Unlike Xbox 360’s Live, PS3 Home Trophies Optional For Now
Published by Robert Staehlin March 11th, 2007 in Uncategorized, Sony, PlayStation 3.
Xbox 360’s Live requires that developers add achievements to every game that’s submitted. Rumors had been floating around that the new PS3 Home would also have mandatory trophies.
Sony prez Phil Harrison denies that any decision has been made regarding the new PS3 Home awards system. “We’ve made no statements about that, so I don’t know how anybody would have told you that because we haven’t told that to any third parties, categorically,” he told Kotaku.
“We are consulting with our third parties. I don’t think every game needs to have trophies, my personal opinion. I don’t think we need to have it. But if it’s meaningful to the community, then just the simple fact of buying the game, owning the game could trigger a trophy. Now a developer has to create a bitmap to show their game saves or their icon on the cross media bar anyway. So for them to take a small bit of 3D geometry, maybe a character, an object, or a weapon, what ever, and put it through RSDK and create an icon, it’s like ten minutes work. So this is very low impact. Very low intensity work that would be required to support Home in a very simple straight forward way,” Harrison explained.
We’re goingto agree with Harrison on this one. Although achievements, trophies, etc., are a nice little perk, there’s no reason that it should have to be an across the board thing.Leave it up to the individual publishers.
I have to say that I’m a big fan of the whole achievements thing and I can honestly say that having them as part of the game has changed the way I play console videogames. There was a time when I would go to the local Gamestop, pick up the latest release for my PS2, clock the game as quickly as possible on default settings before throwing it in a pile with the rest of my games and wait for the next big thing.
That all changed when I got my Xbox 360 and discovered gamer scores and achievements. I remember when being a gamer was all about getting high scores in your local arcade and striving to get your name to the top of the leaderboard. I missed having that kind of motivation, where it wasn’t just whether you could finish the game, but how well you could finish it. Having the achievements gives me something extra to strive for other than the rudimentary end sequence, so I’m not going to just finish Gears on Casual for example, I’m going to try it on Hardcore to get all those extra G’s and then I’m going to try insane, and then go online and really get the very most I can out of the game.
It’s such a simple thing, to provide challenges other than simply finishing the game, but for me it has increased the lifespan of my games exponentially and I haven’t enjoyed my gaming as much in a long time.
it only takes 10 minutes to make achievements..
and it makes more people want to buy / play the game.. why not
I agree with the above achievements are the way forward for gaming.