Luck character and it doesn't normally take too long to save scum through it.
No. Instead, I'm talking about the achievements that you have no means of influencing the luck of and your odds are just horribly stacked against you. Complaining about video game "lootboxes" may feel like a very modern criticism, games have had elements from randomness in them from the very beginning. A lot of it is harmless, but random achievements aren't. The aforementioned Fallout: New Vegas achievement is tolerable because as long as you're making a net positive amount of money, you are making progress towards the achievement. What isn't great is when the achievements are tied to rare item drops (all of the Monster Hunter achievements for collecting Crowns) or getting specific lootbox rolls (Fallout Shelter's "Blast From The Past" achievement).
For some reason, Team Fortress 2 has two achievements for winning and losing at Rock, Paper Scissors three times in a row with either Rock or Scissors. This sounds fine except for one caveat... You can't choose whether you go with rock, paper, or scissors. So not only do you have to roll the same 1/3 results three times in a row, but your opponent needs the same (bad) luck to roll the same winning/losing result for you three times in a row as well. So after you manage to land three Rock-Scissors games in a row and three Scissors-Paper games in a row, your boosting buddy will now want the achievements too and now you've got to slog through more slot machine garbage so that both players can get what they wanted out of the exchange.
If Nintendo added achievements to the Switch 2, you just know that the Pokemon games would have an achievement that said "find a Shiny Pokemon", or even worse, catch one!
Eternal Grind Achievements
The two types of achievements above this one often culminate into this type, but while those two can be achieved shortly with a little luck (and skill in the case of the speedrunning achievements), there are some that give you no choice but to grind your whole life for them because they ask you to do the same thing thousands of times.
Let's take for example that "find a Shiny Pokemon" I mentioned. Now picture an achievement that asked you to find 5 Shiny Pokemon. Then 10. Then 100. Then 1000. Then 100,000. Then 1,000,000. For some reason, some developers think it's fun to add achievements that will take you your whole life to do. If your first thought was The Stanley Parable's "Go Outside" achievement, asking you to not play the game for 5 years, at least you can change your system's clock to get it faster (and given the nature of the game and other achievements, I honestly think that's the way the developers intended you to get that one), and even if you do grab it "legitimately", you can still play your other games and live your life while you wait.
A lot of games however ask you to spend tens, or even hundreds of hours, doing something entirely unproductive to get one digital trophy. It's very common for games to have something like "do this 100 times" or "kill 100 enemies", and most of the time these are perfectly fine since it'll only take you a few hours to do and it's something you'll end up inevitably grabbing naturally as you progress through the game. These are all well and good until they ask you to perform that task ad nauseum for hundreds or even thousands of hours. The online servers for GRID 2019 are planned to go down on December 19 of this year, and even if you have all of the online achievements already, an achievement you might still not have is "Around the Globe", requiring you to drive until you drive the entire distance of the circumference of the Earth, which is just over 40,000km. If you somehow drove at 200mph for 100 consecutive hours without slowing down, you still wouldn't have covered enough distance to get this achievement.
This achievement also depends a lot on how much content is actually in the game. You'll see some games with achievements that are literally just "play the game for X amount of hours". If the game has enough content to where you can reach this at least semi-naturally, this is fine. 100 hours in a long RPG with multiple different endings and side-quests, or 100 hours in a racing game with a huge list of events and endurance races, are both things you can probably reach naturally. But then Panzer Dragoon: Remake asks you to have 100 hours in the game for its "Lifeless" achievement when every other achievement is estimated to take between 4 and 5 hours to get, so now you're just doing being wholly unproductive in the game for 95 more hours just to get one more achievement.
Bugged Achievements
Above all else though, the worst achievements are the ones that are literally impossible to collect without using something like Steam Achievement Manager. Some of them are impossible because the parameters to unlock them weren't coded properly and even when you do exactly what you're supposed to do. Best case scenario, the glitch is a one-time occurrence, and it triggers properly after you reload and do what you need to do again. Worst case scenario, the achievement is literally not possible to obtain legitimately because it wasn't implemented correctly, and the developers may not be willing to fix it. Achievements hunters on Steam in particular, will debate on whether or not it's acceptable to use Steam Achievement Manager to unlock these, and the consensus goes back and forth on whom you ask.
So you've now spent some non-specific number of hours grabbing all of the other achievements only to now find out that one of them, or perhaps even multiple of them, are broken. So what are you to do? At least the other achievement types had some semblance of obtainability even if their window of availability was small, but the bugged achievements were just impossible from the start and they blended in with all of the other achievements because the description for how you were supposed to get them looked simple enough.
That's my list of 7 different achievement types that just suck. What's your least favorite type of achievement and is it something I didn't include on the list? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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