Playing Thief: Deadly Shadows recently, I was struck by how well the game would work with achievements. The game practically screams for them. In each mission, you can select from four difficulty levels, and in addition to increasing enemies’ perception and lowering your own resistance to damage, the higher difficulties will require you to collect a higher percentage of the level’s loot. If you start the level on “Expert”, as I have, you need to collect at least 90% of the loot. The catch is that if you reach the end of the level before you realize that you’ve only got 86% of the loot, your only choice is to retrace your steps through the level, looking for at least 4% that you’ve missed. On certain levels, it’s actually impossible to go back. You can see the problem.
How much better would this be were there an achievement (or bronze trophy) for each level if you got 90% of the loot, and a different achievement (silver trophy) for getting 100% of the loot? Now, not only is the achievement tiered, it also doesn’t prevent you from completing the level should you end up short at the level’s end.
Creating achievements for a thief game would be amazingly easy. Complete the game without harming any noncombatants. Complete a level without being detected. Shoot moss arrows into every pagan cornerstone. Steal 50,000 gold coins worth of loot. Complete every mission on expert difficulty (I’d be getting that one. Guess I don’t suck quite so badly at games as I’d thought) Although the game was released before the existance of achievements, it seems to be designed with them in mind. I guess achievements are here to stay.
Similarly, I’m playing an import version of Prototype that’s unable to log into GFW Live. Normally, this game does have achievements, but I can’t get at them. Since there’s no way I’ll be manually keeping track of how many infected I kill or how many vehicles I destroy, I can just forget about achievements entirely. I’ll still enjoy trying to get gold on every challenge, but there’ll be no record. It’s really odd that such a thing should even matter to me.
