Summary
Achievements (or “Trophies”, for PlayStation fans) serve as a badge of honor for players who managed to pull off the simplest of feats, the most time-consuming and daunting of tasks, and then some. It’s a good way to let people know how much they’ve invested into games that support these rewards.
Prepare to shudder and stare in disbelief, however, at some of the most insane ideas for achievements. It could be demanding a ludicrous score, requiring a ridiculous amount of time to be wasted, or needing players to play a barrage of songs without pausing the game at any point!
ThoughtGuitar Herowas grueling?Rock Band 2took the cake with a gauntlet of an achievement, “The Bladder of Steel,” where players must play through the entire repertoire of songs in the game, barring its DLCs, in one sitting without pausing or failing. Controller disconnects and pressing the big ‘X’ button on Xbox 360 controllers will ruin all progress on this as well.
In total, that’s well over 6 hours of songs to play, made up of 84 tracks flung at the player back-to-back. Not only is this a test of skill, but it’s also a strain on a person’s attention, energy levels, and, as the title suggests, bladder. There’s no room for toilet breaks when attempting this utterly barbaric gauntlet.
What better way to encourage players to invest as much time as possibleinto console versionsofCommand & Conquer 3: Tiberium Warsthan with a cheeky jab in the form of an achievement? “No Life” required players to commit themselves to the game’s online multiplayer for no less than a hundred hours. Skirmishes could’ve taken upwards of an hour or more against skilled players, so it probably would’ve taken a hundred matches to be sure!
Key word: “required”. As of now, the achievement is no longer compatible via legitimate means, as EA closed the servers for the game in 2022. Hopefully, no poor commander was in the process of trying to reach the goal before that happened.
After hitting the maximum rank in multiplayer forCall of Duty, it has been a recurring option to Prestige, thereby resetting a player’s progress with all the perks, challenges, and weapons needing to be unlocked again. InCall of Duty: World at War, it was possible to do this ten times.
According to online forums, it would’ve likely taken well over 350 hours of playing online matches to get this achievement from Treyarch’sWorld War I shooter,though that’s probably if a player was good enough to be raking in the XP. The reward? A secret achievement worth zero Gamerscore for Xbox 360 users specifically, telling them to “go outside and get some fresh air”. For the time, it was quite the feat… before modders ruined it and made it a piece of cake to get the top prestige rank.
Whenfans and moddersgot the chance to work on a brand-new update to breathe more life intoLeft 4 Dead 2on PC, it came with a slew of new content, like more weapons, maps reworked for new modes, and even a new campaign based on a survival-exclusive level. And then came a bunch of achievements, too.
The first entry had a wacky one, requiring 53,595 Infected to be killed (a reference toDead Risingand Willamette’s population, plus one). Only 5.1% of players on Steam bagged it. The achievement’s sequel now requires 53,599 dead Infected (another one-up on theDead Risingseries, this time referring to the fourth game’s achievement ‘Z-Genocider 4: The Return’, which required 53,598 kills), which only 1.4% of players have accomplished. Considering an average campaign may result in about a few hundred kills per player, it’s going to be quite the crunch.
Valve are really, really keen on making sure players spend as much time as possible fighting robots inTeam Fortress 2’s"Mann Versus Machine" mode. Indeed, their numbers total in the hundreds, depending on which campaign a player chooses, whether it’s part of the free-to-play Boot Camp or thepay-to-playTours.
The thing is, the “Metal Massacre” achievement requires a grand total of one million robots to be felled across so many matches. YouTuberWeezyTF2 made an entire video on it, calculating that, if one were to keep replaying the “Bone Shaker” mission on “Bigrock,” it would take roughly 20 days of non-stop grinding to achieve it. Meanwhile, the TF2 Wiki says that replaying “Caliginous Caper” on the “Ghost Town” map would take well over a thousand hours of non-stop grinding to get it, providing each mission unrealistically took an hour with no failures or restarts.
It’s a little surprising how some players will go so far as to use exploits to collect achievements that would normally be impossible to get. Such was the dilemma that the developers of thenarrative-heavy walking-simThe Stanley Parablefaced. Devious players were using cheats to complete the “Go Outside” challenge, where they would have to avoid playing the game for 5 years (it was only legitimately acquirable from October 17th, 2018 onward).
WithThe Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, a new achievement was slipped into the mix, whereby players must avoid playing the game for a whole decade. While it’s possible to fiddle with a PC’s internal clock to get this early, the legitimate way to get it is to wait until after at least April 27th, 2032 (since it was released on this day in 2022). At the time of writing, 4.2% of players on Steam already have this achievement - cheaters!
A mere 0.4% of players on Steam have been skilled enough to obtain the “LASO Master” achievement forHalo: The Master Chief Collection. Simply put, all sixHalotitles under this release must be completed on Legendary difficulty with each of the game-modifying Skulls applied.
This is, in short, a soul-crushing feat to pull off. The Skulls apply all sorts of different effects, like removing the HUD and gun from sight, increasing enemy shields, hiding the motion tracker, making enemies drop grenades on death, and resetting the entire level after dying when playing solo. It should be mentioned thatHalo 2remains infamous within the community when attempting this achievement,as it is the hardest game in the series. Those capable of accomplishing such a task must clearly be from a whole other world.
What in the world were Epic Games and The Coalition thinking with their “Seriously…” achievements?Gears of Warhad ‘Seriously…’, a challenge that required a total 10,000 kills inVersus Ranked matches. The sequel offered a new requirement with “Seriously 2.0:” kill 100,000 enemies across all game modes.
The third game asked for an even bigger demand: Reach level 100 and earn every Onyx medal in online multiplayer, a task that required literally thousands of kills in all sorts of ways across many different game modes. Game No. 4 asked for the campaign to be completed on the highest difficulty, with 141 ribbons, 8 different ranks, survived 50 waves on each of the 10 original Horde maps, prestige 10 times, max out Horde classes to level 10, and get 5 Horde Skills up to Level 5. And in the fifth entry? Way, way more… it’s a recurring achievement that requires hundreds, or even thousands, of hours to get them!
