Most Steam games come with somewhere in the neighbourhood of 15-50 unlockable achievements. Running Through Russia has 4096.
Illustration by Sam Woolley.
Let me be upfront with you: Running Through Russia, which I found out about thanks to PC Gamer, is not good. It’s actually many unique flavours of bad — like a rainbow shaved ice, except all the flavours are different people’s urine. The graphics are amateurish. The controls feel awful. It just isn’t fun. In short, though, it’s a runner game where you drink vodka and leap over poorly drawn bears. There really isn’t much to it.
For some reason, it has thousands of achievements. The game’s in early access right now, so the achievements have names like “new_achievement_1_10”. I played it for a few minutes, and sometimes single jumps would net me multiple achievements. At the end of most runs, I was greeted by a confetti blast of colourful achievement boxes in the corner of my screen. I couldn’t help but laugh.
It’s bizarre. It’s funny. It’s… still not worth a cent of your money. But man, 4096 achievements. Like sure, I guess? I mean, if developers are allowed to do it, why not? Good luck naming them, developer person. The road ahead of you is a long one. Watch out for bears.
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10 responses to “New Steam Game Has Over 4000 Achievements ”
Huge trend of these sorts of games on Steam, they advertise a massive number of achievements on Greenlight and aare gauarnteed to be Greenlit by achievement whores.
What I don’t get and I’m hoping someone can fill me in is why? What does earning… wait that’s obviously not the right word, what does obtaining a shit-tonne of achievements do for people? Is there some way to cash in?
la la la la la — I’m not listening! 😛
As a self-confessed achievement whore, I’m honest, I use achievements as a bit of a CV for my gaming ‘career’ (for want of a better phrase). I don’t feel like I’ve ‘finished’ a game unless I can later point to something and say “there. That time, that date, I completed X”.
Even multiplayer games like Overwatch, which mightn’t have an official ‘end’ let me say with some authority that I’ve experienced everything Blizzard wanted me to out of that game, ergo, I can move onto the next title in my back catalogue.
That being said – I’d rather one substantial achievement than 4000 smaller ones. For me, It’s never really about the ‘amount’ of achievements I’ve collected, more about the substance and the experiences behind them that give me the warm and fuzzies.
This just seems like a bit of marketing ‘point of difference’ to stand out from the rest of the Steam swill.
Thanks, I thought maybe they earned gems or badges or something.
I do get the achievement hunting side of it, I’ll often spend a bit more time going out of my way to get an achievement just for the challenge. After all, that’s one of the reasons why I play games, to be challenged.
I can only imagine people buy games like this one, though, to bump their gamer “score”, completely devaluing that score in the process.
To be honest, Nothing really. They dont really affect anything other than showing up on your profile on steam. Its not like Achievements on XBL where you get points.
Well there are a couple of places it has an ‘effect’. On your steam profile you can show total number of achievements which is basically an e-peen thing. The higher it is the better.
There are also 3rd party sites that have rankings of achievements with rarer achievements netting more ‘points’. So some people can use these games to move up the leaderboard. And once a number of people start doing that, people who are actively trying to hold position fell obligated to do it as well. So they get a bunch of sales from the achievement hunting community as they try to stay on a level playing field.
It is actually quite a big issue within the community at the moment, with a number of games pushing the huge number of achievements and totally distorting the rankings. Then there was talk of one of the serial offenders releasing a new version of the game with 30,000 achievements (Most likely being able to unlock them in a couple of hours)
Wow. Steam reaches a new low.
I mean if it’s shit don’t play etc, but why the hell are these games on the platform in the first place?
“…why the hell are these games on the platform in the first place?”
Greenlight. It’s ending soon. Who knows if Steam Direct will be any better, but it can’t be much worse.
Gold.
But also, holy crap, that’s a disgusting image.
Never mind the disgusting image. Wait until you taste it!
I hesitate to do the search, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some Japanese porn of that somewhere…