Xbox One Tip: Track Achievements

Xbox One Tip: Track Achievements

For many Xbox fans, earning in-game achievements is the be-all, end-all of the experience. But until now, it’s been hard to track your progress towards those achievements.

Consider a game like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered. In the past, I would have used a third-party site, like Xbox Achievements, to see which achievements were available from my PC. And then I would have searched the Internet to figure out why I wasn’t getting certain achievements, or what the secrets were for some of the harder-to-get achievements.

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Today, Microsoft makes this much easier.

From the Xbox One console, you can now access an improved Achievements pane in the Xbox Guide that provides information about the game you are currently playing.

This Achievements pane lets you see which achievements you’ve unlocked, and which remain. And for those that do remain, where applicable, you can see the progress you’ve made towards completing that achievement. For example, here you can see that I am 13 percent of the ways towards completing an achievement called Weapon Master. The little diamond icon indicates that this is a rare achievement, so it may be something I wish to pursue.

New to the Creators Update is an achievement tracker, which you can enable from this pane.

When you do, a “Configure tracker” option appears that lets you configure the following options:

Tracker location. The achievement tracker appears as an on-screen overlay, and you can use the grid to position it as you prefer. By default, it appears in the lower-right.

Number of achievements. You can track from 1 to 5 achievements at a time. The default is 3.

Transparency. Using this slider, you can determine the level of transparency used to display the tracker. The more transparent it is, the harder it is to see the tracker, but the easier it is to see what’s behind the tracker.

When enabled, the tracker appears as you configured it.

Beyond this, the tracker isn’t interactive, and it isn’t further configurable: You can’t, for example, choose which achievements it displays. Instead, you are given the next three achievements, based on how they are organized by the game maker and/or your progress towards achieving them.

In my case, that Weapon Master achievement isn’t something I’m actually going to accomplish anytime soon, but because I’ve made progress towards doing so, it’s at the top. The second achievement in the tracker, Save the Bacon, is the next probable achievement I’ll get in the single player campaign; it’s related to finishing the level I’m currently playing.

But the tracker is also dynamic, and it will change as the game progresses. For example, when I found some in-game intel, the Look Sharp and Eyes and Ears achievements both jumped up in the list: These achievements are related to finding intel in the game.

And to be clear, that certain achievements have risen to the top of the tracker doesn’t mean you will necessarily accomplish them next. As always, some in-game action may result in a happy surprise, an achievement you didn’t expect.

 

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Conversation 5 comments

  • Waethorn

    08 April, 2017 - 3:16 pm

    <p>"<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">For many Xbox fans, earning in-game achievements is the be-all, end-all of the experience"</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I thought having fun was the point of video games.</span></p>

  • zybch

    08 April, 2017 - 6:26 pm

    <p>I'll stick to Trueachievements.com for xbox and its sister site Truetrophies.com for my PS4.</p><p>I tried out this new feature and its just too unwieldy for the most part. Were the ability to dock apps at the side still available it might be useful, but not as a get-in-the-way overlay.</p>

    • JudaZuk

      11 April, 2017 - 3:29 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#96694">In reply to zybch:</a></em></blockquote><p>That is the thing, before achievements was easy to track.. since it can no longer be snapped, same for Trueachievements.com ..it is much harder to focus on Achievements. </p><p>You need to use a second screen to do it basically ..like a tablet or a computer. I fail to see how this is better then how it was </p>

  • AliMaggs

    Premium Member
    10 April, 2017 - 2:55 am

    <p>I&nbsp;believe from playing about with this a little (not got my Xbox in front of me right now) that if you make an achievement your favourite (highlight and press the X button), it appears top of the list in the tracker.</p>

  • JudaZuk

    11 April, 2017 - 3:26 am

    <p>It has always been easy to track achievements on Xbox One until now because Microsoft have made it much harder and annoying to do so with the latest update.</p><p>Before you simply snapped the achievements app and had all achievements right there, and if you finally gave up and needed help , you could have the guide for an achievement snapped as well </p><p>But what did Microsoft do?? They removed Snap… so now you have to go back and forth to the Guide to check your achievements. How is this better?? and if you do need a guide…it will go full screen of course, so you have to flip back and forth between the game and the guide over and over again … it is idiotic.</p><p>They did add an achievement tracker.. that is completely useless, gives no real information and worst of all is overlayed on top of the game, so it blocks content. You can actually miss things on the screen (that are part of an achievement ..finding some collectibles for instance) because the damn tracker blocks it!! </p>

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