Xbox Achievements Getting New Features and Options

Microsoft is rolling out improvements and updates to its pioneering Achievements system for Xbox, adding things like updated icons and animations, the ability to highlight your 100%-completed games, and the option to hide games from your list of Achievements. These changes are available to inner-ring Insiders today, and they’ll roll out wider to other Insider groups and then everyone else in the coming weeks and months.

Classic or rare Achievement unlocks will now trigger new icons and animations, with those notifications now matching your selected custom UI color. Meanwhile, later this month you’ll gain the ability to hide any game from your Achievement history from your profile. So, for instance, if you feel retroactive shame about farming all 1,000 Achievement points in under five minutes on the notoriously easy-Achievement Xbox 360 game Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Burning Earth, you can now bury that shame. I may or may not be talking to myself here…

Conversely, you can also now highlight the games you’ve earned 100% of Achievements for, so if you’re, say, super proud of putting in the time with all the guild questlines to get all 1,000 points in the base version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (sorry, I’m talking to myself again), you can do that.

The Achievement system debuted when the Xbox 360 launched in 2005 and was later copied by just about every other video game platform maker, from PlayStation to Steam. We’ll talk more about this and everything else happening in the world of Xbox on Podcast Unlocked, IGN’s weekly Xbox show that drops new episodes every Thursday.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.