So, I have been playing the classic Quake and Doom 64 games. Games that have existed since before the manifestation of ‘Achievements’. The joy of the game was in itself the reason to play it.
Not anymore it would seem, since even they have suffered the blessing of ‘achievements’.
In fact, so important is this feature above all other aspects of the game, that there is no method of disabling them. And we must pause our action and divert our gaze to the magnificence of the large white rectangle which promptly and periodically informs us that we are, indeed playing the game.

Though I spake with the tongues of men and of angels, I could not form the sufficient verbiage into poem, sonnet, song, or lament in order to express my vitriol for this light-accursed blight on video games.

Hate.

Let me tell you how much I've come to hate video game achievements since they began to manifest their carcinogen. There are 357.288 billion miles of DNA in micro coils that fill the cells of my body. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal to one one-billionth of the hate I feel for in-game achievements at this micro-planck second.

Hate.

Hate.

EDIT: I made a wish. If you click it you will have achieved 'clicking it'.
Provide a way to disable achievements when offline

So, you want no achievements and you must scream?

This is exactly why sometimes the best "Enhanced" Editions / Remasters are the originals played via decent free community source-ports (GZDoom, Quakespasm / vkQuake, etc) rather than "official" re-releases. Shoehorning in achievements to 30 year old games that never originally had them (usually by new developers who played no part in creating the originals and often the IP was acquired by a different publisher who never published the originals but who now imposes a Marketing Dept Tickbox checklist of gimmicks to fulfil) is the equivalent of re-releasing classic movies on DVD with social media related extras that are played *over the top* of the movie in the most obnoxious immersion breaking way possible...

Edit: Nice reference BTW.

Is this a thing?? How horrible.

And to OP, I agree. Achievements are lazy garbage, like taking an already delicious meal and "improving" it by dumping a seasoning cannister over it.

I think game achievements are great, but only if they are reasonably doable. Like for example, the story-based ones. X number of kills with a weapon. Discover a secret easter egg, etc. I like to think of it as milestones, like the devs or other player can see how many people reached a certain part of game judging by the % of unlockers. It also presents a reason to play the game again and try a different approach.

But I hate when they make it difficult, for example the ones like finishing a game on hardest difficulty using only the basic weapon with no upgrades. Or find dozens of easily missed collectibles. And the worst of all, multiplayer achievements in games designed for singleplayer. I'm not a fan of the idea that you have to do something hard to get the feeling of achieving an achievement.

Although the achievements are console-only, I think Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is what I consider the ideal achievement. All of them are related to completing parts of the game and are doable in a single playthrough (except for one which requires a save-reload and choosing different path), no difficulty-related, collectible, or doing near-impossible actions.

And Achievements are a (relatively) new way to experience more joy in computer games, and enhance the joy from old games that have Achievements added to them now.

I'm not sure what you mean by saying you "cannot disable Achievements," but on GOG, you certainly can do that.

Achievements are a great and amazing innovation in video games.

Certainly many Achievements are bad, especially ones that are not reasonable for the average gamer to able to achieve, but that doesn't mean the concept itself is bad. That would be like saying all video games are bad just because most of them are bad.

Hopefully more GOG customers will start speaking out against, and also boycotting, all GOG games that are missing Galaxy Achievements but which do have Achievements for the same games on other stores.

And hopefully also, GOG curation will finally stop allowing for that to happen in the first place, and refuse to list new games that try to pull that missing feature rip off on GOG customers.

And also hopefully GOG will finally delist all games that are missing Achievements that are present for the same games on other platforms but missing on GOG, unless & until those devs bring their games up to par and give the GOG versions full feature parity by way of them adding all of the missing Achievements.

Galaxy Settings > Game features > Achievements > Untick.
"Problem" solved. You know what I hate? When a game has achievements on Steam, but not on GOG.

It's a thing SOMETIMES and always completely optional. I have yet to encounter a single optical disc movie where any extra, especially some social media one, is layered on top by default. Try Telltale's Batman games. That's the only kind of achievement they have.

First I'm hearing of it. Guess it's good I don't watch movies anymore.

Achievements are like the trophies you cut out of the back of a cereal box. They're a really basic customer loyalty scheme. A barebones social media feature – thriving in a world in which everybody overtly seems to hate social media – that badly simulates your participation in a world wide competition. In which you "compete with other players" while playing a god damn single player game. They substitute great game design for fetch quests and degrade players to mindless remote controlled entities. They encourage looking up the solution online instead of experimentation. They demand spending way more time in the game than adults usually have. They normalise a wholly outdated idea of the cool, consumerist alpha core gamer who has a gamer "level" and plays every shit game for a hundred hours because of the "platinum trophies".

Achievements are an extrinsic reward scheme, a pat on the back from outside the logic and the world building of the game, a feature that destroys immersion and gives the designer less freedom to make the intrinsic reward of playing his/her damn game actually fun.

Sure you can turn them off somewhere (actually, you can't turn achievements off in launchers – just the popups). But the law of the playground always applies. Achievements were integrated in the game, they took up a relevant portion of development time (oh yes they did, folks, yes they fucking did). They're literally some of the woefully few toys stuck in that sandbox you're buying with hard earned money. Whatever you think of achievements, you'll have to admit that the law of the playground is a very strong motivator for turning on achievements. Of course, you literally paid for the development time, you want to try out all the "features", even the shit ones.

There's more manipulative force behind achievement implementation.

Take the "completion" percentage value. Say you've finished a game with achievements "turned off". You weren't bothered with any popups. You took a long time finding stuff in the game world on your own without consulting online sources. You had a really satisfying, immersive game experience. You log into your profile and it says you completed the game "58 percent" and only collected "217 bronze trophies". Even the achievement haters extraordinaire won't tell me that they didn't occasionally look at this value completely dumbfounded, then started up the game again, looked up solutions online and essentially spent another 30+ hours in the game doing insipid fetch quests, "finding" developer in-jokes and "solving" badly designed puzzles that only the guy who wrote the online solution ever figured out. Tell me you never felt empty inside after those 30, 40, 50 hours complete waste of time in which you could have written a novel, learned to play the piano, take up some watercolors or trim that fat with a jog. Happened to me with Mass Effect Andromeda. With fucking Mass fucking Effect fucking Andromeda fucking. A game that had content for like 8 great hours of gameplay, yet I spent 110 in it.

Valve called achievements a lot of pompous names back in the day, but the one that stuck with me most was:

"soft copy protection"

They literally sold this achievement shit to their business clients as a DRM alternative. Back when they actually had to advertise their services to developers.

Famously Sean Vanaman tweeted his frustration with achievements while working on his instant hit game "Firewatch". He said that instead of investing development time into creating achievements, he'd rather make his game better. I couldn't find this tweet right now. Which might be because a gazillionaire right wing nutjob has made twitter the home of nazis, or because Vanaman works for Valve now and can't be caught making such subversive statements.

I really don't want to belittle the folks who are into achievements, but I find it interesting how people can reject any kind of DRM outright on the one hand, but readily embrace a copy protection system that's much more devious and dishonest. Achievements are a truly effective copy protection system only if they are an intricate and indispensable part of the games, only if games are spoiled for those who hate achievements' guts. Think about that and then think about how opportunist and money grabbing you assessed AAA companies to be these last years and you'll get a pretty clear road map for achievements in the future.

I actually don't have anything against achievements, as long as they are realistic, like what both kenadrian and Ancient-Red-Dragon have explained in their earlier posts. And besides, sometimes achievements can provide additional humor into the game, like how certain achievements are named. If anything, I wish there was a way to reset all your achievements so you can try to attain them the second time.

Additionally, if the reason behind your hate for video game achievements lies in the annoyance of being alerted of the constant notifications whenever you achieve an achievement, maybe what you want is a feature where the storefront's launcher would only notify you of those achievements right after you've finished a level, a round, or a match, not during them. That way you can stay focused on the gameplay without having to worry about achievements.

I don't hate them per se, if we are talking about in-game achievements that unlock things like character classes, weapon types, items etc. I actually like them.

On the other hand, some games (afair) didn't get a gog release, because the devs weren't able to get achievements working for Galaxy. I might be completely wrong on that though.

That is impossible to do if you play Quake and Doom64 offline, or without Galaxy. And they keep resetting, so you get to see them every single time you play the game.
One would think that they would be there only if you are connected to the internet or have Galaxy installed, but no, they made them an intrinsic part of the game itself.

While I have only completed probably around 10-15% of my 1000+ game library, I don't think I remember a single game with these "achievements" you mentioned.

Actually, scratch that. Now that I think about, it is possible an action RPG called Risen might have had those, though I don't remember caring for them at all, nor them being particularly intrusive (there were some pretty rare pop-ups on the screen that coincided with some things like completing a long quest or maxing out a specific character ability).

The only other game I remember having something like this is an older MMO called World of Warcraft, where they added these "achievement" pop-ups in one of the expansions - once again, these were quite rare, you would usually see them when completely a new dungeon or raid for the first time, reaching maximum character level, maxing out reputation with one of the factions - stuff like that.

We must be playing completely different games if I have not even encountered these achievements in 99% of what I played.

Really curious now what these rare things are that can generate so much hate from someone, haha.

Yup, played Batman and Walking Dead Telltale games. Aside from TWD Final Season, all of them are story-based. Would be better if they were more descriptive though instead of simply "completed part 3 of episode 3" although it may be a bit spoilery.