There are a lot of games where a sizeable amount of players won't have the initial achievements.

They may have just launched the game and never played it, achievements could have been added later on after the release like with Grand Theft Auto IV, some people only play multiplayer, or there may be something in place to disable achievements when you mod the game like in Fallout New Vegas.

39.6% of players have beaten the final boss of Elden Ring. Considering how huge the game is, and how difficult it can be, I found that to be a surprisingly large number of people. I'm not sure how that compares to dark souls 3, but Dark Souls 2 has about 33% completion and dark souls 1 (prepare to die edition) has less than 25%

Generally, I like using achievements to figure out where people called it quits on a game. Like Saints Row the Third. 90% of people cleared the first mission, but the percentages drop with each successive story achievement until you've got the achievement for the last mission which only 27.9% of players bothered to finish. Or you have Hades where around 50% of players just never finished a run of the game and only 25.6% completed enough runs to see the main ending.

These stats are what I have in my head when I am deciding on what to buy. Fact is, most people on the internet are overwhelmingly negative and unable/unwilling to give games a fair shot.

This sounds critical, but look at the numbers. I have a family member who, when asked about Cyberpunk, said it was a shit game, that enemies were too spongy, driving was terrible, and said it was "literally unplayable". (not bug related, just gameplay) When asked about story he said "Oh I only played a couple of missions".

Like what? I'm not saying you need to play 100% of Gollum to know it's a bad game, but come on, talk about judging a book by it's cover. If you aren't going to give it a fair shot then why buy it at all, just don't buy the game?

So many people go into games expecting them to be bad, or expecting bugs/problems that guess what, you're probably going to find something wrong with it. Maybe watch a few less reviewers ahead of time, maybe turn off the FPS counter, and I don't know, see if you have fun playing it.

I think using mods disables achievements for cyberpunk, so that could bias the numbers. I don't know how many people are actually using mods though.

Cyberpunk 2076

The prequel

Bloodborne (PS4). Only 44.6% of players beat the first boss, Father Gascoigne

He was the second boss for me. The first one I encountered was the Cleric Beast. Then I got so fed up with the frame rate after that I swore off the game, especially since I just found it to be Dark-Souls-but-less. Still, Gascoigne was a hard fight, so it's not surprising that the first major souls-esque game on PS4 had a huge dropoff at a difficulty spike.

The one that always got me is that even predominantly multiplayer games have a very low participation rate in multiplayer. I've heard about 70/30 split from developers in most cases (and I've gotten a peak behind the curtain at a few other games where this trend continues to hold up, within a margin of error), where even if your game has a bad single player mode and focuses on multiplayer, only 30% of the player base will ever go online. I'll bet that's why these games stopped putting in achievements for "win one online multiplayer match", because it was astonishingly low. Far more people finished a single player story in Street Fighter V (which were awful) than those who went online to play multiplayer.

On Amalur, I made a character and quit when I couldn't play in a modern resolution

I played the original and enjoyed it well enough though.

I'm not surprised at all to see a soulslike being polarising. Some people absolutely love them, but I think you find out pretty quickly if they're not for you!

• Half Life 2: Despite Zombie Chopper only having 6.9% of steam players actually get it, including myself, it's arguably the more famous of the Half Life 2 achievements.

• Please, Don't Touch Anything is a puzzle game where the player is presented with an empty room and a button, and pressing it unlocks more knobs and switches and levers that they have to figure out how to press to unlock endings. When it comes to the achievement for simply pressing the button, only 96.6% of all players have gotten it. That means a shocking 3.4% looked at the button and decided to just not press it and then didn't continue playing the game.

• The Talos Principle: About 20% of players have gotten the achievement for getting the "canon" ending of the game, but only 6.1% of players got the achievement for going up to where the canon ending takes place, changing their mind, and walking back down.

• Myst (2021): In the 2021 remake a shocking 32% of players made it through Selenitic, but only 4.6% got the "Never Lost" achievement. This is a bit of a big leap in logic, I'll admit, but I'm willing to bet that means only 4% of players actually know how to solve the mazerunner puzzle. It's a puzzle you must solve to complete Selenitic. Without going into it too much, you control a train going through a maze of rails and at each junction you can spin to go to a set of different rails. Each cardinal direction corresponds to a series of 4 sounds you were supposed to have memorized from the previous age (level), the Mechanical age. If 2 sounds happen, then you have to go in the direction between those sounds. If you play the game in the non-randomized state then you can just look up a walkthrough of this puzzle, which is what most people did in the 90s and what most people still do because guaranteeing good sound quality for everyone is still difficult. Most new players might even play with the sound off just because they don't know about this.

Path of Exile on PS5 (I don't have access to PC/xbox).

According to the trophies, only 8.8% of players complete Part 1, with 4.4% completing Part 2. For context, Part 1 would take a new player maybe 20 hours, with Part 2 being a tiny bit shorter. Imo the most likely reason for this is new players bricking their characters. PoE is extremely complicated and if you don't know what you're doing you'll build and gear your toon so wrong that you'll get to a point where you can't progress and you don't have any way of fixing it.

2.3% of players reach level 80, with 0.9% reaching level 90. Context: After completing the campaign you'll be around level 70, getting to 80 isn't difficult, long or hard. Level 90 requires a slight investment of time and effort.

If you've never played PoE before these stats might seem low, but for people that have played it I'm sure it makes a lot of sense! It does to me anyway.

Actual Sunlight. It has one achievement, "Actual Sunlight", whose description is "Thank you." It's awarded at the end of the game. 37.8% of players have the achievement.

It's a short RPG Maker game about depression that probably resonates a bit too much with a bit too much of it's base. It's bleak, and inane, and all the other sorts of ways that life generally sucks, especially for lonely, introverted, geeky 30-somethings. And the ending of the game is

I wouldn't be shocked if a good half or more of players can't bring themselves to drag through it, and some number further just shut the game down and quit when they reach

there must be a small number of players that torrented it then bought it after they played and things like that