For completionists who love seeing those achievements pile in, Steam has long been a gold standard for PC gaming. Every game I play, I can easily view my stats, revel in my hard-earned milestones. Unfortunately, as I’ve been recently playing more split-screen/shared co-ops, I find myself dreading whenever I’m not hosting.

The last two months, I’ve played Kingdom of Night, Untitled Goose Game, and Wildfire. In the first, my teammate and I ran it as completionists. They hosted. Their achievement list filled up, and after the first chunk, I was left with a completely empty library of achievements. Of course, that wasn’t enough for me to leave a game, but it irked me.

Second one came around. I was a clever goose. I had debated pushing to host, but going up against a guy who regularly builds his own system and works in IT, I graciously took the Player 2 slot. Once again, my clever goose antics won my fellow silly goose achievement after achievement, but when the game game to an end.

Now, I’m in the middle of a run of Wildfire and faced with the same dilemma, which has me wondering how many other completionists shy away from split-screen/shared co-ops and avoid a whole mess of two-player games specifically because of the frustration of earned but denied achievements.

Would it truly be such an overhaul to have achievements earned during a split-screen/shared co-op duplicated on both host and guest side?

The same processes that allow such co-ops should have native session-linking tied into the achievements, allowing automatic or player-based verification if achievements during any co-op session were earned together regardless of minor latency hiccups or host migration.

If Valve doesn’t want to make that call across all developers, they could simply add a toggle, allowing developers to flag achievements for co-op unlock, putting the call in the hands of the game makers. I’d be curious to see the stats after something like that were introduced. My money would be on those with the feature would be favored, and we would see it becoming standard in only a few years.

Co-op gaming is all about camaraderie and shared triumph. Steam’s achievement system should reflect this, and it shouldn’t treat split-screen/shared co-op as an afterthought. Valve can alleviate this massive headache for completionists, making playing with friends the all-around joy that it ought to already be.

Have a frustrating multiplayer experience in Steam? Think that fixing this is more trouble than it’d be worth? Sound off in the comments and join the conversation on Boss Rush Network’s Discord and Facebook.

Featured Image: Valve Corporation

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