No More DLC Ruining Your 100% Ribbon: Steam Finally Separates Expansion Achievements From the Base Game
For nearly eighteen years, it has been the single biggest pet peeve for PC completionists: spending eighty hours unlocking every last challenge in a game to proudly display its gold 100% ribbon on your profile, only to watch that score plummet to 72% the day the studio drops a paid expansion. Valve has finally fixed this historical flaw by rolling out Steam Achievement Sets in the latest Steam Client Beta and across the Steamworks developer backend.
Blue for Base Game, Purple for DLC: How Achievement Sets Work
Until now, Valve's platform dumped every single achievement for a title into one giant, undifferentiated bucket. Whether an unlock belonged to the launch campaign, a free co-op update added two years later, or a paid expansion pack, everything weighed equally against your 100% completion rate. Coming right after the platform shattered its all-time concurrent record with 43.5 million players on Steam, Valve is finally modernizing profile tracking by splitting achievements into two distinct tiers:
- Base Game Achievement Sets (displayed in blue): These house the core challenges available to everyone who owns the standard game. Studios can even break them down into logical categories, such as Single-Player versus Cooperative modes, or individual character class sets.
- DLC Achievement Sets (displayed in purple): These isolate unlocks tied to paid expansions and add-ons. Crucially, DLC achievements are completely excluded from your overall game progress until you actually own that specific add-on.
Whenever you unlock every challenge inside a specific category, Steam commemorates the milestone by awarding a permanent "set complete" trophy on your profile. Even better, Valve confirms that if a developer later adds new achievements to a set or drops a fresh expansion, your previously earned completion status remains locked in and protected.
Archiving Seasonal and Unobtainable Achievements
The other major headache for achievement hunters has always been time-limited holiday challenges, seasonal battle pass tasks, or multiplayer trophies tied to decommissioned servers. To solve this, Valve is giving studios the power to archive individual achievements or entire sets directly inside Steamworks.
Once an unobtainable achievement is archived by the developer, both veterans and newcomers win: players who unlocked the challenge while it was live keep it permanently visible on their profiles, while new players who missed the window won't see it cluttering their list or blocking them from reaching 100% completion.
A Revamped Tracker and 17 Games Supporting Sets Today
Alongside the backend split, Valve has overhauled the Achievements page across the Steam Library and web client. Players can now flip a toggle to view Global Stats rarity percentages on the exact same screen, filter by locked status or specific sets, and compare progress side-by-side with up to three friends, including friends playing via Steam Family Sharing. On user profiles, the "Perfect Games" tab has been renamed to "Completed" and now highlights both fully finished titles and games with completed achievement sets, which can also be pinned to the Completionist Showcase.
For game makers, adopting the system requires zero game code changes or Steamworks SDK updates. Everything is handled inside a rebuilt web editor featuring bulk CSV import/export, automatic grayscale icon generation for locked states, localization checks, and hidden developer/DLC test modes so upcoming expansions aren't leaked early through database scrapes. Seventeen games already support Achievement Sets in today's Steam Client Beta:
- Against the Storm, Age of Wonders 4, Crusader Kings III, and Victoria 3
- American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and Forza Horizon 5
- DREDGE, PowerWash Simulator, and PowerWash Simulator 2
- LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, Flock Around, and He is Coming
- Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, and Team Fortress 2
My Take
It took nearly two decades to happen, but as someone who loves chasing 100% completion in my favorite games, I could not be happier. Sony figured this out back in the PS3 era by keeping the Platinum trophy strictly tied to the base game while tucking expansion trophies into separate sub-folders. On PC, watching a hard-earned Perfect Game get stripped from your profile showcase just because a publisher dropped a $15 DLC pack or a seasonal update was endlessly frustrating. At a time when Epic's rushed AI-coded launcher redesign is getting mocked by PC players, Valve is once again proving why its ecosystem remains in a league of its own. By making the new editor effortless for studios to adopt without touching a single line of code, Steam just delivered one of its best quality-of-life upgrades in years.
SEO consultant for over 20 years and digital entrepreneur, Charles 'Grimtag' Ronchain is the founder of Pro-Gamer.gg, Retrocharting.com, and Gamescharting.com. A competitive gamer, streamer, and retro game collector, he has worked in the video game industry for over 15 years, notably as a consultant for leading game price comparison platforms. Passionate about real-time performance data and gaming technology, he analyzes competitive esports, gaming hardware benchmarks, and creator workflows on Pro-Gamer.gg with an authentic player perspective.
