Steam Will Finally Stop DLC From Ruining Your 100% Completion

Valve has started beta testing Achievement Sets, the biggest change to Steam achievements in years. The announcement landed on October 15 (US time) / October 16 in Europe and Asia-Pacific, alongside a redesigned achievements page and a move to a 64-bit Linux client.

The problem it solves is familiar to anyone with a shelf of perfect games. Games now live for years, growing through DLC, expansions and seasons. Every one of those updates can add achievements — and the moment it does, a game you completed 100% quietly stops being complete. Your percentage drops, your perfect game disappears, and there is nothing you did wrong. Valve says the new system was designed specifically to stop that from happening.

Developers now decide how a game's achievements are divided. A set can cover the base game, a single DLC, a season, a multiplayer mode, a character class — whatever grouping makes sense for that game. Unlocking achievements works exactly as before; what changes is how they are browsed, counted and displayed afterwards.

Each set gets its own progress bar. Finish every achievement in a set and you earn a set complete trophy on your profile. Two details matter most. First, that completion is permanent: if a developer later adds achievements to a set you have finished, your completed status is preserved. Second, new content gets its own set, so returning players can see at a glance what has been added since they left, instead of hunting through a list of hundreds.

Valve is also drawing a visual line between types of sets. Base-game sets — the ones any owner can complete — are shown in blue. DLC sets are shown in purple, can be previewed before you buy the content, and do not count toward your overall progress until you own it. That last point fixes a long-running frustration: you are no longer permanently marked incomplete for content you never bought.

Sets do not arrive alone. Developers can now archive individual achievements or whole sets, which Valve is pitching for seasonal and holiday content: players who earned a time-limited achievement keep it visible on their profile, while players who missed it will not have it sitting in their list, blocking a completion forever. The achievements page itself has been rebuilt around overall progress, per-set progress and individual achievement details, with global completion rates moved to a toggle on the same page. Search gains filters for specific sets and for locked versus unlocked achievements, and you can compare progress with up to three friends — with totals now calculated from what each player can actually earn.

Elsewhere, the Perfect Games tab is renamed Completed and expands to include games with completed achievement sets, those games can be added to the Completionist Showcase, and store and library pages will flag whether a game supports sets. Games played through Family Sharing now appear in the Games List.

On its own, this is a quality-of-life update. In context, it is Valve removing a structural penalty for supporting a game for a long time. Developers — independent studios in particular — have had a quiet reason to hesitate before adding achievements with new content: it annoyed their most dedicated players, the exact people most likely to buy the DLC. Sets remove that trade-off. It also changes what finishing a game means on Steam: instead of one ever-expanding denominator, completion becomes modular — done with the base game, done with an expansion, or done with everything, each recognised separately.

This is the right fix, arriving late. The test now is adoption. Sets only exist where a developer does the work of grouping achievements, and the launch list leans heavily on Valve's own catalogue and large publishers. The feature becomes genuinely useful when mid-sized and indie teams with years of updates behind them — the games with the messiest achievement lists — go back and organise them. Watch the supported list over the next few months: if it grows beyond the obvious names, Achievement Sets will become the default way players judge completion. If it stalls, it risks becoming another good Steam idea that only a handful of games use.