Microsoft is Working on “Fundamental Changes” to the Xbox Achievement System

Xbox Achievement’s are a cornerstone of the system’s ecosystem and have been since they first released. By completing specific objectives in games, players are awarded Achievements that then add to their Gamerscore which can shown off for bragging rights or to simply track progress.

Recently during a 90-minute interview, Xbox Platform Corporate Vice President Mike Ybarra spoke about changes coming to the Achievement system. Although he was unable to go into too much detail, Windows Central grabbed the full quote where he noted that Microsoft is working on something that “fundamentally changes the concept” of Achievements, with the aims of highlighting other accomplishments of players who may not play a ton of games, but play one game professionally.

“Those are all small things that we can do to the system, and the team looks at them,” Ybarra said. “They’re in our backlog of things that we want to get done, but there’s actually bigger, more bolder changes that we have in mind. Nothing that I can talk about now, but something that fundamentally changes the concept … we are working towards a bigger, more meaningful change about somebody’s gaming accomplishments in history, as a gamer on Xbox.”

“[W]e can do a lot more to reflect and let people show their gaming history and their status. Whether it’s somebody who only plays multiplayer in Halo 5 at a professional level, maybe they only have 2,000 Gamerscore, you want to be able to celebrate that person. You want people to be in the know. This person doesn’t play a lot of games, but they’re world top ten at Halo 5. All the way to people [with over a million gamerscore]. It’s that range that we really need to look at and celebrate … we’re going to go big in the area of letting people show off and represent their gaming history and the type of gamer that they are, far more than we do with Gamerscore.”

It’s important to note that the current Achievement system is not going away or being replaced. Another system is simply being developed to complement that feature. What form it will take, however, is unknown.