Microsoft invented the modern Achievements concept when the feature launched with the Xbox 360, and we’ve seen those little pop-up badges show up everywhere since. But now Microsoft is pondering some big changes to the system.
Mike Ybarra, corporate vice president of gaming at Microsoft, spoke about the future of Achievements on the Windows Central podcast Xbox Two, as OnMSFT reports. Ybarra noted that the company is thinking about altering the system to focus more on a player’s gaming history and their favorite titles.
Those are all small things that we can do to the system, and the team looks at them. They’re in our backlog of things that we want to get done, but there’s actually bigger, more bolder changes that we have in mind. Nothing that I can talk about now, but something that fundamentally changes the concept … we are working towards a bigger, more meaningful change about somebody’s gaming accomplishments in history, as a gamer on Xbox.
We 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. 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.
As it is, your Gamerscore doesn’t discriminate between your favorite games and anything else you’ve played. Every title has its own list of Achievements, with 1,000 usually being the max amount of points you can earn per game. So the system gives a higher Gamerscore to people who play a larger variety of games.
But these days, especially with so many online and games-as-service titles like Grand Theft Auto Online and Overwatch, it’s not uncommon for a player to stick with just a couple of games.