Reese

I don't care about achievements that you get from playing through a game normally. I like achievements that have me perfecting an aspect of the game. Something like completing a stealth level without alerting anyone, or killing a dangerous creature without getting hit.

I also like achievements that have me doing something in a less than obvious way. World of Warcraft executes those better than most. A lot of the dungeon and raid achievements require you to kill a boss in a different way than you'd normally choose to do it.

I also like achievements that are basically just "Try this" signs. Red Dead Redemption has an achievement to tie a someone up and put them on the train tracks and have a train run over them. Dead Space 2 has an achievement to impale an enemy and have them fly 17 meters, and another to impale an enemy through a decompression window and have them sucked into space. If you accidentally do them, it's great and if you know about them beforehand it's still fun to go out and see it happen.

I can see how grindy achievements are popular too. When I'm done with the story of a game but craving more, an achievement such as "Kill X number of enemies with Y weapon" can give me something to focus on.

I don't really collect achievements anymore though. I switched my main character in World of Warcraft and completely lost interest in all achievements except for the ones with rewards and eventually quit that game and I've had 3-4 xbox profiles and lost all the points I had accumulated on those which really made me lose interest in them.

One thing about achievements is that I think some games are starting to sacrifice some of their own true replayability in favor is adding lots of achievements to get people to play the limited content over and over. Based on a recent interview I have a really bad feeling that Diablo 3 is going to do this in a very noticeable way.

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“It is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick” - Dave Barry