Nintendo has always marched to the tune of its Donkey Kong bongos. The company avoids many industry trends as evidenced by the fact that its big next-generation console is launching between the current generation which is dominated by PlayStation and Xbox. Its independence can be a bad thing, and the week long discussion generated by the decision to price Mario Kart World at $80 illustrates the pitfalls of being different. But the company continued refusal to fall in line with what the rest of the industry is doing can also be a good thing.
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Take the company's indifference to generative AI. While Sony is toying with AI characters and Xbox is churning out bad versions of decades-old games created by AI, Nintendo is saying it will continue to focus only on good, human-made games. Refreshing! I guess the news that Nintendo is still refusing to include system-wide achievements in the Switch 2 is another case where being a little old-fashioned is a good thing.
Achievements and Trophies Transform Gaming into Meta-Gaming
I do not like trophies and achievements. I've only platinumed one game in my life, and that was Astro Bot which was 100 percent easy and so much fun that completing optional objectives never felt like a pain. I don't actively dislike the pursuit of trophies and achievements for the most part but I do not think about it at all. But I do believe that achievements and trophies unnecessarily gamify the act of gaming.
This can turn gaming into a chore. I'm not an achievement hound but sometimes I have to seek them out for guidance. I've often found that most people don't encourage you to play the game in a fun and challenging way. Instead and they force you to search for useless objects discovered throughout the game in order to earn trophies.
Sometimes they are needlessly confusing, such as a trophy in Life is Strange: Double Exposure that requires you to find several art projects but it is a unclear what actually counts toward the goal. Sometimes, they are needlessly time-consuming, such as when Grand Theft Auto 4 asks players to kill 200 pigeons. Sometimes a game forces you to play through multiple times to get platinum. All of this makes the experience less interesting, not more.
Achievements and Trophies: Not All Bad
That does not mean it can not be fun to try to find something. A difficult objective involves you in a new way and can help you understand the game better. When you try to beat a games toughest challenges you get to know the games systems and level design really well, and that kind of deep involvement is beneficial So if you like a game. But such challenges can only be applied to games.
And when you are not trying to make the platinum list or trying to keep objectives fair so players don't get annoyed you can make them more interesting. The recent Hitman trilogy included several optional objectives in each level. I did not care about earning achievements on my PlayStation 5 Console I cared about completing objectives in the game. Trying to complete all the levels without being noticed gave me some fun to work through but I never worried about trying to get trophies. The real trophies were the guards I took out along the way.
So that If developers want to incorporate objectives into the actual game, that's great. More power to them. But I do appreciate Nintendo de emphasizing external motivation and keeping it focused solely on the enjoyment you actually get from the experience.
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