So is gamerscore important? To a lot of people it is. For many it’s not. For me it’s somewhat important. When the Xbox 360 launched in 2005, it included Achievements. Achievements could be unlocked by playing games. In the beginning, Achievements were fairly easy because no one really knew what to do with them or if they would even catch on. Call of Duty 2 offered 1000G for just playing through the campaign on Veteran. Today Achievements are in almost every game whether it’s the Achievements on Steam or Origin or the Trophies on Playstation.
My Xbox gamerscore is currently just over 45,000G. I’ve had my Xbox 360 since the second wave of consoles which launched at midnight on January 1, 2006. I wasn’t into Achievements at first because I didn’t understand them. I just played games through games and moved on to the next unless it was a multiplayer game. However, in 2009, I found myself with lots of free time. Naturally, I filled it with video games and that’s when I really got into video games. My gamerscore was just over 2,000G when I began my Achievement hunting journey. My gamerscore is a record of all of the games I’ve played. I only care about my gamerscore on Xbox though. It’s the system I chose to invest most of my time in. I play on multiple platforms like PC and Playstation, but I could care less about the Achievement systems on those platforms. But on Xbox, I can’t simply play through a game and never look back like I can with PS3 games. I have to try to unlock all of the achievements. I’m proud of unlocking the hard achievements and getting a lot of the multiplayer achievements that would only unlock through sheer luck. I know it can be time consuming sometimes and even frustrating, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
However, I don’t think people with less gamerscore than me are worse players nor do I think that people with higher gamerscores are better players. It could go either way. Someone might have a low gamerscore because they play only a few games, but they could be really good at those games. Someone with a high gamerscore might play tons of games and not be good at any of them. I think I’m somewhere in the middle. There are a few games that I’m really good at and play a lot, but there are some games that I’m not so good at as well. However, I’m not a gamerscore whore. I’m not going to play a game just to get some achievements. If I have no interest in the game, then I’m not going to play it which you can tell because some games on my list only have 1 or 2 Achievements unlocked.
With this new generation of consoles, the gamerscore system seems a bit fractured to me. I don’t like the fact that so many developers are releasing the same game on Xbox 360 and Xbox One with the same Achievements. Purchasing or renting the same game twice and playing through it twice is not something I plan on doing. So I made the decision that if it’s on both consoles, then I will only play the Xbox One version and work on those Achievements. I know I’ll be losing out on gamerscore, but it’s not that serious. I don’t have the time nor the patience to do that. Overall, Achievements are awesome and I’m glad they are a part of the Xbox experience.
Until next time.