We are also introducing the ability for game developers to archive individual achievements or entire Achievement Sets.
That sure would've come in real handy during the absolute clusterfuck of a launch that was Counter-Strike 2 where they sent everybody's CS:GO achievements to the bin and then replaced it with one functionally useless freebie achievement just for starting the game.
i always thought this was super funny because it’s a valve game and the steam achievement functionality is made by valve themselves, so they’re not even utilising their own thing.
This would be good for games with seasons like Wardogs. It would be an additional achievement set that then just gets tucked away afterwards, doesn’t need to affect your main achievements but it’s there for those who want to chase them
POE also have challenges every big league. They recently added to it on POE 2. Really wish they made achievement for steam with this changes. Would be cool to see your achievement on every league.
Valve themselves have achievements for TF2 that date back to specific events from decade ago or something that cannot be obtained anymore by any means other then using SAM.
Yeah and with TF2 having like 580 achievements, knowing that even when I started in 2009, and I've only unlocked 420 achievements, it's annoying I couldn't complete those even if I wanted to. Giving more control to Devs is only a good thing
Any devs were able to delete achivements, so they had enough control already. Those who care did that, like Civilization 5 for example. In tf2 there just 4 broken achievements and Valve could've just deleted them many years ago if they cared
You mean those YouTube achievements? Its actually working but cursed. I remember how i upload my first video and got onle +100 views, but if you remove a original link and replace it with video where you got more views like my unboxing Coca-Cola Boombox you got achivement with thousands
i thought so too, but tbh they already exist, and this just identifies them more directly. also devs can archive acheivements so they wont show up on your profile if youre not able to earn then
Achievements and sets for content that is no longer available can now be archived, without taking them away from players who already earned them.
Once archived, users who had already unlocked the achievement or set will still see it on their profile. However, archived achievements won't show up on the profile pages of users who missed the unlock nor block their progress toward completing a set or game. Anytime an achievement can no longer be unlocked by users, it should be archived.
I think the commentor's complaint was that a lot of users have been asking Valve for years to disallow game developers having "get it right now or you never can" achievements from Steam, yet this post is officially embracing them instead of banning them.
Maybe I'm wrong but I thought a lot of those people didn't want them because it prevents 100% completion. To my understanding, if the devs use the feature, you can still 100% the static content of the game and the seasonal stuff is bonus achievements.
Or maybe those people were just mad at the principle of time-gated achievements, idk
true but idk, those are the biggest flexes in gaming sometimes. at least this way you can still feasibly complete games without having to get some super niche achievement from like 2014 or something cough cough left for dead 2
I mean like, in the base use case of archiving achievements for seasonal content: by this metric, you haven’t have completed any game with removed seasonal content? Does the presence of an achievement that is impossible and isn’t visible for you make a game less complete than that same game with the same removed content just… without an archived achievement?
presence of an achievement that is impossible and isn’t visible for you make a game less complete
Obviously it does. I still very much know that I haven't done the game
But at this point can just remove completionist achiуvement showcase from profile. I've had it there since 2013, but now it's just useless. It doesn't show achievement percentages at all, while it was always pleasure seeing precentages growing. Number of completed games also is now wrong. It counts L4D2 for me, which I haven't even done yet, and not just once, but gives +2. It's so brain dead. For payday 2 I assuming it will be like +50 completed "games" immediatelly?
oh that's way better. not super into achievement hunting in most games but I'm relieved to know they're trying to properly separate event achievements from the completionist ones
Right, but then those who play the game at a later date are still walled from earning those achievements; it’s the same issue as with multiplayer achievements now in that they’re not available once servers / playercount go down.
I think that's what they're specifically getting around. Games already add these. The idea would be to separate those out from the vanilla "set". The previous system still left you unable to complete them, now at least you get some kind of thing for completing the non-seasonal ones. The idea isn't now to have games include seasonal achievements they didn't before.
a LOT of games already have this, and they are gated to the main achievement track so honestly I mainly see this as a dub
ive ran into a fair few achievements that go: defeat 100 of X mob, you look when they show up and its like DURING THE HALLOWEEN EVENT THATS LIVE FROM OCTOBER FIRST
I'm broadly guessing these will almost exclusively be limited to FOMO style multiplayer games with seasons and events and whatnot so I figure I'll largely be safe, but still yeah nothing quite as annoying as playing through a campaign, getting 25% of the cheevos, and then discovering the remainder are locked behind a dead multiplayer (or MP at all, dead or not).
I don't really care. If they get completely hidden from view from anyone who can't get them anymore, they're basically in the trashbin anyway. Thats great and lets the devs who already put these in their games, clean up their messes... should they choose to do so. So it is entirely on them.
I like this because it makes it so those achievements, which already exist, now no longer lock you out of 100%. They're just a little something bonus that doesn't block your progress.
I like the idea, it might even occasionally revive an old online game, where a bunch of people come back for the season or event , one more ride, one big reunion, while also collecting some nice achievements.
One of my favorite games has achievements that are impossible to acquire because they were tied to removed content. This is a way to preserve those achievements while still keeping the real achievements actually achievable
Another thing is they removed the overall Completed % from the achievement showcase. I was one of those people who cared about the overall % so as silly as it may sound, I can start playing games now without having to mentally prepare myself to commit to the game once I get one achievement.
Also this might somewhat reduce the number of people using achievement unlockers to get 100% because the overall percentage is removed.
I think that may be temporary, until at least the full out release. Considering it was quite buggy at times if you paid attention to that, and the whole system is now more complex, I'm guessing they are waiting for more games to use the new system and tweak the way the completion percentage works when they have more data.
While the average completion rate's absence does stand out a bit in this new update and I do miss seeing it a bit, as someone who's been a slave to his carefully maintained 99% for the last nine years - good riddance, I say.
I do realize that I'm the problem in this whole affair, not the fact that this number was displayed up there and now isn't, but the way I see it, if I myself can't see it anymore, I'll probably start to care less about it in time. Who knows, maybe I'll even tackle all those games I know I won't get 100% in.
Still, given some discontent over it, I feel they're going to bring it back in the final release of this new system. Or make it optional.
We are so stupid. I don't think it's ever stopped me from playing any game but I've definitely thought about that. "Damn I'm going to play this game and leave it with only 2-3 achievements done. It's going to mess up with my super valuable completion %!!"
This is to view what percentage of people got each achievement. Other people are talking about the achievement % that you used to appear as part of some profile showcases and would average out all your games' completion rates.
It's not a perfect system but as someone with ADHD I was using the achievement percentage as a way to get myself to actually commit to games. Many games I played a few hours of, couldn't get into or got distracted - but years later I went back for achievements and ended up really enjoying the game.
There are flaws to this approach though, like it kind of disincentivises playing new games since they will reduce your % again.
This will (hopefully) be great for stuff like the Kingdom Hearts 1.5+2.5 HD collection where all the achievements are in one big list and it's hard to work out what achievement goes with which game.
Master Chief Collection desperately needs this. Fuggin' everything in the one list makes it obnoxious to look through, especially when you just want to finish achievements for a certain game.
well before this you could always always use Steam Homebrew and add the Achievement Groups plugin which sorted them according to the steamhunters website. very handy for games like that.
I've been playing Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered and encountered the same problem as the list is a big jumble of all the achievements. It will be much more understandable if they get sorted in to groups in the future.
Separating single-player and multiplayer achievements is a good idea; after all, there are so many games where the multiplayer is dead, making those achievements impossible to unlock.
Will they soon introduce a "platinum" tier, like PlayStation and Xbox do? ^^
Adding every single achievement by hand as a dev was a nightmare. Click the plus button - wait for the backend to react, enter the name, id and description. Save. Wait. Then click edit again. Wait. Then upload the first image. Select the second. Wait. Click save. And that for every single achievement. Made me a bit happier that new games are limited to 100 achievements for launch. :D
Not a dev, but does update make it easier for devs to upload/add/sort achievements? Mostly just wondering how much extra work adding different "sets" of achievements to games actually is.
Just from reading it (can't add new ones as I already hit the limit) there will be a way to bulk upload them. As I also have to track achievements in my own backend and on other platforms that makes things way easier (if it really works that way). With Sets I will have to try it out tomorrow.
Update: Just checked again and you can now upload a CSV to add multiple achievements at once. And you can bulk upload achievement images. So it is really faster. Yay! :)
You add achievements on the Steamworks website, give them a name, picture, identifier and push it. Then you just make the game call a steam api function to give the player the achievement if something happens.
AFAIK you can’t automate it, and it takes a bit of time to set them all up. It’s just a bit annoying and the website isn’t really snappy.
It'd be nice if community players could submit lists for abandoned or old games that publishers might not care about. Just to break up DLC and unavailable stuff etc.
Awesome feature, but the new UI for the achievements is just awful, strictly worse than what we had before, and now global achievements don't sort by rarity.
I hope they walk back a lot of the UI design changes (especially the global achievement stats having the background be a bar that has a percentage filled to represent the achievement stats, that was perfect! Why change that?) but I imagine we're not going to get much other than some moderate changes and potentially a sort by global button.
The first thing I noticed was that the medal showed next to the perfect games on the game list was moved to the right side and its color was changed to blue. Honestly, it looks terrible, completed games on the list look almost the same as the uncompleted ones, the only difference is the ugly icon present next to the completed ones.
"Awesome", sure. They've also made achievements showcase completelly pointless, cause it now shows completed groups instead of completed games. And 1 game can have a single group but another game can have 16, like TF2. Some games might have 50 groups probably, idk what is the limit. So you can have Forza Horizon 4 count as +1 to achievement showcase while TF2 now gives +16. So what's the value of that information in showcase?
Not to mention that they removed achievement percentages from showcase. Who asked for this?
The new UI for ''completed'' (stupid name btw) games looks awful. We went from a cool golden ribbon to some lame blue icon. Also I don't care about 'rare' achievements being put front and center now. Rare achievements rarely mean anything.
Does that even work? My "Completed" tab (formerly perfect games) only shows 100% completed games. I've got 2 completed sets in Team Fortress 2, but TF2 is not showing in the "Completed" tab
Wow, i had a conversation with a friend like 3 days ago about exactly this. and how old games with multiplayer cant be 100% anymore and how playstation separates dlc achievments. I really hope this gets adapted backwards for older games as well
I expect people will very quickly setup an online tracker of which games added it or no. This sub will surely start regularly posting about games that take the step.
BUT I fear for the retroactive filtering.. I can't imagine each Developer going back to do it and manually fixing DLC into their own sets. I used the SteamDB chrome extension on my client and that did nearly the same thing filtering DLC, SP, MP, Added achieves etc using the SteamHunters API.
Not to mention they robbed us of the Avg Game Completion % from our profiles :(
Changing it its extremely easy so atleast smaller and middle sized companies might do it, if you are doing one game you might aswell do all. And big companies might also do it eventually but yeah there will be a lot that dont probably
It is up to the developers to define what a "Set" is though. For Little To the Left, it is the Base Game + 2 DLCs.
For TF2, there are 16 sets, for each class and various game modes.
Ironically Valve mentioned seasonal achievements as another use case just to go ahead and not separate the seasonal achievements you can't get anymore in Left 4 Dead 2, their own game lol
Not a fan at all. Perfect games so much better than “completed groups and games” and I don’t want my stats to be over inflated and for one game to count as 2 or more “platinums”. Not only that, they removed the average completion percentage which was one of the best things. I don’t know why they’d do something like this without community feedback when everything worked perfectly for years without them caring to change it. It’s honestly killed a lot of my desire for achievement hunting.
They should separate not only by dlcs but also by free updates as well, for example fh5 has 53 base game achievements not 110 like the page shows. Also they should also add gamescore and maybe give some profile costumization at some milestone like 100k gamescore etc.
Slight concern with that is any "achievement unlocker game" can now make like 100 categories and suddenly your "games and group completions" is massively boosted.
I mean, you could always install a 50+ separate achievement unlocker games before, but now it's just another avenue for making bloated stats.
That and devs being responsible for making the sets means 90% of games are never going to see this feature used as many devs can hardly even be bothered enough to add functional achievements in the first place.
The categories are created by the developers of the games directly; note how Team Fortress 2 has separate achievement categories for every class. Left 4 Dead 2 has separate categories for general, infected, versus, survival :)
I would love to have a workshop for custom sets too made by users
It could increase the replayability by a ton, no to mention a ton of games don't have achievements so we can have custom sets for that too or even normal/wacky/speedrun achievements sets
I dislike it, the average completion rate is much needed and this "sets" thing makes everything needlessly complicated. Seasonal achievements makes achievement hunting even more a chore than what it already is.
Also sets shouldn't have the same value as completing a game entirely (platinum)
So let's say there's a game I don't like or play anymore but bought DLCs for because half of the achievements were locked behind them and I thought I might want to play it someday. If I remove all the DLCs from my account will I still have the DLC achievement sets unlocked?
There is no feasible way to do this without introducing anticheat (which could still be bypassed) on your computer while running Steam and being always online to make it extremely difficult for bypasses. This is because code that runs on the computer to say hey they unlocked this achievement can be run by the computer and is never server side.
You would effectively have to make games remote play only to have any chance at fully mitigating this. Even consoles face this problem with locked down ecosystems through jail breaks (because now you can run code on your computer to send the signal an achievement popped). You can otherwise only make it a painful experience for bypassers.
Edit: I should mention that making it painful for bypassers shifts the experience for all users to be more painful. Like being online always. Or hogging up system resources for anticheat. And so on.
Unfortunately Steam just is not situated to be a competitive achievement ecosystem. Need to find like minded people who self police or game in highly regulated environments (again with other like minded people). And simply not care about what every single other user is doing who doesn’t care about achievements exactly like you.
There are achievement timestamps so at least you can tell when somebody lazily cheated. Doesn't help with singular rare achievements but it's something.
That doesn’t solve the problem even remotely. Plenty of folks who are “competitive” script their unlocks to look normal.
So you’d still be going up against cheaters… except competent ones.
What’s the problem you are looking to solve?
There are plenty of people who use achievements to track their progress and don’t do it competitively. Or do it to pop an achievement that is bugged. Or to filter out achievements they care not for but annoyed that it’s showing as something to do that they don’t want to do.
There are communities that cater competition too that do this policing. The options exist but doing this in Steam simply creates a barrier for non competitive folks. (Which I’d reckon is the majority of gamers and user base. Competitive gamers is a niche)
There are many people to cater to.
I’d advise a community that you’d install an anticheat mod basically to enforce your expectations with like minded individuals. Because you’re effectively asking for enhanced security in an untrusted environment. (also I’m not sure there is any as it’s a lot of work to do anticheat cat and mouse bypass blocking for free or for niche group of low paid subscriptions that essentially looks for highly specialized low level developers with security backgrounds)
Complaining about people using SAM to unlock achievements when it literally doesn’t affect your life, only to throw a two-edit tantrum over downvotes is peak irony.
Keep editing, man.. maybe Edit #3 will bring back those internet points you're crying over.
Agreed, yeah a lot of salty cheaters will be hurt and justify their cheating such as some achievements were bugged are still wrong. They push global completion rates up for non cheaters to see.
I'd hoped that they'd be able to pull the information about which DLC packages added achievements from their backend and just automatically separate them and allow developers to further customize as desired.
I would assume that there wasn't a difference before. You could just add new achievements as a Dev, but that was completely separate from the fact that they required a dlc to unlock.
You'd expect Valve's staff to go through all the games with achievements on their store?
TBH the community has largely already been doing this.
SteamHunters groups achievements by DLC and by Patch with dates that achievements were added.
They've been doing this for internal scoring purposes, as they assign a points score to the difficulty of an achievement based on completion rates, and they recognize that achievements added post-launch have naturally lower rates.
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u/wickedplayer494 75 1d ago
That sure would've come in real handy during the absolute clusterfuck of a launch that was Counter-Strike 2 where they sent everybody's CS:GO achievements to the bin and then replaced it with one functionally useless freebie achievement just for starting the game.