Alternatively, take a game like World of Warcraft which was built with multiplayer interactions and cooperation in mind. Higher quality items are impossible to obtain without at least a few people trying to work in the same direction.

There were plenty of difficult achievements there, nothing stellarly impossible, since the aim of the entire achievement system was to provide accumulating and intermittent rewards as the player progressed, and later was presented as a means for defining difficult, rare, or simply time-consuming goals that were available for the player to pursue.

In fact, with an MMORPG like WoW where new content is cycled in every few months and gear quickly becomes obsolete for the next higher level, it’s only the flavorful items and achievements, received from both rare and server-firsts which actually stick along with the player as a badge of honor due to some achievements becoming unobtainable once the gear/content bar has been raised.

While I hate to admit it, I think WoW adapted a very addictive rewarding system to keep the community involved and reaching higher when most MMOs on a similar timetable would have stagnated much sooner. The current situation of the MMO market has been to label anything as the next WoW-killer only to have expectations fall reasonably quickly on new title releases..

Compare a multiplayer system like WoW where interaction and cooperation is useful and quite necessary for progression compared to a single-player game ported over to multiplayer scene in what seems to be – from your opinion – more of an afterthought than a serious draw for the playerbase.

Very informative post, and quite enjoyable. I’ve never played Red Faction: Guerilla game myself, but you painted a pretty clear picture on the state of its multiplayer implementation.

However the kind of achievement that rewards players for playing how the developers anticipated can have its advantages. For example developers can emphasise the role of medics by offering an achievement like “Revive 100 team mates”. In TF2 Valve used the achievement “Medical Fraud (Steal 1000 health in one life)” to alert players to the fact that disguised spy’s could be healed by the enemy medics and dispensers. Of course, if the achievements were arbitrarily hard like revive 1000000 team mates then that would just be a cheap and pointless way to encourage players to keep playing.

These kind of achievements have their place when done well however personally I prefer the sort that encourage players to deviate from their normal playstyle. These when done well can be like fun challenges, such as one in TF2 where as a medic the player must achieve 5 (might have been reduced to 3) kills while having an ubercharge (temporary invincibility for him and whoever he’s healing) ready but undeployed. Now there’s almost no scenario where risking the loss of your uber by actively hunting down more offensively capable enemies would be a good idea, it’s just a fun diversion.

So yeah, I believe multiplayer achievements when done well can act to improve a newbies knowledge of the game and extend the game’s multiplayer longevity in a way that’s deeper than just “kill a billion people”.