2y ago

What's the most surprising facts about a game you've gleaned by reading a game's achievement/trophy acquisition percentage?

I'll start with a few:

Cyberpunk 2077 (PS5). Only 53.8% of players earned the "Lovers" trophy, awarded for clearing the prologue at the No-Tell Motel, and only 77.3% of players earned the "Fool" trophy for clearing the preceding lifepath part of the prologue. Which means that ~20% of the people that played the game never made it out of the character creator, and another ~20% of the people that played the game went out into the open world, faffed around for a while, and then decided they were sufficiently entertained & then went back to playing FIFA.
Bonds of the Sky (PS4/Vita). You might have heard of Cyberpunk, but I doubt you've heard of this game, which is a low-budget Dragon Quest clone. It's not one of those "pay us 3 dollars/euros/pounds games and we'll give you an easy platinum" shovelware games that the PS4 had in abundance at one point in time, and yet, the platinum trophy has an insane 59% acquisition rate. (By contrast, Horizon Zero Dawn, a much more popular game with a trivial platinum trophy, has only a 5.4% acquisition rate for its platinum.) The few people that played this game must've really loved it.
Bloodborne (PS4). Only 44.6% of players beat the first boss, Father Gascoigne, but 25.9% of players beat the boss that triggers the endgame to start. So FromSoftware lost half their players in the game's first area (or the character creator again), but of the roughly half that made it out, roughly half of that half went on to finish the game. Talk about polarizing opinions.
Kingdoms of Amalur Re-Reckoning (PS4). How common is it for players to rage-quit in the character creator in any given game, I wonder? Because only 69.1% of the people that played the game collected the "Reborn" trophy for clearing the prologue. I don't get it; a 90% rate would make more sense, but even that would imply that 10% of their players started the game once, decided "oh hell no," and then went back to playing FIFA.

What are others' observations? All platforms with achievements/trophies are valid.

49 comments

There are a lot of games where a sizeable amount of players won't have the initial achievements.
They may have just launched the game and never played it, achievements could have been added later on after the release like with Grand Theft Auto IV, some people only play multiplayer, or there may be something in place to disable achievements when you mod the game like in Fallout New Vegas.
- or there may be something in place to disable achievements when you mod the game like in Fallout New Vegas.
  This is why my achievements for Skyrim look completely incongruent with my play time. Someone might assume that I'd spent 700 hours in the character creator...
  
  Exactly. Even though there are achievement enabler mods for Fallout 3/NV/4 and Skyrim I imagine a sizeable chunk of players just couldn't be bothered.
  
  I didn't realise Skyrim blocked achievements when modding, I'd definitely didn't back in the day, it's one of the few games that I have all achievements on and I've modded it to hell basically every time.
- You mean like Terraria's achievement to chop down a tree, that over 13% of Steam players haven't done?
  
  Yup, the sample size is out of people who've booted up the game ever. So 13% of players downloaded it, installed it, thought about playing it, and didn't get much further than the menu screen. 7% of players of Fallout: New Vegas never finished the first mission.

39.6% of players have beaten the final boss of Elden Ring. Considering how huge the game is, and how difficult it can be, I found that to be a surprisingly large number of people. I'm not sure how that compares to dark souls 3, but Dark Souls 2 has about 33% completion and dark souls 1 (prepare to die edition) has less than 25%

Generally, I like using achievements to figure out where people called it quits on a game. Like Saints Row the Third. 90% of people cleared the first mission, but the percentages drop with each successive story achievement until you've got the achievement for the last mission which only 27.9% of players bothered to finish. Or you have Hades where around 50% of players just never finished a run of the game and only 25.6% completed enough runs to see the main ending.
- My roommate was one of those "completed a run but didn't finish enough to see the ending" people.
  He said that completing the run alone felt like the end of the game to him and he couldn't bare the thought of struggling for what he barely managed to achieve once.
  I was disappointed.
  
  Personally I just don't like going through the same basic thing fifty times.
  Yeah, it was fun the first dozen times, Hades, but running around looking for a couple lines of dialogue to unlock the "real" ending isn't actually what I consider fun gameplay.

These stats are what I have in my head when I am deciding on what to buy. Fact is, most people on the internet are overwhelmingly negative and unable/unwilling to give games a fair shot.
This sounds critical, but look at the numbers. I have a family member who, when asked about Cyberpunk, said it was a shit game, that enemies were too spongy, driving was terrible, and said it was "literally unplayable". (not bug related, just gameplay) When asked about story he said "Oh I only played a couple of missions".
Like what? I'm not saying you need to play 100% of Gollum to know it's a bad game, but come on, talk about judging a book by it's cover. If you aren't going to give it a fair shot then why buy it at all, just don't buy the game?
So many people go into games expecting them to be bad, or expecting bugs/problems that guess what, you're probably going to find something wrong with it. Maybe watch a few less reviewers ahead of time, maybe turn off the FPS counter, and I don't know, see if you have fun playing it.
- Well, he did play the game, he's judging the book by the first few chapters. If you don't like any aspect of the gameplay, even if the story could be good, it's very understandable why he dropped it.
- To be fair to your family member, a couple of missions in Cyberpunk is a couple of hours. I remember an extremely late title card in that game. That's more than a fair shake.
  
  Fair, but I'm talking he spent 20 minutes in there, maybe started one of the main missions.
- I may just have not the most critical taste but I recently picked up Cyberpunk (v1.6, not the latest update) and I loved it, my first AAA game, played it for 170 hours within a few weeks. The story and worldbuilding is amazing imo.
  You're right about people not giving some games a chance. Pretty sure that Cyberpunk had quite a hate hype trend at the start.
  
  Oh it was incredibly popular to hate it. I still see threads that are CJ'ing around about how horrible it is. Because it's fun to hate something on the internet. Now, the people who had bugs or actually "literally unplayable" statuses - genuine. That sucks, I'm sorry, but to everyone who just jumped on the hate train, well I feel bad for people who can't enjoy things because of that.
- In response to cyber punk though, it's entirely possible for gameplay to be bad enough that even a good story can't save it. Personally, I had a problem getting invested in cyber punk's story because I just was not enjoying the moment to moment gameplay. Each person has subjective opinions on where that line is, so I think it's fair for someone to judge it even after just a few missions (though I agree, it might be they enjoyed it more if they gave it more time)

I think using mods disables achievements for cyberpunk, so that could bias the numbers. I don't know how many people are actually using mods though.
- That's stat is on ps5 and there's no mod support, also achievements aren't disabled if you use mods on the GOG version. I mod it to reach level 72 and max all the stats and I still got the achievements.
- That's the reason that only 15% of Crusader Kings II players have "The Marriage Game" achievement, which is awarded for getting married. In a game about dynastic politics.
  
  Paradox games require you to turn on Ironman mode to get achievements, which is why all of them have really low achievement percentages. That combined with vanilla just seems like not a whole lot of fun to me.
  
  It's worse for CK2, you only get achievements if you're playing on ironman mode. Given how complex it is to just understand how to play the game properly, even if you really enjoy it you might play for hundreds of hours before even starting an ironman run!

Bloodborne (PS4). Only 44.6% of players beat the first boss, Father Gascoigne
He was the second boss for me. The first one I encountered was the Cleric Beast. Then I got so fed up with the frame rate after that I swore off the game, especially since I just found it to be Dark-Souls-but-less. Still, Gascoigne was a hard fight, so it's not surprising that the first major souls-esque game on PS4 had a huge dropoff at a difficulty spike.
The one that always got me is that even predominantly multiplayer games have a very low participation rate in multiplayer. I've heard about 70/30 split from developers in most cases (and I've gotten a peak behind the curtain at a few other games where this trend continues to hold up, within a margin of error), where even if your game has a bad single player mode and focuses on multiplayer, only 30% of the player base will ever go online. I'll bet that's why these games stopped putting in achievements for "win one online multiplayer match", because it was astonishingly low. Far more people finished a single player story in Street Fighter V (which were awful) than those who went online to play multiplayer.
- Multiplayer trophies are the worst, in general, except in multiplayer-only games. Once the servers go offline, those multiplayer trophies become unattainable. It's especially a problem on PlayStation where, once the trophies become unattainable, so does the platinum.
  
  Arkham Origins :(

Cyberpunk 2076
The prequel
- Oopsies. Thanks. Corrected.

On Amalur, I made a character and quit when I couldn't play in a modern resolution
I played the original and enjoyed it well enough though.
- Amalur is 4k60 on PS5 where I played it. Is it that much worse one other platforms?
  
  PC, I couldn't get it past 800x600 resolution.
  Now is it possible that was an option? Sure, I couldn't see much the way it tried to render on a 4k monitor.
  The point is, I couldn't access their remake on modern (for the time) hardware.
  One of the few returns I've made on steam.

I'm not surprised at all to see a soulslike being polarising. Some people absolutely love them, but I think you find out pretty quickly if they're not for you!
- I used to dislike dark souls. Recently I tried it again - I struggled but I finally got the hang of it!
  I think the hardest is to know what to do. I figured out I was struggling because I kept going in zones I was not expected to go yet.
  Also it's such a big shift compared to what I was used to. You have to wait for the right opportunity to attack rather than going in there and relying on reflexes.
  
  I tried it for a few hours and my review was "not telling you how to play the game doesn't make it hard, it makes it badly designed". I get that a lot of people like that, but I was just not having fun as I wandered around confused to be killed again.
- I remember trying dark souls once in like 2014 and calling it quits after like 1.5 hours. People love them and I wouldn't ever want to take that away from them, but for me the game's design was just so hostile toward the player.
  
  Same for me, around 2017
  
  I posted another comment about having pretty much this exact experience myself!

Half Life 2: Despite Zombie Chopper only having 6.9% of steam players actually get it, including myself, it's arguably the more famous of the Half Life 2 achievements.
Please, Don't Touch Anything is a puzzle game where the player is presented with an empty room and a button, and pressing it unlocks more knobs and switches and levers that they have to figure out how to press to unlock endings. When it comes to the achievement for simply pressing the button, only 96.6% of all players have gotten it. That means a shocking 3.4% looked at the button and decided to just not press it and then didn't continue playing the game.
The Talos Principle: About 20% of players have gotten the achievement for getting the "canon" ending of the game, but only 6.1% of players got the achievement for going up to where the canon ending takes place, changing their mind, and walking back down.
Myst (2021): In the 2021 remake a shocking 32% of players made it through Selenitic, but only 4.6% got the "Never Lost" achievement. This is a bit of a big leap in logic, I'll admit, but I'm willing to bet that means only 4% of players actually know how to solve the mazerunner puzzle. It's a puzzle you must solve to complete Selenitic. Without going into it too much, you control a train going through a maze of rails and at each junction you can spin to go to a set of different rails. Each cardinal direction corresponds to a series of 4 sounds you were supposed to have memorized from the previous age (level), the Mechanical age. If 2 sounds happen, then you have to go in the direction between those sounds. If you play the game in the non-randomized state then you can just look up a walkthrough of this puzzle, which is what most people did in the 90s and what most people still do because guaranteeing good sound quality for everyone is still difficult. Most new players might even play with the sound off just because they don't know about this.

Path of Exile on PS5 (I don't have access to PC/xbox).
According to the trophies, only 8.8% of players complete Part 1, with 4.4% completing Part 2. For context, Part 1 would take a new player maybe 20 hours, with Part 2 being a tiny bit shorter. Imo the most likely reason for this is new players bricking their characters. PoE is extremely complicated and if you don't know what you're doing you'll build and gear your toon so wrong that you'll get to a point where you can't progress and you don't have any way of fixing it.
2.3% of players reach level 80, with 0.9% reaching level 90. Context: After completing the campaign you'll be around level 70, getting to 80 isn't difficult, long or hard. Level 90 requires a slight investment of time and effort.
If you've never played PoE before these stats might seem low, but for people that have played it I'm sure it makes a lot of sense! It does to me anyway.

Actual Sunlight. It has one achievement, "Actual Sunlight", whose description is "Thank you." It's awarded at the end of the game. 37.8% of players have the achievement.
It's a short RPG Maker game about depression that probably resonates a bit too much with a bit too much of it's base. It's bleak, and inane, and all the other sorts of ways that life generally sucks, especially for lonely, introverted, geeky 30-somethings. And the ending of the game is ::: spoiler spoiler choosing suicide. :::
I wouldn't be shocked if a good half or more of players can't bring themselves to drag through it, and some number further just shut the game down and quit when they reach ::: spoiler spoiler the prompt: "Go to the roof of the building and jump off?" and both options are Yes. :::

there must be a small number of players that torrented it then bought it after they played and things like that
- I've got an unhealthy amount of hours and money (games, DLC) invested in various Paradox games because I once pirated EU3 on a whim.
  My Steam Library now contains CK2 with most gameplay DLC, CK3 with most gameplay DLC, EU4 with all gameplay and content DLC, Stellaris with most gameplay/content DLC, HoI4 with most gameplay DLC, Sengoku, and other Paradox games that aren't grand strategy like Magicka 1&2.
  And both my hours in CK2 and EU4 are in the 4 digit realm, though admittedly that includes times where I played in bed, fell asleep and the respective game kept running.

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