Steam Achievements / Steam Badges

Exile

Hello,

my questions is pretty simple. Do you think there will be some steam achivements and steam badges. Would you like it or you think it's useless?

I personally hope they will be. It would be really awesome to "decorate" my profile with badge such as "Bhallspawn" or something cool like that. I also enjoy very much to gaining achivements so that's also something I would really enjoy.

I'm sorry if this thread was already created. Feel free to close him if that so. And please excuse my poor language. English is not my native language.

Faydark

I wouldn't mind some, I have some nice/fun looking badges on my profile from various games.

It doesn't take long to add them (code-wise), the majority of the time would be in making the art for them mainly.

I think GoG is working on implementing something like achievements as well in GoG Galaxy.

I guess it would make more sense as a whole cross platform system, since all the platforms support achievements in some form I think.

Hudzy

Usually people are quite vocal about how worthless it is and so on. I'd enjoy them though, and as said, they take very little effort and are easily ignored by those opposed.

cmk24

Faydark said:

I guess it would make more sense as a whole cross platform system, since all the platforms support achievements in some form I think.

As far as I know there would be no easy way to include them in the Beamdog version of the game at the very least (as it does not use a launcher). Also does the mac store, IOS, and Android all support *easy* integration of achievements? Sure I have seen Android apps with achievements, but I am not sure how easy that would be to code.

I don't think they will end up adding any in because that would require that they also add some in for all the other EE games as well. Making them for one expansion might not be that hard/time consuming, but 3 full games (each with and expansion already) and an expansion, that is a serious time commitment.

Faydark

I can't speak to the complexity of the IE source code, but generally it takes only a few hours to add achievements using the Steam SDK in our games, and then the remainder of the work is inserting code to track and trigger achievement awards when game events occur. In IE, I imagine it could even be done by adding a scripting function to trigger the achievement award and then using normal scripting variables to track progress (ie, kill 100 kobolds). As I said, once that work was done, the biggest time consumer would be creating the art for the icons and banners and such. It depends on how many achievements they would add.

On the iOS and Android front, I don't think it's much worse (I haven't directly done those platforms myself, but generally other members of my team get it done in about the same timeframe). If you've already got code using the SDK's (as I assume EE's have), then it's just a similar matter of adding calls to the API functions and setting up some metadata on the service.

Generally we handle all this by creating a system that abstracts the specifics of each platforms system away, and the game just uses our calls, which are translated as appropriate into the platform specific calls. On platforms that don't support achievements, the code does nothing or (if we have the resources) we sometimes create "ingame" achievements and add a screen that you can track them from.

Having said all that, it would still be a couple of days work for a programmer to set it all up.. and I'd rather have the game a couple of days earlier to play than have achievements

But it would be nice to have one day, sure. Along with cloud saves.

Arcanis

While I'm not planning to use steam, I have to admit I would like to see achievments (and will be jelous
of steam users =P). Are the pointless? Absolutly. But it is still fun to have feedback (and intresting
to see the icons and names ^^)

I especially like Achievments that don't take themselves serious with their naming, but with those they
should not pop up during the game itself, because they maybe a bit immersion breaking ^^'

deltago

Easy console access makes most achievements moot and I personally would rather have the developer spending time on creating things for the game (or for future games) than wasting time on achievements.

That said Baldur's Gate could have good and unique ones like:

Dairy Queen: Have Neera drop a cow on someone's head.
Horton hears a Boo: Make Boo squeak 50000 times (not a typo).

Arcanis

...The last one reminds me of a achievment of P4G: Hear *all* lines from Risette... Tedious to no end oO

But either way.. it shouldn't be *that* much work and could be amusing!

Vyrulisse

deltago said:

Easy console access makes most achievements moot and I personally would rather have the developer spending time on creating things for the game (or for future games) than wasting time on achievements.

That said Baldur's Gate could have good and unique ones like:

Dairy Queen: Have Neera drop a cow on someone's head.
Horton hears a Boo: Make Boo squeak 50000 times (not a typo).

Not really moot, I know that opening the console in games like Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim disable achievements until the game is completely restarted so you can't easily cheat your way to opening them up. I don't know how they do it, but they do.

No! I'm not a cheater, just... in those games sometimes the console is necessary to pull yourself out of the center of the world due to clipping errors. Hehe

Steam Trading cards may be easier to implement over achievements though I confess not to now about such things.

Faydark

@Vyrulisse They disable their code from calling the API function to award an achievement. Usually it can be worked around, depending on how they store a value/setting to remember that achievements were disabled on that save.

I don't see "cheating" as being a reason not to do achievements. Any game can be cheated for achievements. It's even easier on Steam, there's at least one working method of awarding achievements without even playing the game (if you were so inclined).

Although I don't chase achievements, I find they do add a bit of meta fun to playing the games. Particularly if the achievements are awarded for doing things out of the ordinary in the game, or for doing something humorous etc.

AstroBryGuy

Steam Achievements cannot be opt-ed out. Ugh. All the more reason NOT to buy on Steam if achievements are implemented.

Faydark

@AstroBryGuy Any game is able to add an option to opt-out of awarding achievements. Awarding of achievements is totally controlled by the game code.

I'm not sure why a Steam-enabled game would want to do that, as it is one of the features of Steam.. but it could be done (easily) if it was desired by the games community.

AstroBryGuy

Faydark said:

@AstroBryGuy Any game is able to add an option to opt-out of awarding achievements. Awarding of achievements is totally controlled by the game code.

I'm not sure why a Steam-enabled game would want to do that, as it is one of the features of Steam.. but it could be done (easily) if it was desired by the games community.

Because some users just want to play the game. They don't want to be spammed while playing with "Achievement: Broke 100 Barrels" messages.

If you like them, good for you. Have fun with that. But, It should be up to the USER whether to participate in them, not Steam. I don't care about achievements, nor do I want my achievements as "Master Barrel Breaker" shared with the rest of the grid. Sell me the game, let me play the way I want.

lroumen

What do the achievements do anyway? Just enable fluff messages (if so then why?!?)? What can you *do* with them?

Vyrulisse

They don't do anything really, they are there for people who enjoy feeling rewarded for completing tasks in-game. The best ones reward creative solutions to problems or doing something the not-so-ideal way and getting noticed for it. Personally I think they're fun, but that's really all they are there for, fun.

lroumen

Hmm okay. I think i will set my own challenges and achievements

Faydark

I just meant your "all the more reason not to buy on Steam" comment: It seems odd to buy a game on Steam, then not want achievements, cloud saves, cloud screenshots etc etc.. We have GoG for that (though with galaxy, things may be changing).

Regardless, as I said, it's not a lot of effort to add an option not to award achievements. I'll keep it in mind and mention it to the appropriate people at work for our games.

As for what use do they have: for a person who doesn't really participate in the social side of the services, not a whole lot. For those who like to see what their friends have been playing, they can be a nice quick indicator of game progress, spoiler-safe material to discuss and some achievements have nice badges to display on your profile, and can provide mild competition points between friends and social groups etc, which some people find fun to take part in.

Sort of like custom forum avatars... no real functional purpose, but seems like most people have one here.

I am sorta middle ground: I don't generally "work" on getting achievements, but I don't mind them either when they appear for the most part.

JuliusBorisov

One of the more useful achievements is the one about finishing the game.

There's been a whole story about PoE and the fact that only a small percent of those buying the game actually got that achievement.

This fact offers possibilies to start discussing the reasons for such a behavior, finding arguments about whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.

For example, I think that not finishing a big RPG in a short time is a good thing. It can mean players try different combinations and there's a restartitis.

Although I'm sure I'll be VERY interested to see the outcome of SoD, le finale with David Warner's voice.