While a few games have fiddled with smaller-scale achievement systems of their own (such as Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty 4), they often feel small in comparison and not as compelling. That's definitely not the case with the new achievements system recently introduced in World of Warcraft alongside the launch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. In many ways, it improves on the concept we've come to expect on the 360, adding a wealth of stats and other features that are great to fiddle through even if you never pick up a single achievement.
The main achievements screen is bound by default to the "Y" key, and brings up a list of categories, and overall score and recent achievements. Here's the main screen for the Death Knight I started last week -- as you can see, there are categories for everything from quests and dungeons to professions and PvP:
Probably the easiest achievements to get will be in the Exploration category, especially if you have level 70 characters. All that's required is exploring an entire zone, and you'll get the achievement for it. What's cool is that if you don't have the achievement for a zone, you can expand the listing to see a list of areas that you have or have not unlocked:
While most of the achievements are worth 10 points, there are some bigger achievements you can get for completing an entire category. For instance, in the Exploration category, I received 25-point achievements for fully exploring all of both the Eastern Kingdoms and Outland:
Another cool aspect of the achievements system can be found in the Quests category. As with Exploration, achievements are mostly broken down by zone, rewarding you for completing a set number of quests (usually every quest in the zone, minus one or two). Here, if you click on a zone, you can see exactly how many quests you've completed so far, which is pretty useful info as you're questing through a new area:
Quest achievements are broken down by "Classic" "The Burning Crusade" and "Wrath of the Lich King." The "Classic" quests aren't listed by zone, but simply require a set number of quests completed in either the Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor. "The Burning Crusade" category offers achievements for each zone, and then "Wrath of the Lich King" offers achievements not just for each zone, but for completing special quest chains or dailies. In other words, there's far more to be gained focusing on newer content than going back to Kalimdor for 10 points.
WoW's new achievements system also offers rewards for completing dungeons and raids, although the system stumbles a bit here. For whatever reason, the game has trouble detecting what bosses you might have downed pre-Lich King, and will often fail to give you credit in appropriate places. For example, despite countless clears of Stratholme and Scholomance, killing every boss and completing every quest for both instances, I was surprised to find I didn't have an achievement for either. On the other hand, I was properly credited for other dungeons and raids I'd completed, like Blackrock Depths or Blackwing Lair, so it's anyone's guess as to how the game tracks what you've completed in the past.
This lack of historical data also carries over to the "Statistics" panel, which is awesome if you've created a new character, but not particularly useful for looking at what your characters have done to date. Here's a look at my current Death Knight again, who's got 14 levels' worth of data behind him:
On the other hand, my older main character, who I've not really played in the expansion so far, has almost zero stats across the board.
The upshot of all this is that the achievements system will turn out to serve two really useful purposes in WoW: It'll give players yet one more way to spend their time in Azeroth and provide a wealth of useful stats going forward, even if they're missing some things you've done in the past. So if you'll excuse us, there's an achievement for Ragefire Chasm we need to complete.
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