Steam splits achievements into sets, and developers can archive the ones you cannot earn
Steam is grouping a game’s achievements into developer-made sets, each with its own progress bar and its own trophy, and letting developers archive achievements nobody can unlock any more. Valve says it is "starting a beta for Steam Achievement Sets", with base-game sets shown in blue, DLC sets in purple, and a "set complete" trophy added to your profile when you finish one.
One of the images Valve published with the Achievement Sets beta. Each set carries its own progress bar, and finishing one adds a set-complete trophy. Image: Valve
The reason it gives is completion. Achievements added with new content "can be hard to discover and can accidentally break the completion status of players who have already finished the game", Valve says, and with sets, "If new achievements are later added to the set, your completion is preserved".
It is a beta on both sides. Players have to join the Steam client beta to see any of it, the same channel that fed parts of the update Valve pushed to every client on October 13, and 17 games have added sets so far, among them Portal 2, Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2.
Archiving keeps your unlock and stops blocking everyone else
A developer can archive single achievements or whole sets, which is not the same as deleting them. "Once archived, users who had already unlocked the achievement or set will still see it on their profile", Valve says, while an archived achievement does not appear on the profiles of players who missed it or "block their progress toward completing a set or game".
Valve puts that as a rule rather than an option: "Anytime an achievement can no longer be unlocked by users, it should be archived." Season-based games and time-limited holiday achievements are the cases it names, and a game that quietly retires an event achievement now has somewhere to put it.
Valve's own image of the new achievements page, where Global Stats becomes a toggle rather than a page of its own. Image: Valve
Global Stats becomes a toggle, and comparison reaches three friends
A rebuilt achievements page, reachable from the web Games List and from the library, carries overall progress, per-set progress and per-achievement detail. Global Stats, the per-achievement completion rates, becomes a toggle on that page instead of a page of its own, and search gains filters for a particular set and for locked or unlocked.
Comparison now runs against up to three friends, and the number being compared has changed. Valve says the new total "is based on achievements each player can actually earn", which depends on the add-on content a player owns and on what has been archived, so one game can show two friends different totals.
The Perfect Games tab is now called Completed and covers games with completed sets as well as fully completed games, those games can go in the Completionist Showcase, and games played through Family Sharing turn up in the Games List with their Family Sharing friends eligible for comparison.
Developers get a rebuilt editor and CSV in bulk
"We’ve totally rebuilt the Steam Achievement editor in Steamworks", Valve says in its developer post, which now takes bulk import and export of definitions, set assignments, icons and localisation through CSV and image files, plus a Bulk Move tool for shifting achievements between sets. Upload an icon and the editor can generate the greyscale locked version for you, and it flags any achievement or set missing text in one of the game’s languages.
None of it needs a game update: "You don’t need to update your game or the Steamworks SDK to start using Achievement Sets. Your existing achievements, API names, and unlock calls all keep working." Developer-only sets stay invisible to players while a team tests unlock conditions, and a DLC set stays hidden until the DLC ships.
Valve gives no date for general release and no total beyond the 17 games it lists, which it calls "a growing set". It says nothing about VR achievements behaving differently from any others.
