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3DS - Earning Play Coins In-Game

Cfrock

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Mar 17, 2012
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Liverpool, England
I was thinking about Play Coins the other day and how handy they are. You can use them to buy weapon loadouts in Resident Evil: The Merceneries 3D and to buy hints from ghosts in A Link Between Worlds. They allow you to use new features in Letter Box, buy Idol Toss eggs in Kid Icarus: Uprising, and buy fortune cookies in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Play Coins are most helpful in the Streetpass Plaza games, though, hiring heroes for your quest to save the king, enlisting men (well, cats) into your army, inviting people to water your plants, or buying puzzle pieces to share with people in the street.

Then I started thinking about achievements and trophies and how they reward you for doing specific or special actions within games with a meaningless number or icon. Unlocking achievements is fun and all but sometimes the effort you have to put in for no substantial reward seems a bit... pointless. I remember carrying a useless garden gnome with me for the entire duration of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, making things significantly more frustrating and difficult for myself, and all for just 5G, something which has no value or meaning. Vexing.

Currently you can only earn ten Play Coins per day on a 3DS. You get them by walking around with it in your pocket (switched on, of course) and you get one Coin for every one hundred steps. But what if you could also earn Play Coins in-game? What if 3DS games began to incorporate their own 'achievements' and rewarded you not with virtual bragging rights but with Coins that you could use to help you out in other games?

Nintendo said, of the Wii U, that there would be no universal achievement system, but that developers could include such things if they wanted. Well, without a universal system to track them, not many devs will bother (something I was actually grateful for in Assassin's Creed III and Call of Duty: Ghosts since I tend to get distracted trying to nab the darn things) but the 3DS has the potential to offer a reward which would make them worthwhile.

We've seen 'achievements' in Nintendo games before as well. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption awarded the player with tokens for performing various special actions, which ranged from killing a certain number of a type of enemy to saving Federation personnel from being sucked into space to bowling robots over with the morph ball. These tokens were used to unlock concept art and songs from the soundtrack, which was quite nice. Even more relevant would be the Plaza Token rewards in the updated Streetpass games, which reward certain milestones with hats, glorious hats.

I'd quite like to see future 3DS games reward us with Play Coins for special actions. It'd make you feel good about yourself as well as help you out in numerous games, not least of all the excellent Streetpass offerings, which plenty of people, sadly, don't get the full use of because they just don't have other 3DS owners around.

But what do you think? Is there a benefit to earning Play Coins in-game or are Coins not that useful, do you think? Do you think such a system would bring the best aspects of achievements/trophies to Nintendo's handheld, or the worst, and is it worth it?
 

Mercedes

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Cfrock said:
Unlocking achievements is fun and all but sometimes the effort you have to put in for no substantial reward seems a bit... pointless.

It's not the destination, Cfrock... it's the journey!

mind-blown.jpg


But I completely agree with you, and Ubisoft actually do it. I guess not on the 3DS though? When you get an achievement on PC you earn uPlay points along with it, depending on how tough it was, which can be spent on wallpapers, concept art, or even new costumes and cosmetic stuff in the singleplayer or multiplayer. The uPlay points are added to your account so you can spend points earned playing Splinter Cell in Assassin's Creed, it's not just tied to a single game. I'd like more platforms/developers to start doing something like that. If that's what you did mean, of course.
 

Krazy4Krash

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Play Coins are really nice, and I welcome any new feature that utilities them in any fashion. I myself have used way too many with Uprising Egg Toss, and in particular the default StreetPass games. Those latter games, however, I cannot help but feel are functions best left for actual StreetPass hits, for not only do they have the added benefits of stronger combatants or having the ability to select any desired puzzle piece, they are extremely underwhelming otherwise. Completing a panel or defeating a monster to earn a hat is satisfying for only so long with a cat or bird handing me eventual results.

Earning Play Coins is not the issue, rather their use of spending them is. If I were to actually go outside and attempt for a StreetPass hit (keyword: attempt), I'd come back 10 coins richer no problem. For sure I'd still feel pretty good to be rewarded more currency by achieving... achievements, so to answer your question, yes there is a benefit.
 

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