Playing Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition on PC and I hit one of those classic “Bugthesda” moments: last time this level crashed to desktop with no warning, and today my screen randomly auto‑adjusted mid‑game and threw my aim and immersion completely off.
I did the usual ritual: check for updates → Microsoft Store updates → verify game files → repair the library. You know the drill.
But honestly, that’s not the part that’s really stuck in my head.
What’s been gnawing at me is this: in 2026, are achievements still relevant in the way platforms treat them—especially when mods disable them anyway?
A few things bother me:
Mods disable achievements (even on consoles now in some cases), so for a lot of players they’re already meaningless mechanically.
There’s no way to opt out. If I don’t want a permanent public record of what I did or didn’t do in a game, tough luck.
Even if I uninstall or refund a game, the partial achievement list just sits there on my profile forever like a half‑finished diary I never agreed to publish.
What I wish existed is something like:
a “no achievements” mode where I can play purely for the experience, and my achievement list just shows as “inaccessible/opted out” to others
or at least the ability to hide or erase achievements for specific games if I decide I don’t want that history attached to me anymore
I’m not pretending I can change the minds of big companies who still design like it’s 2005, but I am genuinely curious what different types of players think:
Achievement hunters: Do you care if others can opt out, or does that not affect you at all?
Mod users (PC and console): Since mods often disable achievements, do they still matter to you in any way?
Everyone else: Do you ever think about the permanence of your achievement history, or is it just background noise?
Is it time for platforms to give us a real opt‑out or ephemeral play option, or am I overthinking something that most people are fine with?
We have very different understandings of what a Skinner box is, and I don’t think achievements count.
Variably timed “rewards” which trick your brain into performing repetitive tasks for longer than you normally would? Achievements definitely count.
They tell you exactly what rewards you with them in most cases. They’re finite and not random. They’re hard coded and easily searchable. The point of a Skinner box is that the mouse doesn’t know when the next reward comes. I’m not prepared to say “most” definitively, but at least many achievements don’t require any repetition and are given out for one bespoke action exactly one time, often just as checkpoints for how far you made it into a story.
Most people do not look up all the achievements before they play. So, to them, it appears random, as they just pop up spontaneously as they play. And they usually start of with a bunch and get further apart as time goes on and the harder achievements take longer, so the time varies in much the same way as all those mobile games that have some sort of action economy
I don’t buy it. If achievements were addictive, more people would finish games, and one of the things that we learned from achievements data is that even a 50% rate of finishing a game is rare. The Skinner box conditions behavior when you know that doing a thing sometimes results in a reward or the avoidance of a punishment, and that doesn’t mesh with an achievement that only rewards an action once rather than continually handing it out occasionally for repeating an action.
There are people that buy awful games just to 100% them and get the achievements. They actively search out things which give easy achievements. Not because the game might be fun, just to see number go up.
Not everything is addictive in the same way to everyone. So I don’t really care what you “buy”, it’s a behavior that exists in the real world.