Steam is introducing Achievement Sets, designed to improve the achievement earning experience

Steam is rolling out a new feature called Achievement Sets, which is designed to improve the experience of getting in-game achievements.

Until now, Steam achievements have generally been a single list which the player attempts to clear over the course of playing the game.

The new Steam Achievement Sets feature, however – a beta for which has now started with a small number of games – will let developers separate achievements into groups to better suit the player’s needs.

Steam notes that one of the main reasons for Achievement Sets is the way in which games that receive DLC further down the line can sometimes add new achievements, which in turn may ruin a game’s completion status if a player had already previously earned every achievement in the base game.

In the new setup, players will still unlock achievements by playing the game as normal, but when they browse their achievements, Steam will have broken the long list into the developer-created sets, making it easier to see which other related achievements have still to be unlocked.

Each Achievement Set will have its own progress bar showing how far along the player is in that specific category, and once every achievement in a set is unlocked, Steam will add a ‘set complete’ trophy to the player’s profile. This means if new achievements are added to the set, their completion trophy is preserved.

“As a game grows, developers can create new sets to hold achievements for the added content. These new sets make it easy for returning players to see what new things they can unlock, while also preserving their prior completion status until they play again,” Steam says.

For example, then, developers could potentially split its achievements into single-player and multiplayer sets, to ensure that solo players can still at least gain some sort of completion status for unlocking all the achievements that are valid to them.

Steam is also giving developers the ability to archive individual achievements or entire achievement sets. In this way, it hopes developers might start adding time-based achievements.

“We think there are a lot of fun ways games can take advantage of the temporary nature this can add, such as adding achievements to season-based games or enabling time-limited holiday achievements,” it says.

It stresses, however, that once a set is archived, it won’t show up on the profile pages of users who missed the achievements, nor will it block their progress towards completing a set or game.

“Anytime an achievement can no longer be unlocked by users, it should be archived,” it says. This theoretically means if a game’s online servers are turned off and all its multiplayer achievements are no longer possible to unlock, they could be archived, making it still possible to ‘complete’ the remaining single-player content.

The following 17 games have already added achievement sets, with more to follow:

• Against the Storm
• Age of Wonders 4
• American Truck Simulator
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4
• Crusader Kings III
• DREDGE
• Euro Truck Simulator 2
• Forza Horizon 5
• Flock Around
• He is Coming
• LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Portal 2
• PowerWash Simulator
• PowerWash Simulator 2
• Team Fortress 2
• Victoria 3