The origin of World of Warcraft's achievement system

Sometimes it seems like if you said the skies in WoW are basically the same as real-life skies you'd get a "Not so, says WoW Lead Designer Jeffrey Kaplan. Our skies are designed to be more approachable and accessible than real-life skies. We've taken the skies from real-life and made them better."

Sigh.

This is a fairly simple rip-off of other game's achievement systems. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that, but man up to it Blizz.

Actually, this is Blizzard acknowledging WAR as the biggest threat WoW has ever faced and is doing everything in their power to keep as many subscribers as possible. "Look, we have an achievment system too...." On Sept. 18, WoW's once solid walls with begin to crumble.

Ermh, LOTRO, anyone? Had titles, deeds and other achievements in-game related long before WAR?

City of heroes had badge systems long before LOTRO... badge-collecting was (and still) is quite a craze there.

If you really sit down and think about it, this type of system has been long in coming and not really a new concept, but more of a new implementation.

"Achievements" at first in MMO's came in the form of gear. Everyone knew what raid level gear looked like from the elite groups that were able to get them. It was like saying " Look what I did" but with gear.

LOTRO was the first system I played that used a Deed system that gave you title so you could show everyone what you did, without the need for gear.

So now we move to this new system, where both WoW and WAR have a system in place to record what you have done. Same as the faction grind and so forth that used to be in place. Is one better than the other? Hard to say at this moment, but atleast developers are acknowledging that there is more to MMO's than Quest-Level-Raid-Repeat.

Thing is, WAR's achievement system is far far greater than WoW's or ANY mmo that has come before. Besides, I just think it sucks that WoW is getting achievements NOW after many players worked their asses off to accomplish a lot of things over the past 3 years... what about all THOSE ahievements that wont be recorded...

Well lets keep going even farther back to the Badge System of Star Wars Galaxies, of course it just had to be up dated to fit in to their collection system.