Achievements- Does anyone care?

[Uberfrog]

I think achievements, when done well, can do the following (not necessarily specific to Civ):-

1) Allow you to compare your progress with a friend, and see "where they've got to";

2) Act as an unofficial tutorial, pointing new players towards beneficial actions;

3) Encourage you to try a different or more challenging playstyle (OCC, for instance) that you might not have thought of;

4) Act as recognition/bragging rights for having done the extra challenge in (3).

They're hardly vital, but I think they're quite fun. For instance, in Half-Life 2: Episode 2, there's one for lugging a garden gnome through most of the game and launching it into space.

I can see no reason why they are necessarily a bi-product of FPS games. The above can apply equally to any genre.

 

[SmileyMan]

They're a godo way of encouraging you to break out from your comfort zone. I'm currently going through trying to get every civ's special achievement. Some are easy (Rome, Aztec) while some rely on getting a lucky situation (Japan) and some force you into situations that you might not normally get into (America).

Plus in other communities, 'acheivement whoring' across a selection of games is good for bragging rights.

 

[wannabewarlord]

First off, I never see any windows popping up. Were the posters referring to other games or does this happen in CiV too? So in fact I don't even realise whenever I got one. Plus, I find it tedious to check in Steam all locked icons with a mouserollover to see what achievements there are. Maybe I am just a nab and you can do this easier. So all the achievements I got were pure coincidence. Couldn't care less the way they are set up now.

On achievements in general, I find them nice, if they actually represent something to strive for. For me, the word "achievement" and the resulting badge or reward or whatever, implies a certain challenge. Something that needs skill to complete. Something I can do, not everybody else can or will. Sure, some can be easier than others, but the ones that just come along if you play enough (build X amount of buildings) involve zero skill and are thus worthless in my opinion. Also, "Win a game on Settler difficulty" is not a challenge either.

So all in all I really couldn't care less for the CiV achievements.

 

[noncognosco]

I like them because they encourage you to try everything. For instance, encouraging you to beat the game using every victory condition and with every civ. They also encourage you to ratchet up the difficulty by giving a seperate achievement for each difficulty level.