Tours and Tournaments released recently to a fairly warm reception after a long period of angst from sections of the community about the state of the game, and the general consensus appears to be:
Very Positive! And I agree, it's a very refreshing DLC that adds a lot more to areas of the game that desperately needed fleshing out, and lays the groundwork for future DLCs to have more longevity to them due to the accoutrements of medieval rulership being tastier than ever before.
However! Something that always drove me to playthroughs in Crusader Kings is the Achievements in the game, and the base game came packed with a bevy of varied achievements that for the purpose of this discussion I'd like to separate into the categories of "Basic Achievements", "Campaign Achievements", and "Checkmark Achievements". To start with I'd just like to look at some achievements from the base game and give my thoughts, explain the categories I think they fall into, and shed a little light on the categories themselves.
Until Death Do Us Part - This is an exceptionally basic achievement, and a prime example of what I'd call a well designed "Basic Achievement", an achievement that a player should naturally come across through just playing the game. Basic Achievements are important for achievements overall, as they help players both understand what should qualify as an achievement in the game they're playing, add a sense of progression for new players (can be quite important for sandbox games), and most of all give that tasty dopamine shot I get from the steam popup.
Al-Andalus - This is, in my opinion, one of the better "Campaign Achievements" in the base game. I define a Campaign Achievement as one that tells you what to do, who to do it as, and occasionally what restrictions to do it under, while the latter category doesn't apply for Al-Andalus specifically, it's still very well designed in that it frames your campaign from the minute you press play, as having to do something you would usually do in the course of play (Control an Empire, in the case Hispania), and take a Decision that determines when your Campaign is over that nudges you in one direction. Campaign Achievements for me have been my favourite time playing the game, and when I consider the memories of my most fun playthroughs, they are all when I was on a campaign with a specific objective in mind.
Seven Holy Cities - Here is an example of what I'd like to call a "Checkmark Achievement", which I define as functionally an achievement you get just to check the box of getting the achievement itself. Seven Holy Cities reads like it wants to be a Campaign Achievement: Be a Hindu Ruler, and control all Holy Sites (in your big theoretical Empire). But in actuality, this achievement is trivialised by its ease of obtaining, and the relative lack of flavour that would inspire someone to play somewhere outside of Europe/The Middle East. The most recommended way to get this achievement is to start as a Ruler that already holds 6 of them and just fabricate a claim on the final remaining site. I think an easy identifier for a checkmark achievement is one that you create a save to do, do the achievement quickly, and then exit the save file.
Achievements in the base game are, overall, pretty decent. There are some misses in the Checkmark Achievements, but a lot of issues with the checkmark achievements are typically an issue with an area not having a fantastic amount of flavour and just needing more development before an achievement should be put there. Glaring examples in the opposite direction should be the infamous The Things Love Does For Us which is functionally completely random to obtain, and would barely be obtained through the course of normal gameplay, and so falls to being a Checkmark Achievement. Moving on from this, I'd like to look at achievements from the DLCs we had prior to Tours and Tournaments and just check how we've been doing until now.
Converging Paths/ Changing Course (Royal Court) - Something I noticed about the Flavour packs we've got so far (Northern Lords & Fate of Iberia) is that they don't really have Basic Achievements at all. I don't really think this is a problem since an inherent thing with DLC is that you expect players to buy it once they've already played the base game, and Basic Achievements are better geared towards getting new players into hunting the rest of the achievements you as a game developer have laid out. That being said, the Expansions we have so far do have Basic Achievements, is this discrepancy something to raise issue with? I don't know, if you want to, I guess, I don't have a problem with it. Basic Achievements are pretty hard to go wrong with, and should really just be reflective of something simple a player should get through naturally playing, Basic Achievements are pretty much all good, but a good achievement list should have more than them.
A Dangerous Business (Northern Lords) - Here we have, in my opinion, something that bucks the trend of nearly all Checkmark Achievements being bad. This is cute. It's a cute little reference to another game, and the requisite conditions for it are easy to achieve, and don't require you to build your whole campaign around it, sacrificing other aspects of the game. A key difference that separates this from any of the other Checkmark Achievements is that this can very naturally springboard you into any other larger scale achievement, and I think that while Checkmark Achievements are something that should try to be avoided in terms of development, this is basically as good as you can get.
Iberian Hostilites/ Iberian Conciliation/ Iberian Compromise (Fate of Iberia) - Say what you will about the state of the Struggle mechanic, these are good. To get them you need to interact with the core mechanic of the DLC, and do so in a way that the game was meant to be played. These propose larger campaigns for you, and basically let you sandbox your way to them through whatever means you want. As inoffensive as achievement design can get.
Nobody Comes to Fika (Royal Court) - I think this is some kind of Swedish joke I'm too funny to understand. This just falls to being a Checkmark Achievement and I think comes in contrast to A Dangerous Business in that this absolutely forces you to play in a way that skews you away from doing anything else important with the run, and so most runs of this are slow while you get the achievement, and then end as soon as the pop comes up. Also this is listed as Very Hard. I don't really want to get into difficulties since difficulty is arbitrary, but this isn't hard, it's just boring.
Lingua Franca (Royal Court) - What is there to say about this achievement that hasn't already been said. It looks like something that should make an interesting Campaign Achievement, but it completely falls flat, the mechanics for language change in Royal Courts is too passive, and before I bit the bullet and ground through this achievement, I waited months in hope that a patch would release that introduced a bug that made language change snowball too hard so I could just get it easily. Really terrible design, easily the worst achievement in the game, it's a Checkmark Achievement that takes 20 hours.
King of all the Isles (Northern Lords) - This is the last achievement I wanted to talk about in the prior DLC section. I love this achievement. It fulfils the prior categories mentioned for a Campaign Achievement (What to do, Who to do it as, What restrictions to do it under) and gives you all 3 in spades. The Who allows you to play as either the clearly recommended start in Ivar the Boneless, but also allows a player the freedom of choosing any other Germanic Asatru to start their run as. The What to do is incredibly specific and convoluted, something that no player would think to do in the natural course of play, and feels like a real genuine challenge issued by the developers to those who love their game. Finally, the What restrictions that are imposed on you are cute. You aren't meant to do this as a big snowbally empire, this isn't just an achievement you can get as part of your world conquest, to get this achievement you need to just be a King of the Isles. Great achievement design, 10/10.
Having gone through the DLC achievements, they've basically not lost their spark. They're as (and at times more) inventive than the achievements from the base game, while still in many cases providing the easily accessible Basic Achievements that a game should have, while also having challenges for the experienced players to really strive for. With that being said, my opinion on the Achievements in Tours and Tournaments is:
I don't like them I think they're quite bad actually. Let's see why.
The Very Best/ Like No One Ever Was (Tours and Tournaments) - These are the Basic Achievements offered by Tours and Tournaments, there's not really a problem with them, and they're something it's feasible to expect a player to go for or try to obtain without really the promise of an achievement at the end anyway. My problem with T&T's Basic Achievements is that it feels like there's so many of them. Just to show: Black Dinner, Hunting Accident, Fly, My Pretty!, Pathway to Heaven, There and Back Again, The Very Best, and Like No One Ever Was are all basic achievements, and all of them just really ask you to interact with some aspect of the new content. But to understand an issue with Basic Achievements, they have to be looked at in the context of the other achievements to see what they're meant to be stepping stones towards.
I'm in my Element(s) (Tours and Tournaments) - Here we have one of T&T's Checkmark Achievements, this would appear to be something you'd get towards the end of a longer playthrough, but why would you? You'd have to manually craft your empire to wind around the world in a way that allows you to pass through all the different types of terrain when most activities are doable just inches from your capital, and at no real loss to you for doing so. The best way to get this achievement is make a custom character, do one pilgrimage with a few detours, and then close the save. Really poor design.
A.E.I.O.U. and Me (Tours and Tournaments) - This is the only campaign achievement offered by Tours and Tournaments and it's just boring, there isn't enough to do in the game while you're at peace, even with the new additions from T&T. This one is the most painful because just like all the Checkmarks before it, it reads hopefully - start as someone specific, complete this objective, and do not break this restriction, but it feels as though if someone played through to this achievement naturally in testing, the conclusion they'd come to would be "this one isn't ready yet, maybe in future".
A Knight's Tale (Tours and Tournaments) - This is the last achievement I really want to talk about, and it basically summarises all the other achievements from T&T I haven't yet mentioned. This one seems somewhat inoffensive, but that's just the issue, T&T is full of inoffensive achievements that don't really ask anything of you barring one, and that achievement asks you to do something that isn't really particularly interesting. This achievement is passive; have something be happening that you don't really have control over, and then tick a box. There's so much of T&T's achievements that's just "hope something happens in a way that gets you an achievement" that it makes none of them really feel like achievements at all, and as someone who uses achievements to assist me in direction in this huge sandbox game, has left me very directionless.
That's the end of my rant, thanks for reading if you did, if you skipped down to see a tl;dr, I've got some family guy funny moments that might be more up your alley.
Very Positive! And I agree, it's a very refreshing DLC that adds a lot more to areas of the game that desperately needed fleshing out, and lays the groundwork for future DLCs to have more longevity to them due to the accoutrements of medieval rulership being tastier than ever before.
However! Something that always drove me to playthroughs in Crusader Kings is the Achievements in the game, and the base game came packed with a bevy of varied achievements that for the purpose of this discussion I'd like to separate into the categories of "Basic Achievements", "Campaign Achievements", and "Checkmark Achievements". To start with I'd just like to look at some achievements from the base game and give my thoughts, explain the categories I think they fall into, and shed a little light on the categories themselves.
Until Death Do Us Part - This is an exceptionally basic achievement, and a prime example of what I'd call a well designed "Basic Achievement", an achievement that a player should naturally come across through just playing the game. Basic Achievements are important for achievements overall, as they help players both understand what should qualify as an achievement in the game they're playing, add a sense of progression for new players (can be quite important for sandbox games), and most of all give that tasty dopamine shot I get from the steam popup.
Al-Andalus - This is, in my opinion, one of the better "Campaign Achievements" in the base game. I define a Campaign Achievement as one that tells you what to do, who to do it as, and occasionally what restrictions to do it under, while the latter category doesn't apply for Al-Andalus specifically, it's still very well designed in that it frames your campaign from the minute you press play, as having to do something you would usually do in the course of play (Control an Empire, in the case Hispania), and take a Decision that determines when your Campaign is over that nudges you in one direction. Campaign Achievements for me have been my favourite time playing the game, and when I consider the memories of my most fun playthroughs, they are all when I was on a campaign with a specific objective in mind.
Seven Holy Cities - Here is an example of what I'd like to call a "Checkmark Achievement", which I define as functionally an achievement you get just to check the box of getting the achievement itself. Seven Holy Cities reads like it wants to be a Campaign Achievement: Be a Hindu Ruler, and control all Holy Sites (in your big theoretical Empire). But in actuality, this achievement is trivialised by its ease of obtaining, and the relative lack of flavour that would inspire someone to play somewhere outside of Europe/The Middle East. The most recommended way to get this achievement is to start as a Ruler that already holds 6 of them and just fabricate a claim on the final remaining site. I think an easy identifier for a checkmark achievement is one that you create a save to do, do the achievement quickly, and then exit the save file.
Achievements in the base game are, overall, pretty decent. There are some misses in the Checkmark Achievements, but a lot of issues with the checkmark achievements are typically an issue with an area not having a fantastic amount of flavour and just needing more development before an achievement should be put there. Glaring examples in the opposite direction should be the infamous The Things Love Does For Us which is functionally completely random to obtain, and would barely be obtained through the course of normal gameplay, and so falls to being a Checkmark Achievement. Moving on from this, I'd like to look at achievements from the DLCs we had prior to Tours and Tournaments and just check how we've been doing until now.
Converging Paths/ Changing Course (Royal Court) - Something I noticed about the Flavour packs we've got so far (Northern Lords & Fate of Iberia) is that they don't really have Basic Achievements at all. I don't really think this is a problem since an inherent thing with DLC is that you expect players to buy it once they've already played the base game, and Basic Achievements are better geared towards getting new players into hunting the rest of the achievements you as a game developer have laid out. That being said, the Expansions we have so far do have Basic Achievements, is this discrepancy something to raise issue with? I don't know, if you want to, I guess, I don't have a problem with it. Basic Achievements are pretty hard to go wrong with, and should really just be reflective of something simple a player should get through naturally playing, Basic Achievements are pretty much all good, but a good achievement list should have more than them.
A Dangerous Business (Northern Lords) - Here we have, in my opinion, something that bucks the trend of nearly all Checkmark Achievements being bad. This is cute. It's a cute little reference to another game, and the requisite conditions for it are easy to achieve, and don't require you to build your whole campaign around it, sacrificing other aspects of the game. A key difference that separates this from any of the other Checkmark Achievements is that this can very naturally springboard you into any other larger scale achievement, and I think that while Checkmark Achievements are something that should try to be avoided in terms of development, this is basically as good as you can get.
Iberian Hostilites/ Iberian Conciliation/ Iberian Compromise (Fate of Iberia) - Say what you will about the state of the Struggle mechanic, these are good. To get them you need to interact with the core mechanic of the DLC, and do so in a way that the game was meant to be played. These propose larger campaigns for you, and basically let you sandbox your way to them through whatever means you want. As inoffensive as achievement design can get.
Nobody Comes to Fika (Royal Court) - I think this is some kind of Swedish joke I'm too funny to understand. This just falls to being a Checkmark Achievement and I think comes in contrast to A Dangerous Business in that this absolutely forces you to play in a way that skews you away from doing anything else important with the run, and so most runs of this are slow while you get the achievement, and then end as soon as the pop comes up. Also this is listed as Very Hard. I don't really want to get into difficulties since difficulty is arbitrary, but this isn't hard, it's just boring.
Lingua Franca (Royal Court) - What is there to say about this achievement that hasn't already been said. It looks like something that should make an interesting Campaign Achievement, but it completely falls flat, the mechanics for language change in Royal Courts is too passive, and before I bit the bullet and ground through this achievement, I waited months in hope that a patch would release that introduced a bug that made language change snowball too hard so I could just get it easily. Really terrible design, easily the worst achievement in the game, it's a Checkmark Achievement that takes 20 hours.
King of all the Isles (Northern Lords) - This is the last achievement I wanted to talk about in the prior DLC section. I love this achievement. It fulfils the prior categories mentioned for a Campaign Achievement (What to do, Who to do it as, What restrictions to do it under) and gives you all 3 in spades. The Who allows you to play as either the clearly recommended start in Ivar the Boneless, but also allows a player the freedom of choosing any other Germanic Asatru to start their run as. The What to do is incredibly specific and convoluted, something that no player would think to do in the natural course of play, and feels like a real genuine challenge issued by the developers to those who love their game. Finally, the What restrictions that are imposed on you are cute. You aren't meant to do this as a big snowbally empire, this isn't just an achievement you can get as part of your world conquest, to get this achievement you need to just be a King of the Isles. Great achievement design, 10/10.
Having gone through the DLC achievements, they've basically not lost their spark. They're as (and at times more) inventive than the achievements from the base game, while still in many cases providing the easily accessible Basic Achievements that a game should have, while also having challenges for the experienced players to really strive for. With that being said, my opinion on the Achievements in Tours and Tournaments is:
I don't like them I think they're quite bad actually. Let's see why.
The Very Best/ Like No One Ever Was (Tours and Tournaments) - These are the Basic Achievements offered by Tours and Tournaments, there's not really a problem with them, and they're something it's feasible to expect a player to go for or try to obtain without really the promise of an achievement at the end anyway. My problem with T&T's Basic Achievements is that it feels like there's so many of them. Just to show: Black Dinner, Hunting Accident, Fly, My Pretty!, Pathway to Heaven, There and Back Again, The Very Best, and Like No One Ever Was are all basic achievements, and all of them just really ask you to interact with some aspect of the new content. But to understand an issue with Basic Achievements, they have to be looked at in the context of the other achievements to see what they're meant to be stepping stones towards.
I'm in my Element(s) (Tours and Tournaments) - Here we have one of T&T's Checkmark Achievements, this would appear to be something you'd get towards the end of a longer playthrough, but why would you? You'd have to manually craft your empire to wind around the world in a way that allows you to pass through all the different types of terrain when most activities are doable just inches from your capital, and at no real loss to you for doing so. The best way to get this achievement is make a custom character, do one pilgrimage with a few detours, and then close the save. Really poor design.
A.E.I.O.U. and Me (Tours and Tournaments) - This is the only campaign achievement offered by Tours and Tournaments and it's just boring, there isn't enough to do in the game while you're at peace, even with the new additions from T&T. This one is the most painful because just like all the Checkmarks before it, it reads hopefully - start as someone specific, complete this objective, and do not break this restriction, but it feels as though if someone played through to this achievement naturally in testing, the conclusion they'd come to would be "this one isn't ready yet, maybe in future".
A Knight's Tale (Tours and Tournaments) - This is the last achievement I really want to talk about, and it basically summarises all the other achievements from T&T I haven't yet mentioned. This one seems somewhat inoffensive, but that's just the issue, T&T is full of inoffensive achievements that don't really ask anything of you barring one, and that achievement asks you to do something that isn't really particularly interesting. This achievement is passive; have something be happening that you don't really have control over, and then tick a box. There's so much of T&T's achievements that's just "hope something happens in a way that gets you an achievement" that it makes none of them really feel like achievements at all, and as someone who uses achievements to assist me in direction in this huge sandbox game, has left me very directionless.
That's the end of my rant, thanks for reading if you did, if you skipped down to see a tl;dr, I've got some family guy funny moments that might be more up your alley.
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