Trophies and achievements are a big part of gaming nowadays. They’re incredibly popular with Xbox and PlayStation fans, as your account tracks all your progress across all your titles — giving you a tangible way to look back at your gaming history. However, I never feel compelled to chase achievements or trophies in the games I play.
Here’s a closer look at why I’m content to play through the main story and move on to the next title in my library without worrying about achievements.
1They Tend to Be Monotonous
I’m a big fan of short and sweet video games, as they cut right to the chase and throw you directly into the action. Achievement hunting is often the exact opposite of this philosophy and heavily revolves around bloat.
Too many games offer boring achievements that involve little more than roaming across a map looking for collectibles. This type of gameplay isn’t the most engaging, making it a dull addition to the main story.
I’d rather spend five hours exploring a new game than five hours searching for feathers — and I don’t see how skipping that achievement could be detrimental to my play sessions.
Others are incredibly obscure, such as the Overdesign II achievement in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. This tasks you with slaying three hard-difficulty soldiers without breaking their shields… while your character is on fire. That’s an absurd goal and it doesn’t sound particularly fun. Trying to unlock that achievement might be entertaining to some players, but to me, it sounds like hours of frustrating, monotonous gameplay.
2I Have An Exciting Backlog to Play
Another reason I’m not a fan of achievement hunting is because of my daunting backlog. I try to stay on top of all the big releases throughout the year, but it’s a nearly impossible task. That means once I beat the main quest of a game, I know I have a new adventure waiting for me in my library. So even if a game does have achievements that seem mildly interesting, they pale in comparison to a fresh new video game.
With big releases dropping in 2024 like Dragon’s Dogma 2, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Helldivers 2, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Astro Bot, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Space Marine 2, and Persona 3: Reload, I simply have too many games to choose from and not enough time to play them all.
This means that even if I wanted to chase achievements, I’d likely be pulled away by the hottest new release.
3The Thrill Has Worn Off Once the Credits Roll
Once the credits roll in a video game, I often feel as if my journey is complete. Many folks love to get every achievement in games as a way to squeeze every inch of content out of the adventure and truly feel like they’ve explored everything it has to offer — but the core experience is usually enough for me. Once I’ve discovered what happens to all the characters and they’ve wrapped up their story, I feel a sense of accomplishment and call it a day.
This is especially true for sprawling RPGs that require over 50 hours just to beat the main story, as I often find that I’ve pulled more than enough value out of the game without needing to ever touch achievements. Sure — if there’s a game I particularly love, I’m happy to keep roaming around its digital world. But in most cases, game developers make sure you feel accomplished just by experiencing the main campaign.
4Not All Achievements Are Rewarding
There’s no universal guideline for creating achievements, and that means they vary wildly from one game to the next. This makes achievement hunting an uneven experience, as what might feel rewarding in one game is unfulfilling and tedious in the next.
In turn, this somewhat devalues the experience for me, as unlocking a Platinum trophy doesn’t necessarily mean the same effort is required for each game in your library.
This dilutes the thrill of achievement hunting, as you never really know what to expect until you dive into a game. Will they be carefully crafted to help you explore meaningful side quests and encounter memorable characters? Or will they just be a time sink that forces you to explore boring corners of the map?
This variability makes me less inclined to check out a list of achievements and try to hunt them down, as there’s no telling how involved (or uninvolved) they’ll be.
The thrill of unlocking a rare achievement that only a small percentage of players have earned is undoubtedly exciting, but that feeling comes around too infrequently to make dedicated achievement hunting something I do regularly. And if earning an achievement is simply a matter of sinking more time into a game without any innovative new content, there are a million other things I’d rather be doing.
5Some Achievements Require Multiple Playthroughs
The worst achievements in gaming are those that require multiple playthroughs. Some gamers love these, as it lets them relive the adventure from a new perspective. If it’s during a New Game Plus run, then they get to battle more challenging foes and get more mileage out of their purchase.
However, these can also be wildly frustrating, as they require massive time commitments just to unlock a handful of achievements.
This is also true for achievements that can be missed during your original playthrough, forcing you to start a new game to unlock them. Of course, if you love the game, you might be more willing to slog through repeated content to grab a rare trophy. But for most people, the idea of running through several hours of content for a single achievement can be exhausting.
Achievements and trophies aren’t a bad system. In fact, they can be incredibly rewarding to certain types of players who want to pull the maximum value out of their games.
For me, however, I don’t see them as a necessity, and I’m perfectly happy moving on to the next adventure even if I’ve only unlocked a portion of the available achievements. Unlocking trophies isn’t the only way to measure whether or not you’ve “completed” a game, and I’m glad I don’t feel the need to overstay my welcome.
