Including them in a game design is pretty much a no-brainer these days since you will draw interest from the achievement hunters while the non-hunters will simply not care.
That pretty much sums it up neatly.
I don't remember where I read it, certainly on the forum but where... Tidalis, maybe; a post related to the pointlessness of collectible items. Anyway, I think Keith and Chris don't like achievements but make some in their game and do their best to make them right.
Yeah, Tidalis had a lot of fun poking at pointless collectibles. You got all this stuff that ultimatley meant nothing, and that was part of the story.
I can't speak to how Keith feels, because we haven't really discussed it from a player point of view. From a developer point of view we are both super in favor of achievements because they are a big draw for certain types of players. We pretty much have to have them whether we want to or not.
That said, done right, I do like achievements. To point to a recent game that I've really enjoyed that I feel like did both achievements... and even to some extent collectibles... correctly: Dying Light.
There are some achievements there just for playing through the story, sure, but I didn't mind those. A lot of the others were more interesting, and showed me things like "wow I've run that many miles!?" Which was more of an interesting fact to learn rather than something I was trying to do. It's something you will only do if you are being completionist on all the side quests, but if you do the side quests you'll get that achievement, so there's never a point where you will just be running for the sake of it.
There's one, I think it's called Gabriel's Sword, that I thought was kind of pointless. It was really easy to do, and I never bothered because it had no point. Just put fire on a sword, I think it was.
There were some others like kill X number of infected without taking damage, or stay alive in a hunted state for 4 minutes, etc, that I really enjoyed. I found myself deviating slightly from the norm to do those.
There are also these little written notes scattered about, and occasional zombie statues. The notes aren't very compelling writing to me, and I have no idea what the zombie statues are for and I have no intention of going and collecting either class of thing for the sake of it. But when I do stumble across one or the other of them, it's a little brief flash of excitement because there was something different from the usual loot in that area. It makes an otherwise ordinary apartment suddenly have some extra meaning to me.
Of course, then I get sucked into the MUST GET THEM ALL mindset, and I see the thing about climbing the height of Mount Everest, and I think F that, because grappling hook. So there's immediately this barrier that says "I'll never complete all of these, because that one stinks."
Eh. But in that way, I think it also can be positive. With AI War, having some achievements that are always out of reach makes the game seem "still alive" in some ways, if that makes sense. I've never beaten a difficulty 9 or 10 AI, and the achievements remind me of that. If I ever do, it would be fun to have that to show off that I did. Also by the achievements I can remind myself which of the secondary mechanics I've played against, and which AI types I've tried. Otherwise there's not really a good way to keep track of that info easily. So looking at the achievements makes that easier.
I think the worst thing for a game for me is when I hit the very end and I've done absolutely everything and the game is now "dead" to me. I know that nothing I do will ever make me see something new in that game. FFX was actually the biggest offender in that category for me, for whatever reason. Even games like Chrono Trigger or FF6 that I have played to 100% completion at least five or six times, I still get the feeling like I've missed some tiny something. There's some little bits of mystery left in the world, for whatever reason, in my brain.
As an aside, that stuff they added in the DS remake of Chrono Trigger was absolute trash. It very much is the modern sort of "let's extend gameplay by now giving you a ton of badly designed content that really has no point but to make you spend as much time as possible." Seriously, those levels didn't even have the same feel as the rest of the actual game. It felt like very unskilled modders had been at it, it was just bizarre. I'm not normally that harsh on what someone else does, but that's tied for my favorite game ever and I feel pretty strongly about it.
Anyway, so my interpretation as a player is: it depends on the game.
