These Video Game Achievements SUCK!

At the time of writing, we're coming to the close of another, let's just call it "interesting" year (this could also be substituted for the words "hellscape of..." if you so wish) and by the time that this NOT LIST is made into a video, we'll be emerging from our Hobbit holes wiping away the egg nog crust from our eyes and staring out at a brand new year.

It's a time for excitement, hope, and planning for the road ahead, but also one of reflection and recollection. For you see while we likely all want to roll up our sleeves and get stuck in, it's important to remind ourselves of what we achieved in the year just gone, of the personal trophies we popped the big game of life.

And while you might not think it, even completing the most minor real-life task is better than the absolute video game stinkers we'll be covering today, for while each of these "trophies" presented themselves as a reward for players, each was an exercise in frustration, an utter time sink, a convoluted mess to unlock or even worse, all of the above.

So buckle in because it's time to learn some hard facts, namely that some rewards are just not worth the effort.

Now, normally the Neverwinter Nights series of games would never grace the cesspit that is this video series because let's face it those titles were made with love and care are rarely seen in the current gaming climate, yet today we are going to be taking the Neverwinter MMORPG to task and I can do so with a clear conscious for two reasons.

The first being that Neverwinter isn't considered to be a standalone game apart from the mainline entries so I don't feel as bad ragging on it, and secondly because the Dragon's Bane achievement is such a boil full of fizzy piss that it needs to be lanced out of existence. Dragons, as you might expect, in this game are no pushover, and Neverwinter tasks you with slaying one thousand of the fuckers in order to pop this trophy.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, "come on Jules you pale, oh so very pale goblin of a man, MMORPG's and grinding go together like Resident Evil Village fans and a strange desire to be stepped on, it's just what you do so why don't you shut that sexy mouth of yours and go get yourself some nice Dragon-skin boots like a good little cud-muncher"

Well my friend, aside from the very conflicting insult/compliment style of your message, while this trophy sounds simple to unlock, requiring just a shedload of your time, it's actually much more of a pain in the scrum thanks to the game itself actively trying to work against you at every turn.

By this I mean that for some weird reason, the title doesn't track how many Dragons you've killed, meaning you could be 563 Dragons deep and not have a single clue how much more you've got to go, killing any sense of investment you might have for the process. You might even begin to drive yourself mad as you think you must have killed enough by now right? only for the game to just apathetically shrug and say "maybe, maybe not, why don't you keep killing and find out"

I don't know how but this trophy makes the act of slaying mythical dragons...boring.

Worse still, remember this is an MMORPG meaning you're very likely to be aiming to net this trophy as a group, and the game only tracks kills if you managed to do enough damage to one before it gets taken out, meaning you could well be thinking you're Johnny Dragon Slayer but in reality, you're not even a Jimmy Lizard Puncher, hell you're a Bobby Newt Tickler if anything!

Add to this the fact that the only way to reasonably farm dragons will see you repeating a quest 500 times and will take you over 70 hours and you can see why Bane truly is apt for this title, as this is an exercise in annoyance.