Nintendo: Wii U Achievements Are Up to the Developers

by David Sanchez on June 12, 2012 @ 11:38 am

Nintendo has yet to fully jump onto the whole achievements bandwagon. While the 3DS StreetPass functionality rewards players with Coins, and though we’ve certainly seen a number of games for Nintendo consoles with in-game achievements, the company has yet to make the feature a major staple of its platforms like Microsoft and Sony. It looks like that might remain the same, though the possibility of achievements on the Wii U certainly can’t be written off entirely.

Speaking to Kotaku, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime stated that the Wii U will have a rewards system akin to the StreetPass feature on the 3DS. Additionally, while it won’t be a requirement, developers will be free to include achievements in their games if they wish. “Once you start getting into game-specific [Achievements], that’s developer-driven,” said Fils-Aime.

In the past, we’ve seen some interesting achievements integration for games on the Wii. Xenoblade Chronicles, for example, actually awards players XP for unlocking achievements, something that’s certainly very enticing and a totally different spin on how Microsoft and Sony handle their rewards systems.

We’re sure to get more info soon, but should Nintendo change its approach? Should it make achievements a requirement? Should it keep on doing what it has been doing all along and instead allow developers to make a game as they please? Will the company take an approach similar to Steam, allowing devs to throw in as many achievements as they wish?

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Comments
hush404 says:

As a whole, achievements aren't that meaningful, but they're a great way to get people to explore your games further than just a SP story or change up how they play MP. To ignore them seems kind of silly.

June 12, 2012, 8:39 pm
x3sphere says:

I think Nintendo should make it a requirement if they're going to add achievements at all. Otherwise, why even bother? We saw what happened when Sony first came out with trophies, at the time it wasn't mandated that you had to include them and most developers completely overlooked adding them as a result.

I'll be honest, I don't like the direction Nintendo is taking with online at all, it's like they aren't setting down any ground rules, everything is up to developers. It's going to be a mess without any direction.

Just look at Metal Gear Online. Sony allowed Konami to implement their own login system, bypassing PSN, and it turned out to be a disaster. I don't know if Nintendo is going to be that lax but earlier comments I've read about their online plans seem to suggest so.
June 12, 2012, 8:48 pm
Trigun says:

Why bother? Because what if they want it as just an option. If the developer wants to add trophies. Why not? If they don't, why not?

Personally I don't give a crap, if it's required then it's just a bunch of unneccesary work if you really don't want to do it. Because there is no point to the whole trophies and achievement system anyway. Especially when some games require you to play Multiplayer to get some in an otherwise single player game.

Just also FYI MGO2's online login system wasn't that bad. People just complained that they had to create more than one login. Oh boo fuckin hoo, it takes away 10 minutes of your time to register. And your PS3 can remember all your login credentials as needed so you don't need to input it everytime.

It surely didn't stop a lot of people from playing the game. And any networking related cheating in the game can be attributed to many factors instead of just Konami ID. As we all know Sony's Security on their own servers was a pile of crap.

I played MGO2 for over 1300 hours, so yeah.
June 12, 2012, 9:22 pm
x3sphere says:

It comes down to ease of use. I don't want to deal with multiple accounts just because some publisher wants to push their own system. However, I wouldn't mind if Nintendo uses an open auth implementation, similar to how you can use Facebook/Google accounts to register and login on websites.

I don't care about trophies / achievements either. I just feel if Nintendo is going to add support they might as well mandate it. Otherwise they'll definitely get people complaining that X game doesn't have achievements or whatever.
June 12, 2012, 9:48 pm
Abe Froeman says:

I agree. People either generally like them or are indifferent. The number of achievement and trophy whores out there far outnumber any achievement and trophy haters.

Give me 30 minutes and I could put together an achievement list for any game. Give me an hour and it will be clever. Adding these to games isn't a drain on any dev team.
June 12, 2012, 11:15 pm
RJC4LIFE says:

Adding trophies isn't time consuming one bit, unless you are putting some extra efforts into various tasks its pretty quick to implement.

June 13, 2012, 12:07 am
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