Karma vs Achievements

Something struck me while watching today's dev chats when RG was talking about karma and multiple characters.

The game is intended to track the player's behavior throughout gameplay right? Yet there was also talk about possible achievements such as doing so much good or evil.

Survey says?

*BUZZER* XXX

All achievements encourage players to play a certain way to aquire those achievements. It doesn't matter if they bestow anything upon the player or not. They are goals to achieve and many players go out of their way to get as many as they can regardless. Karma based achievements will be no different. Unless karma based achievements are avoided entirely the two ideals are in conflict.

Is not the idea of having karma to see how a player honestly plays through the game and respond accordingly? One does not naturally seek to obtain achievements of being a evil incarnate and a saint.. but if those truly are achievements to be won then that's what people will do.

I'm getting redunant now I know. Just want to hammer the point home that these two concepts need to be kept completely separate or achievements will destroy the intent of having karma.

 

I agree that open ended achievements just encourage players to farm them all for the prestige of having them. How about this idea...

BAD ALIGNMENT{--------------[-----]----}GOOD ALIGNMENT

Above is the scale of karma. The brackets at either end are the full range of achievements and the brackets inside are the maximum range a character can have. The dashes are achievements.

Your actions in game shift that range slowly up or down and you can only ever hold achievements within that range. An achievement moves out of your range, you lose it. The spacing between achievements on this scale should be significant so you don't just randomly lose achievements - you can see it coming and mend the error of your ways or perhaps decide that that is the direction you now want your life to take?

 

To me, achievements do not help differentiate players. They become checkboxes, which in turn encourages everyone to complete them. Therefore we are encouraged to act the same in game.

 

I've said before but I generally don't like the idea of bad vs good. To me it should be more like group x thinks I'm bad but group y thinks I'm good. Maybe this is related to valuing the virtues in a different order.

If the path of good is simply a winning path, everyone will just be good and make the game boring.
If just don't seeing a game working that simply rewards one for being evil.
Generally games want you to me more good than "acting in one's own rational self interest". i.e. a psychopath

The game needs you to make real trade offs or it doesn't work.

I actually thing achievements work really well for SotA. The reason being is that there's no realy gear progression. So there needs to be some exploration driven "sideways progression". Like cool titles, dye colors, achievements, trophys, etc. You're character need to feel progression without getting stronger.

 

I think the game would be fine without achievements. Imagine what other cool stuff they could work on instead of making a multitude of achievements.

Keep in mind the time they spend on these achievements could have been used for other stuff.

 

Achievements you can lose aren't really achievements. The idea was mentioned during one of the dev chats and that was basically their stance on the idea that an achievement could be lost. Rather in suggested situation it would be tracked another way.

I cringe somewhat at the very concept of achievements in a true role-playing game but so long as none of them are karma related it should be ok.

For any who've missed it, achievements will typically unlock visual features like an eye-patch or a special cloak being two of the examples given. Which in a way is even worse as people will find those things to be 'collectable' Having those be karma related would just provide that much more incentive to achievement hunters to ignore karma tracking entirely.

To be fair, setting achievements would be a relatively simple matter. ie tracking x number of kills or checking a quest flag. Even I could code achievement conditions relatively easily and quickly. I would still prefer they do something else though but again my primary concern here is that achievement hunters not be encouraged to play against the spirit of the karma system, the whole point of which is to suggest your PC is YOU in-game. (A concept I have other issues with but I'll leave that for another thread).

 

@Bowen I did not get the impression from the Dev chat that achievements could be lost. Chris and RG were just spit-balling hypothetically talking about the possibilities anyway.

I believe you have zeroed in on a few points that were brought up as suggestions and possibilities and are thinking that is what the system will be focused on. I don't think most achievements, or even a significant number of achievements will grant you items. I think those achievements will be a special occurrence. For those who have missed it https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?topic=achievments