Proposal for extra achievement (minor SPOILERS)

[Darkelve]

Last week during one of my playthroughs, I defeated the rebel flagship in phase I and phase II.

In the very last fight, I managed to destroy the enemy ship: the "destroy" animation for the enemy flagship was already running. However, since my Oxygen was toast and I had hull breaches, my crew died - probably a mere moment before my finishing shot reached the rebel flagship. Really unlucky?

I lost the game, but somehow this felt special and heroic. Yet I got... nothing! Only the game over screen.
That is why I'd like to propose an extra achievement for when this happens to players.

Suggestions: "Last Man Standing", "Stalemate", "Eye for an Eye" or something alike...

What do you (developers + forum members) think?

[VanguardOfValor]

The problem with designing an achievement around something that *might* happen is that it is only rewarding for a very small percentage of people. As an achievement which, if you were to try to get it, forces you to kill yourself at the end for no reason, it just doesn't reward good behavior.

For the most part, the achievements promote the kind of play that either explores a possibility with a ship (Kill a ship before they get through your Zoltan Shields, for example), pushes you to make use of a ship's particular skill as much as possible (Get to a certain point without ever upgrading your weapon system), or very occaisionally get lucky (Ancestry, getting the crystal questline in the Rock Cruiser (although this is slightly ship-skill based because of the effect of Rock Armor on the event).

The achievements which explore something you could try to do with your ships, and the ones that ask you to try certain challenges with the ship are, in my opinion, the best. They are actively fun to attempt for the most part, and get you to do things differently than normal.

The achievements which stop being fun are the ones that force you to do things no one would intentionally do normally, like get your ship down to 1hp and then fully recover in one go (it could happen randomly but if it doesn't, it's not fun to fabricate) or killing 4 enemy crew with a single boarding drone (you'd have to weaken them before hand, probably with your own boarding party, so why wouldn't you want your boarding team to get the exp?).

Even the few which tell you to play half or your entire game with a restriction (no using offensive anything, no buying repairs, no using missiles, etc) are still fun because they change how the game is played without making it feel unnatural (because you play the entire run like that, for the most part), so it's ok that they're unusual requests.

tl;dr While it's fun when epic events are rewarded with achievements, building achievements around things that really should not be happening is not generally an enjoyable experience for the player.

[Darkelve]

My point was that my game was -at that moment- anticlimatic.

I pushed my ship and my crew to the maximum, prepared to sacrifice everything to stop the Rebel Flagship.

I succeed (in my mind, obviously not where gameplay mechanics are concerned), and what do I get? Nothing but the "standard" text event informing me that I "lost"...
even though the Rebel ship clearly was destroyed!

I know that developers cannot forsee every possibility, but at the very least a different text event or SOMETHING would have been nice saying how the ship "went down heroically" or something like that.

[UltraMantis]

Unfortunately the game engine realised that your ship was destroyed and ended the game at that point. Since this outcome is very disapointing it would be nice if the devs made some slight changes to the final stage of the fight. It's already a special case, and giving the player a token achievement or a different ending would be nice. Probably not the highest priority but i would like to see a check added, to see wheter or not the mothership is also destroyed at the point the game would normally end for the player at the last stage of the boss fight.

It would also require additional text and maybe art as well. Not to mention possible bugs being introduced. Just wishing out loud really.