Steam Just Fixed the Worst Part of Achievement Hunting: DLC Can No Longer Wreck Your 100%

Featured image: official image via Valve / Steam

Every completionist has lived through this. You finish a game, hit 100% achievements, enjoy the little gold crown on your profile, and then the developer releases a DLC. Overnight your perfect game is 87% complete again. Valve has decided that is not how it should work. On October 15, the company opened a beta for Steam Achievement Sets, and it quietly changes how achievements are organized, tracked and displayed across the whole platform.

Here is what the feature does, which games already support it, and why the part about archived achievements may matter more than it first sounds.

The problem Valve is trying to solve

Valve’s own announcement is blunt about it. Games live longer than they used to, and they keep growing through DLC, expansions and seasons. Achievements added with that new content can be hard to discover, and they can “accidentally break the completion status of players who have already finished the game.”

Until now, Steam treated a game’s achievements as one flat list. Add ten new achievements and everyone who finished the game last year drops below 100%. Skip the DLC and you could never get that status back. That is a quiet frustration for the people who care most about this stuff, and a small disincentive for studios who worry about annoying their most loyal players.

How Achievement Sets work

Developers decide how many sets a game has and what each one is for. Valve’s examples are a game with single-player and multiplayer sets, or one with eight class-based sets. You still earn achievements by playing as usual. The difference shows up when you browse them afterward: Steam splits the long list into the developer’s sets, so it is easier to see what you have finished and what is close.

Each set gets its own progress bar. Unlock everything in one and Steam adds a “set complete” trophy to your profile. If the developer later adds achievements to that set, your completion is preserved. When a game grows, studios can create a new set for the new content, so returning players can immediately see what is new without losing credit for what they already did.

Base game sets and DLC sets

There are two kinds of sets, and Valve color-codes them. Base game sets hold achievements every player can earn, shown in blue. DLC sets hold achievements that require extra content, shown in purple.

The important rule is that DLC achievements do not count toward your overall game progress until you actually have access to the content. If you never bought the expansion, it cannot hold your 100% hostage. You can still browse every possible achievement on the new page, so you can see what the DLC adds before you spend money.

Archiving: the quiet big change

The second half of the update is about time-limited content. Developers can now archive individual achievements or whole sets. Valve points to season-based games and holiday events as the obvious uses. Once something is archived, players who already unlocked it keep it on their profile. Players who missed it do not see it, and it does not block their progress toward completing a set or the whole game.

Valve’s guidance is direct: any achievement that can no longer be unlocked should be archived. That solves a long-standing problem with live-service games. A seasonal event from 2022 used to sit in the list forever as an impossible goal, making 100% unreachable for anyone who joined later. Now it can fade out gracefully, while the people who earned it keep the bragging rights.

A rebuilt achievements page

Everything comes together on a redesigned achievements page, reachable from your Games List on the web and from any game in your Library. It shows your overall progress, progress in each set and details on individual achievements. Global Stats, the per-achievement completion rates, now live behind a toggle on the same page instead of a separate one. Search has filters for specific sets and for locked or unlocked achievements.

There are social changes too. You can now compare your progress with up to three friends at once, including rare achievements, completed sets and DLC set progress. Valve also introduces a “more accurate” total achievement count based on what each player can actually earn, so your total and a friend’s may differ if one of you owns the expansion or an achievement has been archived. That is a sensible fix, though it will take a minute to get used to.

Profile and library changes

Valve says it rebuilt several places where achievements appear. Completed sets now show up in the Recently Played section of your profile, your Games List and your Library. A few smaller changes ride along:

• The Perfect Games tab is now called Completed and shows both completed games and games with completed sets.
• Games with completed sets can be added to the Completionist Showcase, not only fully completed games.
• Games played through Family Sharing now appear in the Games List.
• Friends who played through Family Sharing are eligible for friend comparison.
• Store and Library pages will show whether a game has achievement sets.

Which games support it today

The list is short but varied, and it includes some of the biggest names on Steam. Several are live-service or heavily expanded games, which is exactly where the feature helps most. That includes Valve’s own Team Fortress 2, which recently made headlines when Deadlock beat its all-time player record, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, which launches on October 23. Forza Horizon 5 is on it too, a game whose successor is a big deal, as seen in our look at Forza Horizon 6 and its estimated $579 million.

The pattern is clear. Paradox grand strategy games and the truck simulators are famous for years of paid expansions, and they are exactly the games where completionists have been stuck for a long time. It would not be surprising to see these studios use sets to organize an entire back catalog of DLC.

What developers need to do

This is opt-in. Nothing changes in a game until its developer adds sets, so for most of your library the achievements page will look the way it always did. Valve says it will keep improving the feature during the beta and points developers to a separate Steamworks post that explains how easy it is to add sets. As more studios adopt it, expect the changes to arrive game by game.

If you want to try it now, you can join the Steam Client beta by following Valve’s instructions. Remember that beta software can be rough around the edges, and feedback goes to the Steam Client Beta discussion group.

My take

This is one of those updates that sounds like housekeeping and turns out to be a thoughtful design fix. Making DLC achievements invisible to your progress until you own the content removes a long-standing source of resentment. Archiving does the same for seasonal games. Neither solution is flashy, but both respond to real complaints from the people who engage most with Steam’s profile system.

The real test is adoption. A system like this is only useful if studios bother to use it, and the early list of 16 games is a good start rather than a finish line. If big publishers retrofit their back catalogs over the next few months, completionists will have a much calmer relationship with Steam. If they do not, this will stay a nice feature that few people see.

Sources: Steam Achievement Sets Now in Beta (Valve), Gaming.net, VGChartz.

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