Daerphen
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The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
29 hours playtime
10 of 11 achievements
Report #379: The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
Life of Daerphen Challenge Year 2022
Well this is a very stupid thing to do as an (honest) achievement hunter. Starting a game you know you will not finish in the next 10 years :D
At least I can count it as beaten. Did a lot of endings in the progress, most of them are identically to the original game, just there is a chance of getting some extra content with funny twist of commentary. The 24h idle part is also not too difficult. Especially because you can do that in multiple sessions, not like for the previous one where you have to do it in one session.
Now I have to wait until June 2033 to start the game again and get the 11th achievement. Lets hope Steam still exists then.
If you’re actually serious about the “honest” part, that’s a disagree from me. This game’s achievement, like the first one’s, is just a meta 4th wall-breaking meme that actually makes fun of achievement hunters. I mean, just look at their tweet.
I used to be part of those leaderboards websites but saw how stupid some of the rules are and left. There’s nothing dishonest about doing what was in a way intended by the dev and “time-travelling” to earn the achievement instead of “earning” it by not doing anything for 5/10 years and proving the point of the dev how we can do silly shit all for some shiny jpeg’s. Both are valid options. Also, the first game has an achievement named “Unachievable” which you need to edit the game’s files to achieve. Again, this is just the dev making fun of the achievement community. Because if we consider all of this as cheating, what about “boosting” multiplayer achievements? Is that cheating as well? And I know for certain 99.999% of achievement hunters earn them this way, since I was a part of many sessions myself.
Boy, you wouldn’t believe how unbelievably insufferable some people get about this though. Some guy started a thread by suggesting people should be banned by doing this and even though he seems to have had enough throwing petty insults at everyone who disagrees, people are still jumping in to say their piece. (I… would know, I got into it fairly early on…)
Sometimes people are crazy about this stuff. The whole “debate” surrounding The Stanley Parable thing is insanely stupid IMO. The game has achievements that make fun of achievement hunters. They’re meta 4th wall-breaking stuff. So, whether you “time-travel” or do nothing for 5 years, you were made fun of by the dev for doing something stupid for a pointless PNG on Steam. And it’s funny to see the discussion about this given that boosting MP achievements is ok, but this isn’t. You still “cheated” by boosting achievements as it makes them 1000x easier to earn. It’s as if you used cheats in an SP game to make whatever thing you were struggling with a piece of cake. With all those Halo MCC MP stuff I boosted, it would take me probably 10x as long to do legit in a normal session. So, having these dumb rules for some but then letting other things slide is kinda dumb.
I personally decided it was time to leave the whole achievement-hunting scene when I saw the stupid debate over whether the Batman Arkham Origins MP “fix” should be allowed as legit. Just showed that this thing, which was fun for me to do because I like to do it, now has so many rules that I need to keep in mind so that my “achievements” are counted as legit. There’s no way I’m playing vanilla Witcher 3 or Skyrim again on Steam where I have 0 achievements. I’m modding that game day 1. But that’s a no-no. These silly rules just took out the joy of achievement hunting.
The craziest thing to me is just how serious people get about it all, like there’s just no middle ground. Knowing what this achievement is like, I figured most people would just change their system time to get it, which is fine, it’s a single-player game which they are not breaking by doing it, but also, I waited for five years to get the first one because I had other stuff to do. So unless someone’s got a terminal illness waiting to put them down, the “but you might die!” argument is probably the most ridiculous one yet (and yes, it has come up in that thread). I would call myself an achievement hunter, but at the same time, I do stuff that’s in line with my needs or capabilities - downloading other people’s save states, editing values with Cheat Engine if something’s just impossible to do in a relatively short time, autosolvers for puzzle games. I enjoy finishing a game, but I don’t have the time to be reprimanded for having someone play on my account or not being a Sudoku genius. And even though I hardly ever play MP games, I can empathize because of how ridiculous the requirements for some Paladins achievements are - you need to have two full teams of people to even attempt to get them, but it’s just impossible to get ten people together at once for some reason.
Glad to be talking to someone like-minded <3