Thursday, July 17, 2008

Achievements!

Excitement! I just read about this in my feed reader: New Expansion Feature: Achievements. I'd like to give a special thank you to Big Bear Butt for putting the announcement on his blog for people like me who can't read WoW's site from work.

While most podcasts I've heard mention this liken it to XBox gamer achievements, I think that's sort of a poor analogy. The XBox achievements are in your profile, period. It's there if you're interested and do little else. In game achievements like Blizzard is describing sounds closer to the achievements system currently being used by Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). My husband and I played LOTRO when it was in beta and for a year after its launch so I'm pretty familiar with this system as it was in that game.

In LOTRO the majority of achievements were title based. Although these titles did absolutely nothing, people worked to get them like crazy. Each region had its own set of unique titles. Some were granted through exploring, some through quests, and some through straight killing. Apart from the region specific titles there were also titles for in game events, crafting, emotes, etc. There was even one for eating breakfast foods.

It sounds a little corny but they were important to people. Things like the emote quests would get you titles like “Desdarii the Beloved” because you were /hugged so many times. Things like killing quests would get you titles like “Desdarii the Wolf-Slayer”. Quests would get you names like “Desdarii, Champion Pie-Eater”. They were great, they were many and they were absolutely fantastic for role-playing.

Players would purposely work for hours or days to get a specific achievement title because it fit with their character or just because it was rare and they wanted something unique. This makes the achievements a new type of grind similar to having to go farm ore or gaining reputation. The good news is that I’m guessing it will be a completely optional grind. You won’t have to get a certain title in order to do a dungeon or gain a pattern. It’s just a guess though.

For those who think they will be annoyed by everyone and their brother sporting a title and stretching out their name, I’d like to remind them that there already is an option to hide titles in your interface. If you don’t like them, don’t do them and don’t look at them. Leave my to my silly pointless play.

I’m so excited to see this sort of thing being introduced into WoW and I am happy that such a fun system is being pulled into the game I love. I believe they are even taking it to another level with the granting of cosmetic items such as the tabards for this sort of play. I look forward to see what some of the rewards are so I can plan which my characters absolutely need.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, just started reading your blog and love it. I do want to let you know that you can read the WoW blog from work, try https://www.worldofwarcraft.com and https://www.wowarmory.com. You just have to add the "s" to the end of "http". My work blocks it too but this allows me to get a little bit of WoW while at work.

Desdarii said...

Thank you! I will definately try it tomorrow. :D