(When you get around to it – no rush)
Achievement city, right here.
We’ve always been underachievers. Our teachers told us so, and we’ve said it to ourselves any number of times. Are we clever? Sure. Funny? It’s been said so.
Handsome? *wink wink*
The point is, we’ve always been told we could do so much more if we actually applied ourselves, could achieve more, blah blah blah.
Not surprisingly, this aversion to achieving transferred whole-hog over to the Starcraft II Universe once it was implemented.
Blizzard originally used this feature in WoW, and it’s often been compared to making player into rats on wheels, or Pavlov’s dogs, actually salivating at virtual rewards. Learning from our joy in hearing the “ding” of leveling sounds in WoW, Blizzard decided to introduce achievements awhile back, which had players doing mundane things like completing “x” number of quests or hard things, like killing certain bosses in a prescribed time, or with more adds up, etc.
Some of these achievements came with in-game rewards like titles, pets, or even mounts for the more difficult and multi-tiered variety.
Most importantly, however, they came with a big “BONG” sound, a visual display on the screen, and notification to everyone in your guild and the immediate vicinity that you had done something awesome, or incredibly nerdy and time-consuming.
Either way, you’d done it.
No surprise, then, that they brought these achievements, again, with the hog, over to SCII. They included things like getting a friend, winning a match, or winning a certain number in a row. They came with flashy visual imagery and sound, rewards in the form of portraits for your character, and notification to your friends should they choose to go look.
Huzzah.
We did our best to ignore them, though they were obvious even on the start-up screen. Below the main area of the interface, Blizz has installed a little panel that shows you how many out of 5 matches with each race you have won to earn that particular achievement. There is also a slot for winning 5 matches as a random race.
Though they looked slick and even had a “play now” button – which was misleading since you still had to manually click at least once after that – we turned our head and harrumphed. Sure, people don’t harrumph a lot anymore, but it’s got its uses.
But even though we were in full-on ignore mode, our total wins out of 5 for Protoss started going up. There it was, every time we logged in – 2/5. 3/5. 4/5.
Suddenly, we wanted the achievement.
We wanted the world (well, some of the world [ok, hardly any of it. Happy now?]), to know that we had been victorious! And, after some struggle, we accomplished our goal. Our reward?
BONG!
And a portrait.
Really, these things mean nothing, but Blizz has found another way to keep people interested when they’ve “done everything”. It’s clever, it’s insidious, and we don’t like it.
Did we mention that we got the achievement for 5 wins as solo Protoss?
Not sure if we did.
Just checking.
We got it, though, just so you know.
GDI.
