Valve's redesigned Steam Achievements are now live for all, with extra good news for Linux users

One month after it rolled the feature into beta, Valve's big Steam Achievements overhaul has now gone public, and you can start using it right away. The redesign aims to give a more helpful look at exactly what parts of a game you're an expert in, allowing it both to show when you've mastered certain sections of a game (such as the single-player side), and to better reflect games with a longer lifespan using seasons or DLC. Alongside this, Valve has also deployed some improvements to Big Picture mode, Remote Play, and Linux support.

Currently, the feature only applies to a relatively small segment of Steam games, although there are some heavy hitters among them. These include Portal 2, TF2, Left 4 Dead 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4, Forza Horizon 5, Crusader Kings 3, and Against the Storm, to name just a few of those that were ready in time for the beta. Valve suggests it should be very simple for developers to implement, however, so expect it to become the standard moving forward, and I wouldn't be surprised if most live-service games and other regularly updated games follow suit.

At the top level, achievements are now split between two colors. Blue achievements are for the base game, while purple achievements are for DLC. The latter group doesn't count towards your personal progress in a game unless you've bought the add-on in question (or added it to your account for free expansions). This means you no longer need to worry that your proud 100% completion is going to be spoiled because some new stuff came out that you aren't particularly fussed about returning to.

Digging down deeper, developers can also split their achievements up into specific groups. The most obvious use case for this is separating single-player and multiplayer achievements, or breaking up various game modes so that you can quickly see when someone is an expert at a particular activity.

Additionally, there's the option for 'seasonal' achievement sets, which can be retired should updates make them no longer accessible. This stops people who missed any time-limited unlocks from being permanently forced to stare at their empty slots in the achievement list, while those who put in the work to earn them will still be able to see them all.

To bring this all together, Valve has also overhauled some other related aspects of the Steam interface. There's a new comparison page where you can quickly see how you stack up to three of your friends. The old 'Perfect Games' tab has been rebranded to 'Completed' and shows both fully finished games, along with those where you've got 100% in any individual achievement sets. It also now includes those you've accessed through Steam Family Sharing.

The Steam Achievement Sets update is live now for all. There's also more to look forward to in the rest of the patch notes, however. Notifications have been improved and should now more consistently support per-friend settings. Offline support for the activity feed gets an upgrade, as does the text search algorithm on the store. There's new controller support for GameInput v4, and a tweak to the custom 'Joystick Power Curve' setting, which wasn't working properly - be sure to check your settings if you were using it before.

Remote Play now has a display setting to provide more control over screens with different aspect ratios, and HDR support has been overhauled while using Remote Play, which also sees it enabled via Linux and macOS, on Steam Deck OLED, and with phones running Android 15 or newer. The Linux Steam client has been changed to a 64-bit application, and now runs inside a Steam Runtime container (the way games do) to "provide a more consistent experience" across various Linux distributions.

Finally, Big Picture mode gets quite a few touches. There's now a dedicated widget in the chat window to make accepting them easier, and the chat tab has been given a fresh coat of paint for more clarity. Message notifications will be rolled together when you get multiple in quick succession (rather than sending one per message). You can now adjust voice chat levels via the friend context menu, and there are some additional time zone settings for locations with specific daylight saving time changes.