Steam Tests Achievement Sets So New DLC Stops Breaking Your 100% Completion, With Seasonal Archiving Built In

By CriticalPixel · 2026-10-17

Valve has been sitting on one of the oldest annoyances in PC gaming for years, and it finally has an answer. Steam is testing Achievement Sets in a client beta, a system that lets developers sort a game's achievements into groups so that new DLC, expansions and seasons stop wiping out the completion status of players who already finished everything. Eurogamer reported the beta on October 17, and Valve's own announcement spells out the rules in detail. If you have ever finished a game, felt good about it, and then watched it slip below 100 percent because a studio shipped a paid expansion with a pile of new achievements, this one was built for you.

Steam Achievement Sets beta artwork from Valve's announcement showing grouped achievements with progress bars

How Achievement Sets Work

The core idea is simple. Developers can now group a game's achievements into collections that Valve calls achievement sets, and they decide both how many sets exist and what each one is for. A game might split everything into a single-player set and a multiplayer set, while another could run eight class-based sets. Players still unlock achievements the normal way by playing. The difference shows up afterward, when Steam sorts the long flat list into the developer's groups, which makes it far easier to see what you have finished and which related achievements are sitting one step away. Each set gets its own progress bar, and finishing one drops a set complete trophy onto your profile. If the developer adds more achievements to that set later, your completion is preserved instead of being quietly revoked.

That last part matters more than the progress bars. For a decade, live service games and long-running titles have treated your hard-earned completion as a disposable number. Every season pass, every holiday event and every paid expansion could reset a finished game to unfinished, and the only fix was to buy more content or live with the gap. Developers can also create fresh sets as a game grows, so returning players get a clear list of what is new while their earlier completion stays intact until they actually play the new material.

Base Game Sets, DLC Sets and Seasonal Archiving

There are two kinds of set. Base Game sets hold achievements that every player of the game can earn, and their progress and trophies show up in blue. DLC sets group achievements that only exist for people who bought extra content, and those show up in purple. According to Eurogamer, DLC achievements are not counted in your overall game progress until you actually have access to the content, so owning the base game and skipping the expansion no longer leaves a permanent hole in your completion. You can still track what you have unlocked inside the expansion separately if you do buy it. Given how many publishers slice games into editions and add-ons, that separation is overdue.

The second half of the package is archiving. Developers can retire individual achievements or whole sets, which Valve pitches as a fit for season-based games or limited-time holiday achievements. Players who already unlocked an archived achievement or completed an archived set keep it on their profile. Players who missed it will not see it on their profile, and it will not block their progress toward completing a set or the game. Valve also says that any achievement that can no longer be earned should be archived, which is a polite way of telling developers to stop leaving dead achievements in the list. Anyone who has chased an event achievement that vanished with a server patch knows why this is a big deal.

Steam Achievement Sets beta artwork from Valve's announcement showing the updated achievements page

A New Achievements Page and Friend Comparison

To hold all of this together, Valve rebuilt the achievements page. It is reachable from the Games List on the web and from any game in the Steam Library, and it shows your overall progress, your progress in each set and the details of individual achievements. Global stats, meaning the percentage of players who earned each achievement, can now be shown on that page with a toggle. Search gets new filters for specific sets and for locked or unlocked achievements, and there is a small celebration when you finish all of your sets. You can also compare your progress in a game with up to three friends, including rare achievements, completed sets and progress in DLC sets. Because the totals only count achievements each player can actually earn, the numbers can differ from friend to friend depending on which DLC they own and whether time-limited achievements were archived.

There are smaller changes around the edges too. The Perfect Games tab is now called Completed, and it expands to show both fully completed games and games where you have finished an achievement set. Games you played through Family Sharing now show up in the Games List, and friends who played a game that way become eligible for the friend comparison. Store and Library pages will also tell you when a game has achievement sets, so you can see the structure before you buy. The beta is open to both players and developers, and Valve says it will keep improving things during the test as developers start adopting the tools.

Which Games Support It Today

Adoption has already started. Eurogamer lists the games that have added achievement sets so far as Against the Storm, Age of Wonders 4, American Truck Simulator, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, Crusader Kings 3, Dredge, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Forza Horizon 5, Flock Around, He is Coming, LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, PowerWash Simulator, PowerWash Simulator 2, Team Fortress 2 and Victoria 3. The mix is telling. Valve's own old shooters are on the list, which makes sense since Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 carry years of updates, but so are a brand new Activision release and big strategy and simulation games that live on expansions. That is a healthy spread for a beta that only just opened, though the real test is whether the huge live service catalogs follow.

Steam Achievement Sets beta artwork from Valve's announcement showing set progress and friend comparison

Community Reaction So Far

Reaction is limited at the moment, and it would be dishonest to call it a consensus. The posts circulating today come mostly from news and fan accounts rather than regular players. The Steam Deck focused account SteamDeckGaming called it a big upgrade and said completionists should rejoice, because DLC achievements no longer break a 100 percent completion and seasonal ones can be retired. Other accounts echoed the same framing within minutes of the announcement. What nobody has had yet is time to report how developers actually use the tool, or whether the sets feel useful in a real library of hundreds of games. Treat the early mood as positive but unproven.

Our Take

This is a good change, and it is the kind of boring infrastructure work Valve does best when it decides to care. The 100 percent badge was always a promise Steam could not keep, because the moment a studio shipped content the promise broke and the player took the hit. Achievement Sets fixes the accounting without punishing anyone: your old completion stays, your new goals get their own bar, and dead achievements can be buried. The cynical read is that this also makes DLC cheaper to ship for publishers, since nobody will be angry about a fresh batch of achievements wrecking their profile. That is true, and it is still the better trade for players.

The catch is that it only works if developers bother. A feature that depends on studios organizing their achievement lists will be uneven for a long time, and the games most in need of it, the sprawling live service titles with endless seasonal clutter, are also the ones whose publishers may care least about cleaning up. Valve picked a quiet moment to ship this, with Steam still fresh off a record of more than 43.5 million concurrent users last Sunday and Epic pushing a new vibe coded launcher at the same market. If Valve wants to keep that lead, shipping thoughtful fixes like this one is the right way to do it. Now we wait to see how many studios actually adopt it, and how soon the Steam client beta becomes the stable client for everyone.