Steam now lets developers sort a game's achievements into named sets, with DLC achievements in sets of their own, so in games that use them a new expansion no longer undoes a player's completion. The feature is in beta, available on the web and in the Steam Client beta that shipped on October 15.
According to Valve, games now live longer than ever through DLC, expansions and seasons. Achievements added later can be hard to find, and they can accidentally break the completion status of players who had already finished. Under the new system a developer chooses how many sets a game has and what each one is for: single-player and multiplayer, say, or eight class-based sets. Every set carries its own progress bar, and finishing one adds a "set complete" trophy to the player's profile. If achievements are later added to a set, the completion stays.
Base game sets show in blue. DLC sets show in purple and stay out of a player's overall game progress until that player has access to the content. Valve says every possible achievement, DLC ones included, can be explored from the new achievements page. The achievements page also folds in what used to be a separate global stats page: per-achievement completion rates are now a toggle, and search can filter by set or by locked and unlocked.
Developers can also archive single achievements or whole sets, which Valve suggests for season-based games and time-limited holiday achievements. A player who unlocked an archived item keeps it. Players who missed it will not see it on their profile, and it cannot block them from completing a set or a game. Valve's instruction is that any achievement nobody can earn anymore should be archived. A new friend comparison lines up progress against up to three friends, including rare achievements, completed sets and DLC progress. Its total is counted from the achievements each player can actually earn, so it can differ from one friend to the next depending on owned add-ons, time-limited items and archived entries.
The same beta carries a few other changes on the Steam side:
- The Perfect Games tab is renamed Completed and lists games with completed sets alongside fully completed games.
- Games with completed sets can be featured in a profile's Completionist section.
- Family Sharing games appear in the Games List, and friends who played through Family Sharing can be compared.
- Store and Library pages flag games that support achievement sets.
Seventeen games support sets at the start, among them Valve's own Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2, plus Crusader Kings III, Victoria 3 and Forza Horizon 5. For developers, Valve says it rebuilt the Steamworks achievement editor and added bulk import, export and move tools. The Linux client in the same beta build is now a 64-bit application running inside a Steam Runtime container, Valve says.
In Steam's beta feedback group, players asked where the average completion percentage went and requested sorting by rarity. Valve says it will keep making improvements during the beta, and more games should show sets as their developers adopt the tools.
