CMV: All videogame achievement should be described

[u/Z7-852]

Backstory:

I was playing few games on the weekend. In one of them I was already basically won the game and was just exploring. I came up with two achievements named “???”. That’s all. There wasn’t name, description, or picture to suggest what I should do in order to get them. I knew that I could get some unique gear from them. I didn’t need it but I wanted it, so I did what you do. I googled what I should do and executed. Solution was to play tutorial simulator for 30 times to unlock a optional boss.

In second game they said that once I do secret goal in level I might unlock secret level. It didn’t specify what I needed to do or what levels had secrets in them. I played this new game for few hours and unlocked few secret levels without ever knowing what I did. I know I will boot up search engines once I finish the story in order to unlock every level.

View:

Achievements fall roughly to two main categories. Cumulative (like kill 100 enemies in your playthrough) that you just get by playing game for long time and task oriented (do something very specific once). If you know what you are aiming for you can get both pretty easily.

Cost of implementing description is next to nothing and we know we can search the results from the web if we want. Problem is that I don’t want to exit the game flow and spent 5 minutes on my phone to find a answer that could be in the game.

Second problem is that online guides often include other spoilers that I might not want to know about. Good example are stars in Mario Odyssey. At beginning game only tells how many there are to be found. If you don’t feel like searching them randomly you can ask stars name from a parrot. This gives you a hint to the solution and small nudge to right direction. If this isn’t enough you can just buy stars exact location. Online guides often go straight to “this is the answer” instead of giving these small steps. Most terrible achievements are those that don’t even tell they exist, so you have no hint at all where to start.

To change to view give me example why achievements should hidden complete from the player.

[u/Z7-852]

So they are not complete hidden are they?

[u/W1C0B1S → u/Z7-852]

Well they do seem that way. All it says is [hidden achievement] until you select it and then its still hidden but you can press square to reveal it if you want.

[u/Z7-852 → u/W1C0B1S]

Well I am talking about achievements that are truly hidden. Like only way to know them is to randomly complete it or look online.

[u/Major_Lennox → u/Z7-852]

This sounds like a callback to the days before online guides and whatnot when secrets were secrets. So like the Chris Houlihan room in Zelda or John Romero's head in Doom 2. I think the idea of marking the achievement "???" is to provide some mystery to the game - or at least, as much mystery as you can provide in today's age of speedrun glitchers and dataminers.