The battlefield 4 ‘meta’ game is a thing of beauty. You only really notice it when you start looking at Battlefront: Star Wars. I consider BF4 to be a standard I one day aspire to. Not in terms of the length of its grind to unlock, which is frankly nuts, but in terms of the wealth of stats, and the freedom you have in self defining your own metrics for success. Here is my Battlefield 4 main stats page.
There is SO Much stuff here, and every tab has additional data in excruciating detail Its just awesome. What really makes it work for me are the multiple streams of data. I never care about my win/lose ration because I routinely swap sides to keep a game balanced (I hate one sided slugfests), but I can ignore that and focus on my unlocks, or my assignments, or awards, or maybe the leaderboards or kill/death ratio. It basically says ‘here is a whole bunch of cool stats, have fun with it all, and gives you a great gui and some shiny graphics to show off when you reach a milestone.
Basically, even the worst BF4 player in the universe has probably got a bunch of awards/icons/scores that they are proud of, and everyone’s style is different. This contrasts massively with the approach of far too many games which is “Game is done, throw in some achievements before launch and we are done.”
I’m as bad as the next guy. Democracy 3 has some pretty cool achievements (especially after the recent update), but thats all it has. There are not separate stats to measure stuff like the average crime rate over all your games, or per-country achievements or stats, or maybe the number of countries each situation has been achieved in, or your highest ever election victory…etc. There is a lot more scope for me to improve on stuff like that.
I’m working on my next game now (release date: errrr maybe next year?) and I’m already thinking I need to be aware of how cool this kind of thing is from a much earlier stage.