So everyone knows me as White Knight #1, I figured I’d throw in a bit of constructive criticism. The kind of stuff that annoys me.
One of my issues right now is the way achievements are handled in story instances. Sometimes you see that golden icon over your bar and sometimes you don’t, with no rhyme or reason. Sometimes you get certain achievements and sometimes you don’t with no rhyme or reason. It makes running achievements more stressful because I’m repeating stories or looking for an achievement that I can’t get, and it doesn’t indicate I can’t get it.
I won’t give out spoilers specifically but there are several specific instances where I still had the golden icon for an achievement I could no longer achieve and had no way of knowing that I couldn’t achieve it. I wasted about an hour looking around for an NPC that wasn’t there, because the clue was misleading. This really annoys me.
Another issue that came up tonight is for a specific achievement…Friend of Frogs in Tangled Depths. In order to get this achievement, you need to complete every event necessary to prepare the beetles for the upcoming fight against the chak garent. In fact the idea behind the whole thing is sort of cool, helping the beetles hatch, escorting them, feeding them, herding them, this is a great chain. I needed one single event for the achievement.
The earlier events in the chain are long and drawn out. So I’m suffering through them (particularly one of them where you have to kill Zintl for ages and none of them drop loot or give XP). I thought the event would never end.
I get to the event I need and it ended in about 30 seconds, so fast I didn’t get credit for it, even though I was there for the whole event. By the time I figured out what to do, the event was over.
Why such a disparity in event duration, to the point where one was long and worthless, and took tons of effort and one finished so fast, I didn’t even have enough time to interpret it. I lost the achievement, and now I have to either wait around until it spawns again, or come back another time. It was the last achievement I needed.
These are the kind of thing that affects my game.
I love the old fashioned type of adventure game, where I’m searching for stuff. I really liked the Karka hunt in Lion’s Arch. But there are those types of achievements in this game that are completely wasted on me, because there really is no good way to figure out how to do them without going to Dulfy and I don’t want to go to Dulfy.
And that might be part of the problem. If Anet is making these achievements with the idea everyone is going to look them up, in my case they’re wrong. I don’t want to look it up, which means I want the clues to be able to put me on the path to figuring out the achievement.
It’s sort of like the old Trolls End JP. The entrance is the well really wasn’t something you could figure out. You had to be told about it, or you had to stumble into it (perhaps literally).
I’d like to see the more puzzle oriented achievements be actual puzzles that there’s a chance to figure out. There are some in the game, but it could do with more. And every time there’s some ridiculously unfair achievement that is so misleading as to have a negative clue,. it makes me reluctant to try the next achievement that comes out…because I hate wasting my in game time.