It’s not exactly news as such, but a new post on the Xbox Engineering Blog makes some absolutely fascinating reading on the topic of Achievements. That’s not the how-to, mind you, but rather the how-it-works-and-why. It’s also all rather technical, but for Achievement geeks out there (like me), it’s loaded with cool facts you can casually drop during your next round of Gears of War and look really clever to everyone else. Maybe. Probably not.
Still, Microsoft supplies developers with a 21-page, 8000-word whitepaper on Achievement design guidelines? That’s interesting. So’s the SHOCKING revelation that the distinctive and instantly gratifying Achievement pop almost didn’t happen:
“We are proud of the consistency you find across all games. You have one friends list, every game supports voice chat, etc. But we also like to give game designers room to come up with new and interesting ways to entertain. That trade-off was at the heart of the original decision we made to not give any indication that a new achievement had been awarded. Some people argued that games wouldn’t want toast popping up in the heat of battle and that game designers would want to use their own visual style to present achievements. Others argued for consistency and for reducing the work required of game developers. In the end we added the notification popup and its happy beep, which turned out to be the right decision, but for a long time it was anything but obvious.”
The article also discusses the evolution of Achievements from dreary “WELL DONE, YOU STARTED THE GAME; HAVE 1000 GAMERSCORE LOL”-types to “YOU REPLAYED THE CALL OF DUTY 4 MILE HIGH CLUB MISSION ON VETERAN DIFFICULTY FOR 8 HOURS BEFORE SUCCEEDING; HAVE 20 GAMERSCORE LOL”-types.
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