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[neutonm]

An interesting dilemma came to my mind recently. So what we have? We have single player game and assuming there is a achievement system in it. And there's this thing going on... If we have the classical achievement of collecting X things and possibility to save'n'load game we also receive a nice feature that allows abusing loading same game and collecting that thing until achievement is completed. I can make save files store the achievement data but that's unpleasant work with all that serialization stuff and there's one more thing with Steam achievements which i haven't looked yet. Yet i'm too lazy to do it.

Anyway...

The question is if the game should allow players to do so. This is cheating but the game is single player so why should it be a great deal? However, games are all about fun. Would you get a huge satisfaction of doing so if you were that player's shoes? If so, then there's no sense in preventing player abusing achievements. "Hey, it's not a bug - it's a feature!"

What would you do?

[JWK5]

The real problem is that if your "collect X" is that un-fun or pointlessly tedious that a player would want to save-spam it then how many people are really going to want that achievement enough to bother in the first place? If earning the achievement is enjoyable enough people won't really want to cheat it because they are having fun earning it.

Some players do have fun "cheating the system", seeing what they can get away with in a game or seeing if they can work around the designers' intent, and that is okay too. For me that is a good chunk of the fun of the Dark Souls games, those moments where you figure out how to break the AI and turn what would be a difficult battle into an amusing bout of mischief. I like to try runs through the game where I do the battles the "hard way" and then other runs to see if I can find ways to break them as well. I see no reason to punish someone just because they found a different way to enjoy your game, even if it is different than you might have intended.

[neutonm]

Thanks JWK5. Guess player should be doing whatever they want, just for fun's sake, and i wouldn't stop them from doing that.

[PirateFish]

Yeah I agree with JWK5. It's fun to try to get achievements as easy as possible, using creative solutions.

I don't really think it would a favour to anyone, spending time removing it.

[WarpQueen]

I agree with that too.
Also, some games "solve" it by not having a good save/load feature, and that is just the worst. Designers should not put them selves above all players and tell them exactly how the game should be played imho, the player need some degrees of freedom.