Xbox Achievement System Fundamental Concepts Might Be Changing

Written by Brandon Hofer on August 10, 2017

News: Some surprising news has just come out of Microsoft where they might be making fundamental changes to how achievements work.

Achievements might be changing soon. A couple of days ago we wrote about a big UI change for Xbox One that is coming this fall but according to Windows Central there are more changes coming. Since launching in 2005 with the Xbox 360, the Achievement and Gamerscore system has been an extension of how we all grew up playing games in arcades. We would always be trying to get the highest score so we could put our initials at the top of the leaderboard and the achievement system was an evolution of that. It was a revolutionary feature that companies like Sony, Valve and others eventually implemented into their respective platforms. It appears things might be changing though.

Corporate vice president of the Xbox and Windows gaming platforms Mike Ybarra didn’t reveal too many details other than saying that they are working on something that “fundamentally changes the concept” of the Xbox Achievement system. We don’t really know how to take that and people are understandably a bit nervous about it. Microsoft has tweaked the Achievement system over the years adding new features and coming up with new concepts for it but it was never something on this scale.

Mike told Windows Central:

”We can do a lot more to reflect and let people show their gaming history and their status. Whether it's somebody who only plays multiplayer in Halo 5 at a professional level, maybe they only have 2,000 Gamerscore, you want to be able to celebrate that person. You want people to be in the know. This person doesn't play a lot of games, but they're world top ten at Halo 5. All the way to people [with over a million gamerscore]. It's that range that we really need to look at and celebrate ... we're going to go big in the area of letting people show off and represent their gaming history and the type of gamer that they are, far more than we do with Gamerscore.”

Now this could turn out to be amazing news for gamers but there is also the mantra of “if its not broke, don’t fix it”. The achievement system works really well for Microsoft and they do it far better than anyone else so the hope is that this adds to that. Hopefully it is one of those situations where they give us something we didn’t know we wanted until it was actually here.

What do you think about the potential change in how Microsoft handles the achievement system? What would you like to see changed? What do you want them to leave alone? Tell us what you think below.

source: Windows Central