jwatte:

Achievement Unlocked: Developed your first game  ;)

I'm ALL for that!

I believe we looked into doing that, actually. There were two main problems:

• How do you avoid someone publishing the "download this zip and just run the solution in it to get all the achievements" package? ie. how can you tell that code really was written by the person currently signed in, and not just copied from someone else? Makes it hard to come up with interesting achievements that aren't trivially spoofable.

• I believe there were some policy concerns about achievements being a gamer targetted feature, and not wanting to dilute that by issuing them for non game activities.
  

jwatte:

And, by the way, the XNA launcher does not achieve tech cert, because it doesn't give achievements or gamerpoints. I'm just sayin'!

We had to negotiate a rather large number of TCR exceptions with the cert team before they would let us ship :-)

For instance the "thy game shalt not hang" TCR - well, the launcher might or might not hang depending on what C# code you happen to give it. Not a lot we can do to prevent your program doing some lengthy computation that makes it go unresponsive for ten minutes!

Or the "game must pause when controller is disconnected" TCR - there's not really any way we can force all managed games to do that, since the framework isn't high enough level to have a standardised concept of what "paused" even means!

Fortunately the cert guys were reasonable enough to agree that a programming framework isn't exactly the same thing as a regular game, so not all the regular TCRs have to apply to our launcher.

(unlike if you get an XNA Framework game signed for Arcade, in which case the full TCR set obviously does apply)

Shawn Hargreaves:

jwatte:

Achievement Unlocked: Developed your first game  ;)

I'm ALL for that!

I believe we looked into doing that, actually.

I don't know, I consider seeing my game running on my 360 achievement enough for me!

Tom

How do you avoid someone publishing the "download this zip and just run the solution in it to get all the achievements" package?

Does it matter? If I'm desperate enough to pay $99 just to get that achievement, then let me. After all, there are services that will raise your gamer score for money. Or I could just go rent King Kong for a day.

Thou shall not hang[/qoute]

Tell that to my recently "repaired" box that now can't play more than an hour of GTA before it hangs :-/

Jon Watte, Direct3D MVP kW X-port 3ds Max .X exporter kW Animation source code

jwatte:

How do you avoid someone publishing the "download this zip and just run the solution in it to get all the achievements" package?

Does it matter? If I'm desperate enough to pay $99 just to get that achievement, then let me. After all, there are services that will raise your gamer score for money. Or I could just go rent King Kong for a day.

 

no doubt, if rainbow six can give you an achievment for buying a webcam, why not ...:P

 

Sorry to bring this thread back, but I think this subject is important enough to be given more thoughts :-).

Achievements are indeed a powerful way to make the player want to go further in a game, for the two reasons that were already told earlier : personal challenge and community "pride". After all, older games were all made of achievements. I got the game "Landstalker" on Megadrive about 12 years ago, and I'm still playing it again and again because I could never get the "Oracle Stone" item to tell me "You've done 100% of thegame" !

As it was already said, achievements and points on XBL are under very strict rules that are impossible to check on community games. Unless the whole XBL engine gives community game scores a special place to fit, we won't be able to share achievements between players nor reflecting them on the gamertag.

But even without going live, achievements are interesting for the personal challenge they represent. I even think that aspect of them is the most important. Sure, I can still implement some custom achievement system into an XNA game and make a menu accessible from the title screen to display unlocked and locked achievements...but I would still be unsatisfied as a developper and as a gamer, because I think the XBOX has brought something more to achievements with its interface, for the 2 following reasons.

The first one is purely psychological: with XBL, achievements don't belong to a game in particular. Instead they belong to "me". Or more precisely, the gamer I incarnate through my profile and my gamertag. With older systems, if you threw a game away and forgot it, you lose your achievements. With the XBOX, they're carved in stone for eternity. They are what makes the player you are. The identity you build through gaming experience gets stronger and stronger as your profile is able to remember your achievements and the games you played. It's not something that gets forgotten with time. It exists and lives.

The second reason, and the most important to me, is purely pratical. As I said earlier, the main purpose of an "achievement board" is to make you want to play the game again. But an "achievement board" can serve that purpose only if you look at it. You won't be playing a game or chasing after a missing achievement if you don't even remember that game exists, or don't remember what you've done and missed in that game. This is why the common achievement system offered by the XBOX interface is so powerful. When you're not playing any games and are browsing your "achievement board" using the XBOX interface, you can see all the games you played and *remember* about them. If an "achievement board" is lost in a menu of a game you've forgotten then it's useless. For every gamer, there're times when you get a bit tired and don't know which game you want to play. While others get cazy searching among their DVD-boxes or cartridges throughout their room, desperately trying to get motivation, XBOX players can quietly browse their profile and simply let the achievement board give themselves the taste for a particular game. I think XBOX games can get tremendous lifespan extentions with that feature.

There's a small additional reason: users as well as developers often prefer to use something that looks *official* instead of something that is "handmade". That's a general assertion on our subconscious idea of "quality" or "attractiveness". For example non-official console controllers are easily sold because they're cheaper, but lots of people will still buy the official ones -- even if their functionnalities are identical -- because they'll always believe official == better.

For now that's just words, but there might be solutions that could be set up. Here's a suggestion that may work, or at least help someone else finding out a solution. Imagine the following configuration: the XNA framework provides the developper with in-game achievement display -- just like it does with the guide -- and achievement registration -- through metadata, C# is good at that kind of things :-). Developpers use it just like they would for a commercial game. Internally, the XNA framework keeps a local file on the XBOX, along with the profile of the player, that it uses to store and modify these achievements, what's missing, what has been completed, etc. And finally, the XNA Game Launcher gets an additional sub-menu that mimics the standard XBOX one, where it displays your achievements for each and every -XNA- game. And even in the case the XNA Game Launcher could not be modified that way, such interface could still be developped as an "XNA game", whose only purpose would be to browse XNA games' achievements. This "game" would then show up in the list among the others, and that would do the work -- but, something "official" is always better :-).

Sorry for that loooong post :-(. Waiting for your reactions.

I find a well written game does not need to be about acheivements. It is about what type of entertainment factor are you trying to promote.

My favorite FPS to date is H3. Have I gotten all of the acheivements, or all of the hidden features? Nope. But I still blast through it because it was done very well. And I get to enjoy the suspension of disbelief when playing it.

Too many games are about token rewards (Acheivements). Mind you, I like them, but I would rather play a game that has none, but has a great story, playability, immersiveness, interface, general fun, than a moderate game with tons of acheivement recognitions.

 

Sorry to bring this thread back, but I think this subject is important enough to be given more thoughts :-).

 

It's not, though, is it? The decision has been made. It's not going to change. Any "more thoughts" are just wishes and daydreams. (That have probably already been said).

Well, the XNA team has implemented Presence for community games with Presence.PresenceMode and Presence.PresenceValue. Could they similarly set up achievements for community games where the achievement options are from a fixed list of options? It wouldn't be ideal, but maybe it is an okay compromise.

The achievement is to kill the final boss, not to have a list who says "you killed the final boss".

BogTurtleCarl:

Well, the XNA team has implemented Presence for community games with Presence.PresenceMode and Presence.PresenceValue. Could they similarly set up achievements for community games where the achievement options are from a fixed list of options? It wouldn't be ideal, but maybe it is an okay compromise.

This does not solve the issue of gamer points, though.  One of the larger issues with allowing Community Games developers to award achievements to players is that the system could be abused to "farm" gamer points.

No gamer points for Community Games, just Achievements from a limited list of possibilities. You could petition to Microsoft to have a particular achievement type added to the list in future releases, but they would control a set list like they do with the Presence list. Again, not ideal, but it is a compromise.