Right as rainy

Back in the day of the point & click adventure games, a lot of titles had a scoring system. Every correct action in the game, every successful dialogue, every useful item (and some less useful ones) rewarded the player with a number of points. The objective, of course, was to finish the game with the maximum score, or to get as close to it as possible. It was something that added to the game (or tried to do so), provided for some bragging rights and maybe even made it worthwhile to play the game again.

For some time, as the classic adventure games lost popularity to other genres, the concept was forgotten. Until the console world picked it up again in a slightly different fashion. On the XBox 360, every retail game is worth 1000 points in so-called gamerscore. Since not every game comes with enough story or dialogue or items to adapt the concept 1:1, they had to come up with a few other ideas. The answer is Achievements – milestones scattered throughout the game, each worth a number of points.

It’s quite a neat idea, giving you some incentive to replay the game and max out the score, if you’re that way inclined. I myself am mostly a story player. I enjoy a variety of genres and styles, and there’s many ways to tell a story, but if there is a tangible story which is told well, I am bound to enjoy the game a lot more than if there isn’t. Not all of the achievements you get in games however tie in well with that. Many of them seem to be there to add fake replay value to a game where there is no real replay value.

Let’s go back in time a bit and look at a few examples of real replayability. One of the most underrated adventure games of our time was the 1996 title ‘The Pandora Directive’ by Access Software. It offered 3 ways through the story and a number of possible endings, all depending on the choices the player made as well as their attitude towards other characters in the game. That alone made it worthwhile to play the game a second time. The scoring system came with an interesting twist. During the game, you could access an ingame hint system (on the easier game mode at least), but every hint would cost you a few points of your accumulated score.

‘Deus Ex’, released on PC and Mac in 2000, took it to a new level. Except for a few places where the limitation was necessary to drive the story forward, the player had complete freedom of choice as to how to solve the missions and approach other characters. Depending on that, the attitudes of other characters towards the player would change, to the point where you could or couldn’t get help and assistance from them. In addition, the game offered three different endings. It was also possible to take a nonviolent approach and not kill a single opponent in the game. That’s what I would call an achievement, considering how difficult that approach is.

Last but certainly not least in this little list is ‘The Witcher’, based on the novels by Polish fantasy author Andrzej Sapkowsi and released in 2007. Firstly this game offered at least 40 hours of playing time on a single playthrough, without getting boring or repetitive. Throughout the game, the player had to make decisions that influenced the story. But as opposed to similar games, here the decisions were not purely good or purely evil. Instead they were moral choices, each with their advantages and drawbacks at the same time. The impact of the decision was not always immediately visible – some choices could only manifest a few chapters down the line. The amount of detail and thought that went into the game became clear in one scene, where the player was invited to a party but had to invite another character. There were a few choices as to who to invite, and depending on the choice, the whole scene played out in a different way.

Sadly, with many current games, achievements come down to defeating a certain number of opponents, finding a certain number of mostly arbitrary items that are scattered around the levels, advancing in a stricly linear storyline… And more often than not, the replay value is limited to playing exactly the same game at a higher difficulty. No adidtional content, no branching in the story, no differences at all. Don’t get me wrong, if a game is well-made, there is nothing wrong with being linear. But if there is no replay value beyond finding 33 fiendishly hidden items that add nothing to the story, then don’t try to artificially add some. Achievement locked.