PS3 Has No Achievements, Replaceable Controllers

So, there is bad news and good news. The bad news is, despite the popularity of the Gamerscore and Achivements on Xbox Live, the PS3 won't offer that. Despite earlier rumours on the subject, developers will have to pick and choose if they want to have a system like that. Sony says first party titles will offer 'entitlements' ... but none of the launch titles will have it. There is good news for PS3 fans, though, as Sony says it will replace controllers if the batteries wear out. The lithium batteries the company is shipping the controllers with should last 'for many years'.

Re:This will hurt at least a little.

[AuMatar]

Youy're overgeneralizing. I refuse to play a lot of online serivces, including battle.net and Live, in large part due to the score. Not all of us are competitive, and not all of us are competitive all the time. And if I'm going to be competitive, it will be in game beating you, not having to tweal my playstyle to maximize some number (nothing pisses me off more in DDO that hear someone talk about how much higher their kill score is when I'm playing a CC wizard or priest. Yeah, you're the man, I suck for my 2 kills. Lets do it again without me webbing half the dungeon). I'm far more likely to use Sony's system than MSes due to the fact there is no score. Which makes it more likely I'll buy the PS version rather than the xbox for non-exclusives. And I'm far from alone. I think this is a great move.

Now if only they cut their price in half, they'd have my buisness. Until then, wii is for me.

Re:Gonna Miss the Vibration

[drinkypoo]

You probably already know it exists but if you look around carefully you can find the Rez Trance Vibrator. It looks like an old school mac mouse with no button (Stupidamouse!) and it comes with, no shit, a washable slip cover. Washable was actually listed as a feature!

Re:I think thats a good thing

[fimbulvetr]

XBL has something worth it, if the game supports it. It's called ranking. It's by far one of the best things about Halo2, and it certainly makes the game a lot more fun. For an example, spend an afternoon playing ranked halo2 and ranked cod2. You'll find with cod2, despite it being super fun, people join with absolutely no clue what they are doing. Half the time, 30% or more players quit the game, and 5% of the time, the game is laggy.

With Halo2, OTOH, I can jump on and since I have a fairly high rank, I know I'm not going to be disappointed because I'm playing a bunch of newbs. I know a significant majority of them will not quit because it counts as a loss against their rank, I know their big brother isn't going to let them play on his ranked profile, I know the host will rarely be laggy because he has an interest in winning so he'll stop his bittorrent, and I know they're probably not going to jump on halfway drunk or completely stoned.

In addition, I know that most of the time it's a level playing field, no one has a 150% FOV, no one has a tweaked sniper and rarely will anyone every "cheat". Compare this to the old days of Q3 and ladders or UT and clans, and it's a godsend. I now know what my *real* rank is against everyone in the world who plays this game on this console. I know if I have a good chance of winning, and I know it's usually gonna be a goddamn fun, if very close, game.

This, to me, is well worth the $50/year. I would _love_ to see COD2 support rankings, but I think we'll have to wait and see if COD3 has it.

DIY... In other words, none

[cgenman]

Hmm... giving publishers the "flexibility" to create their own achievements systems, which none of the launch titles will feature.

In other words, it's all up to the developers what they want to do, because Sony isn't going to provide any help. The nice thing about 360 achievements is that you can figure out your trigger conditions, call an API once, and be done. Anyone can add achievements to their game with relatively little effort (a huge improvement from Xbox 1).

On the other end, you have the completely open ended system. You decide the trigger conditions, as usual. You implement their storage. You implement their display. You manage any sort of in-game rewards for these. You add more screens and menu options to your flow. You debug. Not Easy. And even then, other players won't be able to see it.

I can't imagine most game developers seeing the tradeoff and deciding that it is worth it. They'll just keep whatever in-game rewards system they have deemed useful over the years.

Microsoft really learned one thing from the Xbox 1... and that is if you want something from the developer, you have to make it really, really simple to do. Or else it isn't worth their development dollars to do it. MS gets this now. We'll see about Sony.

It's not FUD. Have we come full circle?

[jchenx]

Yeah, Zonk has been zonk'in a lot of fud lately. I don't know the person but honestly they've been slightly making slashdot a pain in the a lately. Not so much for providing at least some useful content, (which Zonk does do occasionally), but all this FUD on topics that don't matter are annoying. Plus it just gets the fan boys riled up. Zonk, you happen to work at Digg too?

Not supporting achievements, is not FUD. It's a real feature that a lot of people (myself included) were hoping to see, especially since Sony themselves talked about it some time ago.

Have we come full circle? I admit that some of the articles Zonk posts can be rather FUD-ish for Sony, especially when they're just rumors, or just dupes of the same bad news from Sony. But it's gotten back to the point where everything that Zonk posts is already assumed that it's just anti-Sony FUD, when it's not the case. Believe it or not, bad Sony news does still exist, and it's not just "anti-Sony hype".