In the early days of the Xbox 360, developers had little idea how to properly build achievements into their games. Over the past decade they’ve come to find more and more interesting ways to offer achievements. Gone are the days of King Kong – a game where you could earn 1,000 points without even batting an eye. Nine fairly easy to reach achievements would earn you all the available points in just a couple short hours.
However, some games did the opposite. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter included an achievement for multilayer called World Champion. This meant you had to climb to #1 on the leader board in order to unlock it. For many, this would mean never unlocking all the achievements in the game. For the few who eventually would unlock it, it would mean thousands of hours of gameplay in order to do so.
Gaming has seen dramatic changes since the inception of achievements. E-sports have gained popularity taken off in a huge way. We see many people, professional e-sports players specifically, sinking thousands of hours into one game like Overwatch. This is different than those who play game after game to bolster their achievement score. Microsoft has taken note of this and has teased that there are changes being made to the achievement structure for this type of player.
Xbox VP, Mike Ybarra, claims that Microsoft is working to “fundamentally change the concept” of Xbox achievements. “We are working towards a bigger, more meaningful change about somebody’s gaming accomplishments in history, as a gamer on the Xbox.” Ybarra goes on to say “We can do a lot more to reflect and let people show their gaming history.”
Based on Ybarra’s comments, it appears as though Microsoft has something big in mind to work in conjunction with the Gamerscore to better show the world who each individual gamer is. This would be a highly favored alternative to discontinuing Gamerscores altogether.
Our Guesses
While details have not been made clear at this time, it’s become fun to speculate as to what this could mean. Achievements will still continue, but we could see new forms of measuring skill. Some more popular ideas are the following;
- Time put into a single game could add up and score points
- Specific stats in one game adding together to form a more specific point total
- Unique leaderboards for each game
- Distinct leaderboards on Xbox Live as a whole
