Back in the ancient days of the Xbox 360, I really enjoyed Xbox achievements. I spent way more time than I care to admit trying to lock down every single achievement in Left 4 Dead.
I used exploits to assist in beating Expert, I changed the difficulty to Easy to farm massive numbers of zombies to kill, and all sorts of tactics to nail down all available 1,000 gamer points.
There was once a night where I managed to wrangle together seven other people, and we played a patsy of a 4v4 game, where we all took turns trying to farm down achievements, such as the one that involved puking on all four survivors simultaneously, one special infected incapacitating all four survivors, and so forth.
And then Valve released some expansions that resulted in more achievements, none of which actually worked even when accurately triggered, and I lost interest in being 100% in that game anymore.
Because I moved onto Resident Evil 5, and farmed the shit out of getting all those achievements. My friend Huzzard and I would spend hours in Mercenaries mode to make farming them easier, and utilized the adventures of Chris Redfield and Gay Chris Redfield to both have shotguns to make farming easier to unlock double Weskers which took us the rest of the way.
And then Capcom released a PvP mode that had more achievements, and because it cost money to acquire, neither of us went for it, and we eventually lost interest.
The point is, back in those days, Xbox achievements kind of meant something, and there was some merit to actually unlocking them.
I have no games for my Xbox One. Yet, I’ve already unlocked like, eight achievements. I haven’t checked, but none of them actually appear to be for any gamer points, but they’re still achievements forever associated with my Xbox account now.
The thing is, none of these achievements really mean anything. You’re basically getting them for doing anything at all, as long as the Xbox itself is turned on. I mean seriously, there’s literally an achievement for logging on an existing Xbox account to Xbox one. There was one for pinning an app to your home page.
But the impetus for this post was the fact that I was watching some baseball games on MLB.tv, and I got an achievement, because it was a game involving an NL West teams. The achievement was appropriately labeled simply “NL West.”
And because MLB.tv is the Jesus app for baseball fans, I switched to another game, and then another blip and bubble popped up on the screen to let me know that I had just “unlocked” the AL East achievement.
According to this list, there’s literally an achievement by watching any game from each of the six MLB divisions, among several other patsy achievements that don’t mean anything or boost your gamer score.
The bottom line is that as far as XBONE is concerned, there are so many meaningless achievements that are in existence right now, that it’s basically killing the whole idea of achievements as a whole. Gone is hearing the blip, and then seeing the emergence of the bubble, and the name of the achievement unlocked, much less the curiosity to just what it just was that was unlocked.
If MLB.tv really wanted to add a legitimate degree of difficulty in gaining app achievements, they should have achievements called “Cleveland Indians” and “Arizona Diamondbacks,” which are each unlocked upon 100% completion of watching a Cleveland Indians or Arizona Diamondbacks game. The app should track whether any sort of fast forwarding was done, and Kinect connectivity should be mandatory, so that Big Brother can watch to make sure that someone was watching the games in their entirety.
Those would be legitimate challenges, and would be something proud to boast about gaining.
