Steam’s Bold Move: Can New Achievement Set Beta Finally Fix Your Completion Nightmares?

Valve Launches Beta for Steam Achievement Sets, Enhancing Game Completion Tracking

Valve has announced the beta testing of Steam Achievement Sets, a new feature that enables game developers to group achievements into organized collections. This initiative addresses the challenge of managing achievements that accumulate with ongoing content updates, ensuring that they remain discoverable for players.

In an announcement, Valve stated that as games continue to evolve with new downloadable content (DLC), expansions, and seasonal updates, previously completed achievements can become hard to find, potentially disrupting players’ completion records. By incorporating Achievement Sets, developers can now define the number and types of sets tailored to their games, allowing for configurations such as single-player versus multiplayer groupings or class-based sets.

Players will unlock achievements in the usual manner, but these will be automatically categorized by Steam into the developer-defined sets. Valve emphasized that this system aims to make it “easier to see what you have completed and to find other related achievements you can unlock next.”

Each Achievement Set will feature its own progress bar, and completing a set rewards players with a “set complete” trophy. If new achievements are added, players’ completion status is maintained. Developers have the flexibility to create additional sets as a game evolves, which helps returning players easily identify new achievements available to unlock while keeping their prior completion status intact.

There are two categories of sets: Base Game sets, which include achievements available to all players and are marked in blue, and DLC sets, which aggregate achievements requiring additional content and are marked in purple. Notably, DLC achievements will not affect overall game progress until players have access to the relevant content, allowing for separate tracking of new achievements.

Developers are also provided the option to archive individual achievements or entire sets, catering to seasonal games or limited-time achievements. Players who had previously unlocked such achievements will still see them on their profiles, although archived achievements will not appear for users who missed the unlocks and won’t impede their progress towards completing a set or game.

The rollout includes an updated achievements page accessible via the Games List on the web and in the Steam Library. The search function has also received enhancements, allowing users to filter by specific sets and the status of achievements. Players can compare their achievement progress with up to three friends, including comparisons of rare achievements and completed sets.

Furthermore, the previously named Perfect Games tab has been updated to “Completed,” showcasing both fully completed games and games with completed achievement sets. Games accessed through Family Sharing will now be visible in the Games List, with friend comparisons enabled for those titles as well. Store and Library pages will indicate if a game features achievement sets.

The beta program is currently accessible to both players and developers. Valve plans to make continual improvements during this phase, indicating that players will notice changes in supported games as developers begin utilizing the new tools.

Several titles, including Against the Storm, Age of Wonders 4, and Team Fortress 2, have already integrated achievement sets into their systems.
Last Sunday, Valve’s digital platform reached a record of 43,505,724 concurrent users. Meanwhile, Epic Games continues to develop its own offerings, recently launching a new Epic Games Launcher to compete with Steam’s dominance in the digital gaming marketplace.

News Courtesy of Eurogamer