Achievements basically boil down to “does it matter to me that other people see that I’ve accomplished something” and that only matters “if it matters to other people that my achievements are worth knowing”. It’s essentially trying to generate interest in a game by creating this social competition and of course FOMO. So I guess it’s just social media advertising.

In my case none of this matters. I play mostly single player games because I enjoy them, not because I care what other people think. Having that info in game is sometimes cool if I want to know I’ve finished everything there is to finish.

From a game developers standpoint this data could be useful. Is this part being used? How long does it take? At what part in the game did they accomplish it? That sorta thing. The publishing of that data in a public space is different beast.

Makes no difference to me. I don’t mind them either way, but considering how they do nothing to effect the game i would say keep them. If anything they serve a purpose of statistics and possibly how far you are into a game. Considering i have never played a game with mods they are never disabled for me either. Ive been there when they started which i think was the year after the PS3 launched so 2007 or 2008 when the update came to introduce them. Its pretty cool seeing almost 20 years worth of that data on what i did and in what year i did it.

Side note but I really don’t know that drill. I’ve used Linux since 2010 and only begrudgingly dual booted in the years before proton was a thing, but now have used it as my only OS since Valve started developing it.

Highly recommend trying it out if you like to tinker. Modding things like Bethesda games is possible, but it’s been a while since I played one so I can’t remember all the specifics.

Achievements are cool sometimes. I did some challenge runs on Factorio like “there is no spoon” which is launching a rocket in under 8 hours. There is almost always a mod that turns achievements back on for most games fwiw

Idgaf about achievements. It always was a scattered mess and (imo) epeen length comparison. I play for the experience and fun of it.

Ymmv. Have fun however you’re having it!

You can usually reenable achievements with another mod, if they matter to you.

I love achievements to the point I’ve been replaying a ton of old games just cause of retroachievements. As for what I’d think of others not wanting them, I don’t really care what you do. I do see a lot of pushback against achievements, especially whenever the topic of Nintendo adding them comes up since they’re the only platform without it, so a way to just permanently system or game wide disable them would be nice for those people. Something easy to access so you wouldn’t have to dig in menus for it.

Could be an age thing. 20 years ago on the 360, achievements I cared about. By the middle of the PS4 generation, I stopped caring about PS trophies. On Steam, never cared about Steam achievements. 20 years ago being a completionist was an interest of mine which included achievements. Today, I’m fine not finishing games

I really like seeing the breakdown of what percentage of players have done X, Y, or Z compared to me. When achievements were first implemented, it was the first time developers had real data about how people played their games, and it influenced how games would change after that. I don’t think many people are circumventing them via mods percentage-wise, so they’re mostly a good representation of the sample size’s behavior. I rarely go for all of them, averaging about 35% of achievements per game, but I did just 100% Escape from Ever After not long ago, and part of that was getting all of the achievements in it, which was a fun little extra activity to do in a game I really enjoyed.

If you really don’t want that record attached to you, you could prioritize playing games from GOG via offline installer, I suppose.

I think they’re relevant for people who like them. Most games I don’t care, but for games I really like I’ll use achievements to see of there are things I haven’t yet discovered.

Sometimes it’s fun to compare to friends.

I don’t really know why they disable them with mods installed. If a person cheats and gets them all, who cares? It’s not like there’s actual value. If it makes them happy, let them be happy.

And yea, an opt out feature for people who don’t want them would be good, too.

As you can see, I care about achievements: https://sh.itjust.works/post/56525516

As others have said, it’s a great incentive to go deeper in a game. It should just not become a grind and that’s why I don’t 100% a lot of games.

It can also make you remember what branch of a story you went for in a story driven game.

If it gives data to developer about how a game is played, it ain’t something I mind as the way I play isn’t a important privacy wise as other data.

What’s stupid is when people buy a game just because it has easy achievements though…

They are marketing shenanigans, they always have been. Those who care about them is the people who are sensible to such marketing tactics.

I’d say you’re definitely overthinking it. I’ll look at the high end achievements if I’ve finished a game I like, as that could point me towards things I may have missed during my initial playthrough, but other than that, I don’t think about them at all.

If I actually do 100% a major game (Like I did for Fallout New Vegas) I’m proud to have accomplished it, but I’m not losing sleep over the other 3000 unfinished titles I’ve played.

I only achievement hunt for certain games. Granted, I’m not a hardcore gamer or anything. I’m probably the guy that most hardcore gamers hate. I’m old school, in my day, you could just pick up a game and go. You’d peruse the manual a bit on the ride home from the store and you’d have a pretty good idea of how to play it once you got home. Some games today are still that way, hell some are so intuitive that you just pick it up and you already know how to play(spiderman), some haven’t changed enough in decades to be a problem. (Gran Turismo, call of duty, Madden). However even if you understood HOW to play a game, some were just hard AF. Everyone understood how to play the stampede level on lion king, very few could beat it.

The point of that previous paragraph is to put a perspective to my response. There weren’t achievements growing up. In fact, many games were so hard, or so badly designed that it was nearly impossible to beat unless you were so ridiculously dedicated that you wouldn’t have enough time to get into other games. I played the original command and conquer games and absolutely loved them but tropico has like 45 fucking menus and I just can’t remember or be bothered to learn every single minute detail. However, Gran Turismo only got more detailed gradually enough that it came naturally, even if I skipped several iterations. My point is, I try a lot of games, especially the free stuff on PS+, that I like the idea of, but when I play it I’m just like nah, fuck this like tropico, I even made my guy look like trump lol. Or games that are too big that I’m just not gonna try to 100% but I love all the same like cyberpunk. I really like DayZ but I never played the arma games and have no idea really what I’m doing. It’s fun but I know getting platinum just isn’t happening but I have fun.

So I guess my point is, I don’t blame anyone for not getting platinum. Currently I only have 4. All the insomniac spiderman games and fallout 4. I want to play a game for the game. Hunting trophies feels like a job, unless I realize I’m pretty close just by playing the game. So if someone wants to play a game without achievements being shown I wouldn’t judge. I like fighting games but won’t play DOA because I dont want to catch shit from my friends for being thirsty.

Also sorry if my post is a little disjointed and rambling. I’ve been writing this during commercials while also getting progressively more buzzed.

I saw one other person mention RetroAchevements and I second their love for adding it to older games-- in these cases, though, they’re a passion projects by fans and while they maintain a leaderboard, the main thing to be is it legitimizes some retro gaming by disabling save states and cheats while still having sets for modded games. I think it sets a good standard for what the industry should be doing.

For instance, it checks those boxes; it’s opt-in by default and there are privacy options, although hardcore mode requires rich presence for enforcement of the rules. There’s still the softcore option though. The sets have rules about what you can make, leaving grindy and multiplayer stuff as subsets. And again, modded/hacked roms get support, since all it takes is a user wanting to develop it (except Pokemon Clover, that’s banned for pretty good reasons lol)

At this point, it feels more legit than Steam, Xbox or PlayStation achievements. If the industry adopted a similar model, most of your concerns would be addressed although it’s likely impossible since developers often have to write achievement code that fits all platforms.

(Oh, and if you can’t tell, my answers to the questions, mod use makes it irrelevant on PC and permanence does matter to me, although not for any good reason: RA badges are nice to look at. Lol)

I like them. They’ve given me incentive to try out playstyles I wouldn’t have like the ghost achievement for Dishonored where you can’t alert or kill random npcs in the game.

I haven’t run into many scenarios where mods disabled achievements and if they did I would play with the mod over achievements if it brought enough quality of life improvements.