Of the three biggest gaming companies, hardcore audiences often mistake Nintendo as the black sheep of the family. It's easy to see why they'd think so. The company often holds out on features already standard on rival gaming systems.
Take online saves for instance, which only the Switch presently still doesn't have. For its part, Nintendo has so far enjoyed being a global brand for kid-friendly games, casual titles, and Nostalgia-inducing franchises the likes of Mario and Zelda. However, many hardcore gamers merely see the company as largely inessential to their gaming preferences. That might change with the Switch, the company's wildly successful hybrid console.
Achievement System Might Be Coming To Nintendo Switch
The Switch is different than Nintendo's past consoles in a way that it's more open to ideas this time around. For the first time ever, Nintendo will launch a paid online service for sophisticated multiplayer features, in the vein of Sony's PlayStation Network and Microsoft's Xbox Live. There might also be another element Nintendo is working on that will make the Switch more like its rivals: an achievement system.
Nintendo seems to be the only company among the big three that is still holding out on any form of a dedicated achievements or trophies system, but an indie developer hints otherwise. The news came from the folks who worked on Lichtspeer, an indie title recently ported to the Switch. The developers recently conducted an Ask Me Anything session, where it mostly covered queries about their game. One question asked about whether or not the game had online rankings.
"Nintendo doesn't have an official support for Achievements and Leaderboards, like Sony or Microsoft but we know that they're working on it," answered one of the developers.
"Huh?! Isn't this supposed to be a secret?" one Reddit user said.
"Move along. Nothing to see here," one of the developers jokingly replied. They also said that Nintendo has hinted about it several times already.
Nintendo has not talked about such a feature for its newest console, so it's possible the company has something planned for the future, perhaps when the Switch's online service kicks into full gear.
What's The Big Deal About An Achievement System, Anyway?
In-game achievements might not seem that important to the core gaming experience, but it's actually a clever way to enhance a game's longevity. For instance, it gives players incentives to continue playing long after completing the main story. There's a subset of the gaming community called "purists," or players who stop at nothing until they have collected everything there is to collect, or beaten whoever there is to beat. They aim to complete the absolute 100 percent of any game, and surely achievements will make them salivate even more.
Get on it, Nintendo.
