I Kind of Don't Like RetroAchievements

Let’s clear this up from the get go; If you like RetroAchievements, I’m happy for you and I hope you’re having fun with it. My personal gripes with it shouldn’t detract from that. I just want to air out my problems with it and why I’ve never been able to enjoy it. If you don’t want to hear me rant about that, probably best to just leave now and pretend this post isn’t here.

Achievements are a pretty big part of gaming nowadays. Basically every platform and game (except Nintendo for some reason) has an achievement system, giving you sweet sweet Gamer points to show off that “yeah, I’m a real gamer 😎”. And it’s really cool! You get to show off your progress, what challenges you’ve undertaken, and your overall mastery of a game you love. It’s a great way to quickly see how much someone’s really engaged with a game outside of just the raw playtime. But they can also be incredibly obnoxious in execution, and that’s where my largest issue with RetroAchievements lies.

But let’s back up for a second. What even is RetroAchievements? 

RetroAchievements is a site dedicated to giving older games from the retro era the achievement system of the modern day using integration with emulators to track what’s happening in the game. The achievement lists for these games are created by users and submitted to the site. Since these games are played on emulators, achievements have two variants: softcore and hardcore. The distinction comes from the fact emulators have various tools like rewind and savestates that can trivialise any challenge in a game. Softcore achievements are what you get when you play with these features enabled, and Hardcore achievements are for playing with them disabled (with the exception of Fast Forward). Hardcore is usually the only one that people care about since it proves you did the achievement legitimately.

Fairly straightforward and sounds cool! At least I’d think so, if half of the achievements for every game wasn’t some variation on over-saturated Youtuber challenge video challenges like “Can I beat Minecraft with a foot up my ass and a gun to my head”. This is my primary reason for disliking the site. Achievements feel less like I’m delving into the games as they were intended and instead like someone else is telling me “Hey, you know this aspect of the game you like? Try not engaging with it at all and having a worse time for it!”. And I know, these are technically Achievements. They’re difficult challenges worthy of that title, but I don’t think that means they’re automatically good.

So if I don’t think a difficult challenge makes a good achievement on its own, then what does? I think what makes a good achievement comes down to the following:

• Is it progression?

• Is it obscure?

• Is the challenge acknowledged by the game?

Let’s tackle that first one since it’s the most straightforward. Progression achievements are given as you progress through the game naturally. Hit a major milestone in the story? Achievement. Reached a new area? Achievement. They’re easily the most simple implementation, and one I think works super well. You’re able to quickly compare how far you are in a game compared to a friend or other players just by what achievements they’ve gotten, and you’re given a little pat on the back that “Yeah, you’re playing the game and making progress! Good job!”. Sure it’s a little patronizing, but it’s nice to see your efforts in just playing through normally rewarded.

Lastly we have challenges that are outright acknowledged by the game. Things like the Battle Towers in Pokemon, a mission mode, time trial ghosts, etc. Even if all they give you is a little star to say “you did this!”, it’s a statement that the game designers planned this as something for you to even do. They’re not always the most fun, but knowing that it’s something the developers themselves view as a proper achievement in some way makes it more worthwhile.

I think these are the core ideas of what makes an achievement “good” to me and worth doing. Unfortunately, a lot of the achievement sets on RetroAchievements are brought down for me because they don’t follow this idea. Some of the worst achievements I’ve seen, and ruin my enjoyment of the site as a whole, are ones that are just about placing random arbitrary restrictions on what you can and can’t do during regular gameplay.

The natural response to all that would be “Why does it matter? You don’t have to get all the achievements” and my response to that would be “Why even bother with setting up RetroAchievements at that point?”. If I’m already going out of my way to play a game I like on an emulator, making an account, reading the achievement list when I could just play it on original hardware and have essentially the exact same experience, what’s the point if I’m not going to get them all? This goes especially for portable consoles like the DS where you have to give up the portability aspect, and the dual screen setup suffers from being played on a computer monitor. 

The most frustrating part about all this is that RetroAchievements has a system in place already that could solve this issue entirely! Games can have Achievement subsets, usually reserved for arbitrary challenge achievements like these. The best example of this is Super Mario 64, which has five whole subsets for things like getting a star without using the intended method, using glitches to reach areas out of bounds coins, collecting every single coin in a stage, performing speedrun tricks, collecting stars with the camera locked at the start (what the fuck) and the A Button Challenge (you can’t press A). But even then the standard set still has its share of obnoxious achievements, like getting the Red Coins in Tick Tock Clock on the max speed setting.

To end on a more positive note though, I’d like to highlight the aspects of the site I really do like regardless of my problems with it. Since the site relies on emulation for its processes, this means that Rom Hacks can be added to the database and have their own Achievement set! This is a genuine plus that you can have over playing on real hardware (yes I know flash carts and stuff exist), and it gives hack developers an extra system to add on if they want to. They’ve also been making great strides at adding more “modern” consoles to the roster they support, like GameCube and Wii in recent years. I suspect this is likely where the support will end, maybe Wii U and the original Xbox could happen, but anything beyond that is either too recent and could risk some DMCA stuff (Switch) or the system already had achievements (everything else).