Achieving the dream

Those of you who are Xbox 360 owners will be savvy to the Microsoft innovation of achievements within games, the fact that when you complete a certain task or mission set out you win game points. Now Football Manager 2010 is entering the frame to offer up the achievements of their own through STEAM. But what I seem to be asking alot at the moment is what will these FM features bring to the gaming experience?

Achievements and the points gained from them on the Xbox, where do they get you? What rewards would you attain from doing 5 wheelies on GTA or 50 head shots on Halo: OSDT or scoring a hat-trick with your favoured Darlington side on FM10?  Well absolutely nothing. What achievements actually bring to gaming is the social element, something that is become increasingly important within gaming. The new achievement system in Football Manager, just the same as it always has been in the Xbox allowing bragging rights you have against those circle of friends that are involved with you.

It is no longer good enough to just complete a game (not that FM allowed you to ever complete a game, unless on the Xbox, on a side note I was gutted when one of my Xbox saved games on the old CM came to an end after spending days on it sick in bed.), now games are now built so that you go back and collect all those missed gems, or tasks that you have yet to do. To truly finish you need to have performed all those missions or tasks to complete the achievements. This will inevitable increase the game time spent by the average FM player as an extra purpose has been put in the game. A dangling carrot is placed infront of all the FM players to work towards fulfilling each of the achievements so that when they get into the pub (or forum), it is an easy way to compare how much you are kicking ass.

It was found from a 2007 study by Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) that those games that implemented an achievement system well, with diverse accomplishments made the games more enjoyable and scored highly in reviews, sales and profitability and also those who added an online element could on average expect a further 50% rise in profits of their games. So it makes business sense for SI games to invest a little time in creating a series of achievements for their users. SI games have listed 70 achievement names that will be in the new game, that range in variety and difficulty, maybe giving that diverse list that will capture the minds of the FM gamer.

Obviously this is all in an attempt to extend the life of a Football Manager game and the amount of time that a person spends at their computer. How best to reward that time then a small pop-up telling you that you have become an England hero and you can collect more like badges, because since the dawn of time the Human Being has been a collector and this will only serve are basic needs. But what I would like to see from the game in a sense of badges or something along those lines would be for somewhere where your achievements were logged on an online server and using that information a sort of Football Manager CV was automatically created, or feed to signatures that you could place when around your forums. Kevin Rose in an interesting keynote speech speaking about ways to help a web application grow mentioned the fact of leader boards, badges and rewards for the involvement in the product which I thought could translate well into FM, something that naturally FM Live already has, helping bring it success, but something that us FM players could have aswell.

But in the end I do think that the achievements are a fantastic idea has SI Games continue to try and add value to the partnership with STEAM to encourage us all onto the system to collect our data and help in the fight against piracy. It will help bring another sense of community interaction as now we will have something else to feed our egos with when we bounce around the Football Manager community. But most of all I think all of this will improve the enjoyment to the game giving us a purpose throughout the year instead of finishing in September and as we await the new game, we rush to collect the last remaining achievements. I know for this reason I will be signing up to STEAM this year, will you?