Following on from my list of insanely difficult achievements, it’s time to shine the spotlight on another type of hellish achievement. The dreaded grind. These are the awards that will take you hundreds of hours at the absolute minimum, and often involve repeating menial tasks over and over. It’s safe to say that these were definitely not made with the casual gamer in mind. Only the most committed will ever see these pop.
So if you’re a gamer with too much time on your hands or are just someone looking to dedicate hundreds of hours to arbitrary challenges that will net you dismal amounts of Gamerscore, then good news! This is the list for you.
Forza Horizon 2 (2014)
All Your Race Are Belong To Us 2.0 (50G)
Forza Horizon is one of the best franchises going. Each new instalment lets us tear up a different breath-taking location across the world. Australia, the UK and the USA have all been recreated. But it’s the second entry in the series that we’re interested in for this one. It sees the Horizon Festival hit Northern Italy and the South of France. There’s rolling hills, winding roads and parts of the world-famous French Riviera to enjoy. The map is massive and you can do what you want. You’ll quickly find that there is nothing more fun than speeding through this beautiful locale in an equally beautiful supercar (or Ford Fiesta, your choice).
As good as Forza Horizon 2 is, there is one hell of a grind in store for anyone who wants that full 1000. Namely, the All Your Race Are Belong To Us 2.0 achievement. For this one, you’ll need to complete all 168 championships. That’s 671 races. That alone will take you over 50 hours. But the ordeal is made even longer by the fact that after you complete a championship, you’ll need to drive to the location of the next one. And after every three, you’ll have to drive back to the Horizon Festival. Don’t think you can get out of this by using Fast Travel either. You can’t. All told, you’re probably looking at around 100 hours, or 80 if you’re quick about it.
This grind is worse than anything you’ll find in the other Horizon games. It’s quite tame compared to the Motorsport series though. In those games, 200 hour grinds are par for the course. So if you’re looking for some more racing grinds, then head there next.
Friday the 13th: The Game (2017)
The Final Chapter (100G)
Friday the 13th has a pretty simple premise. One person gets to be Jason Vorhees, and their job is to try and murder all the other players. Everyone else is a camp councillor, and they have to survive long enough in order to make good on their escape. They can kill Jason, but it’ll take some doing. And that’s all there is to it really.
It’s not very good and is littered with game-breaking bugs and server issues. And what fun there is to be had in this game is all but eliminated when you look at some of the awful grinds you’ll need to endure for the full 1000 Gamerscore. The worst offender is The Final Chapter achievement, which asks you to play as Jason 1000 times. Good luck if you want to do this one ‘legitimately’. Only one person gets to be the famous killer each game. So if there are the max amount of players in a lobby, you’d only have a 1 in 8 chance. One redditor worked out that you’d have to spend .4% of your entire conscious life playing this game to earn the achievement legit. Here’s my advice – don’t do it this way.
Instead, find yourself a boosting partner. It’ll speed up the process significantly. Be warned though, it’s still going to take you just over 83 hours at an absolute minimum. That’s because you can only do 24 games an hour. So if there are two of you, you’ll get to play as Jason 12 times each hour. And that’s presuming you do everything perfectly and manage to finish every match in 2 and a half minutes. You need to factor in load times and unpredictable servers, so all told, it’s probably a grind that’ll take you at least 100 hours.
Call of Duty: World at War (2008)
Go Get Some Sun (0G)
In my personal and probably controversial opinion, World at War is the second best Call of Duty of all time and is only bested by its sequel, Black Ops 1. The setting was a little overdone by the time of its 2008 release, but World at War is still one of the best World War II games out there. It doesn’t hold anything back. It’s gritty and brutal. This is war after all. Expect to be blowing people’s legs off with your Trench gun or hearing their screams as you scorch them with your flamethrower. The campaign is littered with memorable moments and is backed by a hard-hitting soundtrack (and is really, really, really hard on Veteran difficulty). Not only that, World at War is also the game that spawned the popular Zombies mode that is now a mainstay of the COD series.
The multiplayer is also pretty good too, and it’s where you’ll be spending all your time if you want the Go Get Some Sun achievement. For this one, you’ll need to hit 10th Prestige. What this means is that you’ll need to reach the max level 65, then press the prestige button. This will reset your progress, but you’ll get a fancy emblem that shows off your dedication. Do this nine times and the achievement is yours. Simple right?
Well, not really. Unfortunately, like a lot of the older Call of Duty titles, the game is infested with hackers. If you’re lucky, one might rank you up to 10th Prestige and you won’t need to grind at all. But if you’re unlucky, you might get de-ranked and have to start all over again. If you’re really, really unlucky, you might be given millions of negative XP, meaning you’ll have to earn millions of XP just to get back to level 1. Fun fact: this happened to me on Call of Duty 4. I never did get back to level 1.
But if you decide to go for this, and don’t run into any mean-spirited hackers, then expect at least 10-15 days of gameplay. And what do you get for your efforts? Nothing. Not a single point. Remind me why anyone should do this again?
Mortal Kombat (2011)
My Kung-Fu is Stronger (60G)
‘Gain Mastery of All Fighters’ is the suitably vague description for this one. But how do you go about doing that? Well, as you probably guessed there’s a whole bunch of menial grinds to go through. You’ll need to:
- Win 100 Times
- Land 150 X-Ray Moves
- Land 100 Fatalities
- Spill 10,000 Pints of Blood
- Play 24 Hours
And that’s just for mastering one fighter (which you’ll get 20G for). You’ll need to do that for every character – all 27 of them. Now, just the first four requirements would constitute a decent grind by themselves. There are ways to shorten them by using second controllers and entering various codes but you’d still be looking at over 100 hours.
But what pushes it over the top is the 24 hours of gameplay with each fighter. For those who don’t have a calculator to hand (and why would you?), that’s 648 hours of gameplay. 648 hours! You’re going to need a wired controller unless you’re planning on watching your Xbox pad like a hawk the whole time in case it turns off.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. If you own two wired controllers then you’re really in business because you can use two characters at a time. It’ll effectively half your grind, but it’s still going to take you over 13 days of gameplay. You better hope your 360 can cope with it.
Fortnite: Save the World (2017)
Plays Well with Others (50G), and other assorted achievements
At this point, everyone and their mother has played Fortnite. The game commands a massive user base, and it isn’t going away any time soon. But a vast majority of that player base are playing the Battle Royale mode. And that doesn’t have achievements. So for this entry, we’ll have to dive into Save the World, the shooter-survival version of Fortnite. You won’t be killing players and hitting them with the Orange Justice here. Instead, you and up to three players will be fending off hordes of zombies, gathering resources and rescuing survivors.
You should buckle up because the road to 1000G is a long one. Here are the main grinds you’ll have to go through:
- Building 500,000 Structures for ‘Talented Builder’ (40G)
- Saving 10,000 Survivors for ‘Guardian Angel’ (50G)
- Fully exploring 1,500 Zones for ‘World Explorer’
- Killing 20,000 Mist Monsters for ‘Unspeakable Horrors’ (40G)
- Completing 1,000 Play with Others missions for ‘Plays Well with Others’ (50G)
The last one on the list deserves a special mention because of just how long it will take you. One gamer worked out that it’ll take you over 330 hours just to earn Plays Well with Others. And then you have to take into account the other grinds. So you should expect anywhere between 500 to 1000 hours of total playtime. One more thing, they all have to be done in successful missions too. Any progress you earn in failed missions won’t count. So bad luck if you end up with rubbish teammates!
Quake 4 (2005)
Seasoned Warrior (50G), and other multiplayer achievements
Quake 4 released with the Xbox 360 in November 2005. That makes it the oldest game on this list, and one of the oldest to have achievements full stop. At that time, developers were only just getting to grips with the whole system. Some decided to practically hand out achievements and gave you massive amounts of Gamerscore for simple tasks. Others took the term ‘achievement’ too literally and made challenges that were really, really hard. Quake 4 is the best example of this, and it’s probably the hardest grind on the 360.
What makes this game peculiar is that it’s almost like a tale of two lists. The campaign achievements are quite reasonable and normal even by today standards. By contrast, the multiplayer ones are completely mental and expect you to do far too much. To fully finish Quake 4, you’ll need to:
- Capture 1,000 Flags for ‘The Golden Flag’ (25G)
- Get 10,000 Kills for ‘Rhino Squad’ (75G)
- Earn 500 Double Kills for ‘Your Excellency’ (10G)
- Reach Rank One on the global leaderboard (!?) for ‘Number One’ (20G)
These achievements will run you hundreds upon hundreds of hours just by themselves. And after all that, you’ll still need to earn Seasoned Warrior. For that one, you’ll need to play 5000 Ranked Multiplayer Matches. Just let that sink in for a moment. You’ll get to Rank One in the entire world and still have to sit through thousands more matches.
You will have to boost this one. You’ll also have to deal with the game’s wonky servers. And the fact that sometimes stats won’t properly record. So you could play ten games and have none of them count. The only way to get around it is to dashboard and re-boot the game on a regular basis. These complications add even more time to this already insane grind.
I’m not joking when I say it’s probably going to take you around 1000 hours to finish this one. That’s over 41 days.
Sea of Thieves (2018)
The Whole List
On the surface, Sea of Thieves sounds great. You get to live the life of a pirate, sailing the seven seas and plundering all the booty you can handle. What could ruin this experience? Probably the monumental amount of time that you’ll need if you want to come close to finishing this one. Just an initial look at the list reveals over ten achievements that will take any would-be pirate around a hundred hours to unlock. I won’t list them all, because there are way too many, but here are some of the highlights:
- 250 Gold Hoarder Voyages completed for ‘Golden Voyager’ (20G)
- 250 Order of Souls Voyages completed for ‘Voyager of Lost Souls’ (20G)
- 250 Merchant Alliance Voyages completed for ‘Merchant Voyager’ (20G)
- 300 Shipwrecked Chests sold for ‘Hoarder of Barnacled Gold’ (15G)
- 50 Banana Crates delivered on time for ‘Merchant Forager’ (50G)
It took eight months for someone to earn the full 1000G. Eight months! And the guy who did it – a gamer named Zyx – estimated that it took him about 2,000 hours. That’s an average of over seven hours a day. Since then, TrueAchievements has tracked five other pirates who have earned 1000 Gamerscore in Sea of Thieves. Six people in fifteen months is simply mental.
If you’re scoffing at the estimated completion time, you should know that it used to be even worse than this. Those insane grinds I’ve listed used to be much longer. You once had to complete 500 of each kind of voyage instead of 250. Similarly, the requirement for Hoarder of Barnacled Gold used to be 1,000 shipwrecked chests sold. Merchant Forager was the worst of the bunch by a country mile though. For that one, you needed to deliver 1,000 Banana Crates. And some players were reporting that they had played over 100 hours and hadn’t seen one. One redditor saw two in 200 hours of playtime. So to deliver a thousand of them, you were looking at a grind that could potentially have lasted well over 10,000 hours. Luckily that grind has been made somewhat easier, both by the fact that you only need 50 now and the missions spawn far more frequently.
If Rare hadn’t ceded to player complaints and made the achievements significantly easier, I’m willing to bet that no-one would have finished the game by this point. For now though, you’re only looking at a few thousand hours. Good luck!
So there we have it – 7 achievements (or lists of achievements in many cases) that demand simply preposterous amounts of time for us to complete and to obtain that coveted 1000G. If you have any more grind-y achievements that we should have included, feel free to share them in the comments below and on the usual social media channels.
