If you’ve been farming easy Achievements from Barbie Horse Adventures you needn’t worry about your friends finding out, thanks to a suite of new changes to the system.
With the Xbox project currently at a low ebb, despite this being its 25th anniversary year, it’s easy to lose site of the many innovations the brand has brought to gaming over the decades. A lot of these are related to online features but one of the most important, and longest-lasting, concepts invented by Xbox is the idea of Achievements.
Getting points for achieving unique goals, that aren’t usually spelled out by the game itself, proved instantly popular and Sony quickly set up their own Trophies system to copy it. Nintendo has never had a system wide equivalent but many of their games do use a similar concept.
The way Achievements works hasn’t changed much over the years, since it’s at heart a very simple idea, but Xbox is in the process of implementing a major update, with Xbox Insider testers getting a chance to try it out this week… and hide the shame of the games they’ve used to inflate their Gamerscore.
Completing Achievements adds to an overall Gamerscore but different games have different ideas about how many hoops you need to jump through in order to earn a lot of points. That’s led to some people playing unusually short or easy games – often those aimed purely at children – to quickly inflate their score.
If that’s you, or you just don’t want to admit to other games you’ve played, then you can now hide games from the list of those contributing to your Gamerscore. Importantly, they’ll still count towards your overall total but only you will know about them.
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The reverse is also now possible, with the ability to highlight 100% completions to other players and customise how Achievement pop-ups appear. The whole design of the iconic Achievement banners has been changed, although you still have the ability to switch them off, so they never appear at all, if you’re not interested.
If you want to keep things old school you can also revert back to the original green alerts, but there’s also lots of icons and animations that are completely new.
While there didn’t seem to be any burning need for any of these changes, apparently the one about hiding embarrassing games was the most requested by fans, with the others also based on player feedback.
It’s somewhat surprising that there’s not a direct equivalent to the Platinum Trophy system on PlayStation, which has proven very popular and highly braggable, but according to Xbox Wire, ‘This is a small but meaningful step in a broader set of improvements we’re making to Achievements.’
‘We’re continuing to explore new ways to recognise completion and milestone moments over time, and this update is one of our first steps towards celebrating those moments,’ it adds.
There’s no indication of what the other features will be, but it will also likely be based on fan feedback from over the last few years.
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