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Should Microsoft Revisit XBLA Achievements?
It’s gotten to the point where I’ve said variations on the following line so many times that I type it in my sleep: Achievements have revolutionized the way that many people play video games, giving them an incentive to try new things, check out multiplayer, and blah blah blah. One things becoming increasingly clear, however: Microsoft needs to reexamine the way it doles out those points.
When it launched, Xbox Live Arcade was a repository for quick in/quick out arcade titles. (Appropriate, no?) As games on the service became more ambitious than Root Beer Tapper ports and the like, Microsoft continued the practice of continuing to cap the achievements for those downloadable titles to 200 points. XBLA games have crept mightily close to their retail cousins, even as that distinction is, to be honest, pretty stupid. Fairytale Fights could have easily been a downloadable game, just as Puzzle Quest could have been burned onto DVDs, stuffed in cases, and tossed onto store shelves. But because Microsoft continues to make a distinction between the games that you download and those that you buy at a store, that 200 point cap exists.
Ubisoft’s announcement of Beyond Good & Evil HD really drove that point home to me. That is a full game. There’s no two ways around it. It was when it was available on the GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox, and it is now. Players who complete that game should have the same chance to earn the full 1,000 points as someone who plays a boxed copy of Tetris Evolution.
It’s time that Microsoft evaluates achievement points on a case by case basis, particularly when it comes to games that appear on Xbox Live Arcade. Those 200 points should be a starting point, but not a standard. Just as games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night forced the company to reconsider its maximum file sizes, more ambitious projects such as Beyond Good & Evil HD should make Microsoft think about whether 200 points is still adequate.
What do you think? Is it time for Microsoft to take another look at achievements?
I’ll take a preemptive strike here and cut the trolls off at the pass: ACHIEVEMENTS ARE DUMB, WHO CARES, WHAT A WASTE OF TIME, LEARN TO PLAY NOOB, BLAHBLAHBLAH WHATEVER. If you don’t care about achievements in general, I respect that, but this isn’t a conversation for you. Sorry.
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