Online Achievements

There is nothing I hate more than online achievements. These things are the bane to pretty much every completionist back from the Playstation era when you could get into Final Fantasy, collect every weapon, level every skill, get to lvl 99 and do all secrets. It was fun, you knew you completed everything and in the end you could brag for exactly this. The idea of a game or system that actually kept track of this and even advertised it online was awesome! Just think of the possibilities that your friends could know that YOU beat Ozma without help from Friendly Monsters!


So I try to play games and collect a gamerscore, I used to rent games just to see how bad some games are, but one thing I tend to notice a lot is these games require some form of Online play to collect these achievements. I think one of the best things I ever saw the Call of Duty series do, was not include ANY for their Online for Modern Warfare 1 and 2... but sadly Black Ops broke this tradition. Where they now force you to do co-op for so many missions in Zombies...

I tried to rent Brink... which of course had a lot of online achievements. Now let's bare in mind here, this game is fucking awful, it was designed to be a piece of garbage and the people who designed the game clearly never played a game in their life, because this could hardly be considered a game much less a chore for how awful it was. But I digress... The game's achievements were actually quite easy to get..... if you went online. And SINCE this game is as awful as it is, hey look at that... Not a single person plays it. So what does this mean? These achievements are now impossible to get, unless you know someone who also owns this game. Which I suppose would prove they are true friends since he's also willing to trudge through this complete shit fest of a game....* Point being, the online achievements are near-impossible now.**

I could probably point out a better example, but the few that come to mind still have an online, but to make an example... In 15 years, let's say I decided I want to play Assassins Creed 2. A game that focuses completely on Single Player, but.... for some stupid reason also has this tacked on Multiplayer which you can do what you can do in Single Player, except to people trying to hide from you. So I pop the game in, complete the game and then notice that hey.... 800 gamerscore.... wonder what these 200 that Im missing are... Oh hey, look at that... this shitty multiplayer that's tacked on? That's my missing gamerscore is from. Oh  wait... nobody plays this game, nobody has played it in 10 years. These 200 gamerscore are now impossible to get. What great game design.

What I just don't understand is, we managed to go from Atari all the way to the Playstation 2 without relying on Online Multiplayer whatsoever. And now these modes HAVE to be tacked on as if they prolong the life of the game. How about we just go back to actually putting EFFORT into games, instead of artificially prolonging the game with multiplayer which isn't content by competitive repetition. It just goes to show that these generations are losing their taste and using cheap tactics to entertain their audience.