After playing through an insane amount of SC2, having heaps of fun grabbing all the different achievements you could think of there, and feeling quite challenged in the process, I was pleasantly surprised to see achievements in place for Civilization 5 as well! However …
There’s obviously a fairly huge difference between the gameplay in SC2 and Civ5, but there’s just something that made me worry slightly as I was going through the list while playing my first few games… they’re quite simply all piss easy for someone who wants to “achieve”! You can just set the game to fit whichever achievement you want to get, and soon thereafter… you have it! With the obvious exception being “Do 1000 things” – with no tracking of how far you are along with these, you just stop caring after a while…
I think in a sense, the achievements implemented in Civ5 to a certain extent made the game a lot “worse” for me personally than if they hadn’t been present at all. My OCD kicked in and I just rushed through the list in no time, only the 2-3 multiplayer achievements and the “do insane amounts of things” remain…
I think I’ve grown accustomed to the fact that single player games have a challenge in the sense that you want to complete them, but you also want to have something to show for it, even if it’s just a simple image or a small icon you can see somewhere in your account profile… it’s “something”! And now that I’ve rushed through these, the game feels like it’s “over” in a sense, whereas in Civ4 I would play it just for fun quite a few times to try out various things, I’ve found myself come across a mental block which says “why bother? it’s not THAT much fun, already done everything… and I get no more achievements…”
I can safely say that the achievements in SC2 prolonged the game by an insane amount for me. There’s no way I would’ve replayed the entire campaign on Brutal difficulty if I hadn’t been able to get that little shiny achievement and the ability to use a picture of Kerrigan as my avatar. In addition to that, they added achievements to carefully thought out challenges, which again partially trained me in terms of what to expect from multiplayer – resulting in me getting hooked on that as well.
So, instead of saying No More Turns – Civilization 5 should say No More Achievements!