Feature Weekend question: What achievement did you go to ridiculous lengths for?

[PCG Jody]

I ask the PCG staff a regular Weekend Question and post the answers on the site. This week the question is: What achievement did you go to ridiculous lengths for? If you'd like to throw in an answer here, I'll squeeze the best into the finished article!

Note that it doesn't have to be a Steam achievement to count—if you've gone way too far out of your way to earn some reward in an MMO or to get a cosmetic in a MOBA or whatever, that counts as well. It's anything you probably shouldn't be proud of, but are.

 

[DelirusRex]

I'm a completionist, I just need to get everything in every game, period. This includes every achievement, item, collectible, just everything. Thing is, sometimes, these games have the most mental achievements.

Stanley Parable has the weirdest and best achievements in any game, and right now I'm about a week off of the "Go Outside" achievement. Don't play it for five years.

Hm. It's worth noting I've attempted the achievement to play for the entire duration of a Tuesday.

 

[PCG Jody]

Stanley Parable has the weirdest and best achievements in any game, and right now I'm about a week off of the "Go Outside" achievement. Don't play it for five year

When you reinstall The Stanley Parable, make sure to close and reopen Steam before you start the game to collect that achievement—otherwise Steam won't have a correct read on your Last Played date and you won't get it!

 

[DelirusRex]

When you reinstall The Stanley Parable, make sure to close and reopen Steam before you start the game to collect that achievement—otherwise Steam won't have a correct read on your Last Played date and you won't get it!

Good shout, thanks! I'll make sure I do!

 

[SWard]

I once let one of my sims die by lightning because he needed to stay fishing outside cause I needed a cowplant seed.

Don't @ me

 

[P1N0]

None, because I'm the best. If you need help, don't hesitate to contact me. Obviously for free, you are my family. 💙

 

[I Will Haunt You]

I honestly think that any game that requires multiple playthroughs to get an achievement is considered a "ridiculous length" and by that definition I have done that more than a few times.

The achievement I have probably spent the most time acquiring would be the 100 mounts in World of Warcraft. Many of them required an insane amount of grinding or luck.

 

[Zloth]

Sheesh, I keep bringing this game up but...

The HUB quest in X3:Terran Conflict. Done without cheating, only a little away-from-keyboard SETA, and nearly no pirating of other ships. It starts out as a fetch quest to help re-build a massive space station but it doesn't take long before the demands are just too much to simply go out and buy, so you have to start building your own stations. And stations to supply those stations. And you'll need to manage a fleet of trade ships to deliver goods and sell off leftovers. And you'll want some defenses for all that stuff, of course. In short, you need to build an interstellar trade empire to finish the quest! It's the biggest quest I've ever seen.

And I got no achievement for it. Back in the early days of the game, I got a couple of mods to add some features to the game. The mods were later signed (or some such) so they wouldn't block achievements but my game was already marked as modified. So I took a video instead.

 

[Rensje]

I'm not sure if this qualifies as 'ridiculous lengths', but one of the hardest and most time-consuming achievements I've ever gotten is the Knight's Honor achievement in Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. It requires you to collect every unique weapon and shield available in the game with one character. That includes boss weapons you can only acquire by trading a particular boss soul for it, and items that are locked behind a particular covenant.

It took me hours of farming and playing through the game three times with the same character to collect all of it. One of the boss souls, namely that of the Great Grey Wolf Sif, is required for two different swords and a shield! That means you have to beat New Game+ and beat him on NG+2 before you can collect all of the weapons, and then you also have to play up to Anor Londo on that game cycle before you can actually transpose the soul into the required weapon or shield.

I actually remember finally getting there, fired up to collect the last weapon I needed before the achievement would pop. In my excitement, I accidentally bought the wrong weapon! Upon realising my mistake, I panicked hard. I figured I would have to do another entire playthrough to get it, after I had already struggled to get here for some 60+ hours. I quickly Alt+F4'd out of the game and halle-flippin'-lujah, the game had not autosaved yet. I was standing outside the door to Anor Londo cathedral, boss soul still in hand. When I traded it for the right weapon this time, the achievement finally popped! Whew!

I went on to collect ALL of the achievements for Dark Souls, and I'm very proud that I managed it, but Knight's Honor was the hardest part by far.

 

[McStabStab]

The ridiculous lengths I went to were self-inflicted in this case, but I 100% cleared Mad Max... without using fast travel the whole game.

I'm also proud of beating Alien: Isolation on Nightmare difficulty, and having perfect games (100% achievements) for Hotline Miami, Into the Breach, and a handful of others.

 

[spvtnik1]

View attachment 430

Good work! I got close, but just couldn't push myself to unlock all the archangels and vehicles. This is the only game I've come even close to 100% on all collectibles, and also the only game I've even finished recently.

 

[Julez]

I know this is a little outside the scope of the question, but I recently got the "Collector" achievement in Evoland 2. The game features a card battling minigame, in which you get one unique card for each in game player you beat (you'll also find some in chests in hidden areas). I spent hours finding every opponent and battling them, collecting all 62 cards. I've never been much of an achievement hunter but, I got addicted to the minigame, what can I say?

 

[Johnway]

pretty much trying to get all the achievements for duke nukem forever. The game was terrible and going through it again to accomplish it was madness. part of the problem was that i got the collectors edition and i felt like it would have been a waste if i didn't short of that. DNF was a painful reminder why i should never preorder any game ever again. Except maybe cyberpunk 2077 will be the exception.

 

[Sciophyte]

Any achievement I've ever gotten in any game was accomplished incidentally. Unless there's a specific reward attached to it—an in-game item or other utility—I frankly don't see the point.

 

[Balrog8Moria]

I am a casual gamer, so achievements were never a must. But I did tried my best to accomplish all of TitanFall2, having enjoyed it so much. I think I only have a couple multiplayer ones left to complete.

 

[logainofhades]

When Final Fantasy II, for SNES came out, the book said 40hrs minimum, to beat it. I learned the games so well, that I could do it in less than 24. I think my best ever was 18hrs.

 

[Ralkier]

In Tree of Savior, there is this item called Ignition. Before the major updates to the game, you could only get the recipe to craft the item from a dungeon as a reward, and the ingredients to actually craft the item requires some backtracking to obtain. It simply looked cool and had some good stats on it when I first saw it - by the time I actually got enough to craft the item, my character progressed far enough for the item to theoretically be useless in some regards.

The drop rate for all those back then required some dedicated time for grinding too.