Xbox Live Achievements are getting an update to better reflect how gamers play games. This information comes from an interview Windows Central had with Xbox Platform Corporate Vice President Mike Ybarra.
As it stands right now, Xbox Live Achievements reward players for completing specific tasks by giving out points. These points are accumulated into one pool called Gamerscore. According to Ybarra, this doesn’t really reflect what people are actually doing when playing games.
“We are working towards a bigger, more meaningful change about somebody's gaming accomplishments in history, as a gamer on Xbox,” Ybarra said in the interview, mentioning he couldn’t provide many specific details.
“[W]e 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,” Ybarra continued. “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.”
Whatever is in the works, Ybarra says it will “fundamentally change the concept” of Achievements. This could mean a number of different things, like highlighting the different stats each game generates. For example, shooter games will typically give your accuracy, the number of headshots you’ve made and other stats if you scroll over to your profile. This would highlight a player’s skill at a game more accurately than how many arbitrary goals the player has met. It would also allow players who can’t afford to get that many games to be highlighted, as opposed to those who get seemingly every game and can jack up their Gamerscore with all the easy Achievements.
So what do you think? Are you interested in seeing what’s next for Xbox Achievements? What do you think Microsoft is working on? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
