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.
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.
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.
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 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.
