Achievement

Achievements interface during the Beta test.

Achievements are a sort of mini-game tied to Blizzard games when played over Battle.net (as Diablo III must be). When players complete various tasks during the gameplay, or special extra efforts, they will earn achievements. These do not grant an in-game reward, in terms of extra items or experience, but are simply bonuses to display on one's Battle.net account.

Achievements in Diablo III are tracked by account[1] not by character, integrated into the banner system with achievements unlocking more colors and sigals, and otherwise offering improvements and distinctive visuals to an account's banner.

See all the news about Diablo III Achievements.

Achievements in Diablo III

There is not yet an official list of achievements in Diablo III, though the developers have often spoken of the types of achievements they hope to include. (All kinds.)

The most recent news came from the Blizzcon 2011 Gameplay panel[2], where Jason Bender said that there would be hundreds of achievements, for every sort of accomplishment. Good or bad. They'll be earned for reaching Clvl 60 with multiple hardcore characters, for dying multiple times to the same monster, and everything in between.

Diablo III Beta Info

Achievements are not functional in the beta, though the v5 patch in November 2011 added a new icon to the lower right corner of the screen that shows recent achievements, right beside a display of your online friends list.

Other info unearthed from the beta was detailed in November 2011, in a news post on Diablo.IncGamers.com.[3]

Achievements in Diablo III have a UI very like that in Starcraft 2.
They are categorized into Campaign, Cooperative, Hardcore, Classes, and Combat, and can be sorted by those and other parameters.
A number of achievements can be designated as "showcase" achievements, which will display on a player's Banner, part of their Battle.net account profile.
All achievements are tracked in the game, with progress bars to help calculate how many a player has accomplished.
Achievements enable appearance options on the Banner, with additional colors, sigals, border patterns, and more enabled by completing Achievements.

Diablo III Beta Achievements

A full of list of all 80 achievements available in the beta, courtesy of the DiabloNut Diablo 3 Database.

Achievement Plans

Jay Wilson spoke about Achievements from Gamescom, in August, 2010:[4]

in.Diablo.d3: Are we going to see achievements in Diablo III? For example, kill one million Fallen Ones with a single swipe, finish the whole game with a naked hardcore character, listen to every single Deckard Cain dialogue?

Jay Wilson: *smiles* Those are very good achievement ideas. We’ll have them in D3, but I don’t think kill one million anything in one blow. Or ever. Those aren’t good; those are grindy. I do like the naked hardcore character completing the whole game though. I’m all over that one.

Bashiok added to this concept in a forum post in October 2010. [5]

Leveling was the least important part of Diablo II. Well, aside from gold. I’m sorry but even though you may have had fun grinding to 99 for absolutely no reason, we don’t think it’s a fun mechanic to encourage. ...But guess what, achievements reach that same goal, and can actually have some meaning. What if after leveling 10 characters to 60 you get a unique item? Or dye color? Or title? Or glow? Or anything.

Projected Achievements

Very few specifics are yet released about the system, but looking at WoW and StarCraft II, which already have Achievements in them, logical ones reward actions such as:

Achievement for defeating each boss on each difficulty.
Killing X (1, 100, 1000, etc) of a specific monster type.
Completing X (1, 10, 100, etc) quests.
Completing all available random quests in an Act.
Completing one specific quest within a time limit.
Getting a Massacre bonus of 10, 20, 30, etc monsters.
Killing a monster when you have less than 5% health left.
Killing a monster when ally had less than 5% health left.

Fans have had a lot of fun inventing potential Diablo III achievements as well.

"Blizzard Level" Achievement

The Diablo 3 Achievement system will be an account-based system tied to a player's Blizzard Account ID, the purpose of which is to track achievements of all three major games: World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3. When combining all the games together, a score dubbed "Blizzard Level" is gained.