I wish more developers put significance into Trophy/Achievement design like their peers (The Good & Bad of Achievement/Trophies)

[Scruffy8642]

I have trophy hunted for a very long time and even I'm not sure what makes up a good list.

Like obviously get 10k kills online or reach match rank ain't it, neither is playing a game more than twice, but I don't think the recent PS trophy lists that tend to be pretty effortless and boring are either. Also this trend of adding NG+ and harder modes down the line with extra trophies to try get you to return to the game months later really sucks.

I definitely enjoy trophy lists more when they at least require you to go somewhat out of your way or have a challenging task. Like I honestly prefer a list that doesn't require you to do everything but has a very challenging task. Titanfall 2 is a good example, a rather simple playthrough and a challenging speed run task that'll probably take an hour or 2 of practice. Even Vanquish which is considered uber difficult was a great list because it still only takes like 25 hours, it's just half that time is practicing one task.

Doing all the side content in a 50+ hour game is more often than not monotonous and boring because a lot of the content is crappy filler. I'll take a short and challenging list any day, but I feel like there're fewer and fewer lists like that. Most nowadays are medium to long and effortless/grindy/boring.

 

[2Blackcats]

Can't stand it when a game has trophies for finishing different difficulty levels. I normaly play games on hard for fun but allot of games have unfun super mega hard modes. Especially if your a 100hour RPG. I ain't got time for that.

Biggest example that comes to mind is the Witcher 3, blood and bones is great but I just don't want to play through the whole game again to get one death march trophy.

If your a short game ment to be mastered and replayed then sure but ONLY then.

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I hate it when games don't have them. You can still get them all in the one run if you go blood and bones (or whatever) on your first go.

I really like having an incentive not to change the difficulty for that one tough boss.

A compromise might be to have it separate. One elite trophy for each game that doesn't effect the platinum.

 

[shadowman16]

Go! Go! Ready Go!
Go! Go! Leady Go!
Hi! Hi! High!
otome-iro my life 3-2-1 Go!

Getting platinums in all Yakuza games must take a few years off your lifespan.

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On the contrary, I think it's helped keep me sane. Also, playing as much DJMax as I tend to, that song was never something that I viewed as all that tough, probably managed it first time. The final fan dance in Ishin though... yeah that definitely took some doing.

 

[Garrison]

A lot of Japanese games used to make cool bits of art through sequential trophies (Gravity Rush, the Trails games), but I think that has died out :(

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Woah, that's awesome.

 

[cognizant]

MK11's DLC Aftermath is on sale today, and I was tempted to get it but then learned it had no trophies, which I admit dampened my motivation. Online is toxic, can't even block people. Towers of Time have obnoxious modifiers that got old real quick. So £15 for a short story doesn't really seem worth it.

I'm playing King of Fighters 14 at the moment, and one trophy requires me to play story mode with every team. As a result I'm playing as characters I never would have normally picked. So I like how trophies provide structure to playing a game, and allow you to discover more than you would have without them. The Last of Us's difficulty trophies made me play the game in a different way almost transforming the experience entirely.

I'm undecided on trophies that require an element of luck. They piss me off, but at the same time when I manage to get them the sense of accomplishment is great. Rainbow Six Siege's trophy to kill someone with a breach charge took me AGES. The relief when I finally managed it...

 

[Spring-Loaded]

Are achievements in games a mandatory requirement in order to get your game published by playstation, xbox and steam?

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They are, which is why it's kind of in bad form to give devs shit for their trophies.

 

[FliX]

Grindy trophies can go the way of the dodo.
I just started RDR2 and I've pretty much resigned myself to not completing the plat because some of those collectible ones are just ridiculous...

 

[MillionGil-Gilgamesh]

Achievement/Trophy Lists that don't respect the players time

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Laughs in Star Ocean

 

[Jawmuncher]

They are, which is why it's kind of in bad form to give devs shit for their trophies.

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Achievements/Trophies are mandatory. What they make the list isn't.
I don't think it's giving the developers "shit" by saying "Hey, maybe don't do this when making a trophy list" (Especially when you consider a trophy list can be more of a selling point than not).

A good example is actually Turok. The trophy list was posted and users weren't happy about no Platinum.
Nightdive saw that criticism and Turok 2 now has a platinum trophy due to the team figuring out it was actually possible to do so.

 

[Euler007]

On the contrary, I think it's helped keep me sane. Also, playing as much DJMax as I tend to, that song was never something that I viewed as all that tough, probably managed it first time. The final fan dance in Ishin though... yeah that definitely took some doing.

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To be clear, I'm talking about scoring 950 for Haruka's whims, not just the 800 passing score for songs as usual. If you scored 950 on your first try you are very, very good at rhythm games.

 

[Citizencope]

A lot of Japanese games used to make cool bits of art through sequential trophies (Gravity Rush, the Trails games), but I think that has died out :(

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Wow that's cool! Didn't know that was a thing.

 

[shadowman16]

To be clear, I'm talking about scoring 950 for Haruka's whims, not just the 800 passing score for songs as usual. If you scored 950 on your first try you are very, very good at rhythm games.

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So am I. I had 0 problems sailing past that score first time. I honestly dont get all the fuss about the song, I felt it was pretty easy all things considered. Majima's "Get to the Top" in Dead Souls is a tougher song to consistently score higher on due to its eratic and fast pace and even then I can tend to get to 950 fine. And Id really not say Im "great" with rhythm games, just good enough that nothing Yakuza throws at me is remotely challenging. Im the loner in the corner shouting about getting higher difficulty in the completion lists, thankfully ignored by everyone ;)

 

[JaseC64]

OP you are a legend. YES I agree.

There is that Halo wannabe game on PS that is missing a platinum but Xbox version has the equivalent. Like WTF!?

Also they expect you to play (and win) like 1000MP games to get....a gold trophy and not platinum at the end. Hard pass even with the good word of mouth. Devs literally showing no respect for your time like you said. Fucking yikes.

 

[Niklel]

Hot take: I like achievements/trophies tied to difficulty levels.
For example, I was disappointed that God of War 2018 doesn't have difficulty achievements. I played through a terribly designed "Give me GoW" difficulty and you're not even going to reward me for this?

What I dislike is "Complete a New Game+" trophies/achievements. Usually there is no significant difference between NG and NG+, so why do you want me to beat your game twice?

 

[Man Called Aerodynamics]

A lot of Japanese games used to make cool bits of art through sequential trophies (Gravity Rush, the Trails games), but I think that has died out :(

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That's amazing! So clever, I love it.

 

[KDC720]

Halo 5 and MCC had so much cool concept art you can get for unlocking achievements. It's a shame Infinite's achievement art is pretty bland in comparison.

Agree with everything in the OP though.

 

[cake]

Achievements/Trophies are mandatory. What they make the list isn't.
I don't think it's giving the developers "shit" by saying "Hey, maybe don't do this when making a trophy list" (Especially when you consider a trophy list can be more of a selling point than not).

A good example is actually Turok. The trophy list was posted and users weren't happy about no Platinum.
Nightdive saw that criticism and Turok 2 now has a platinum trophy due to the team figuring out it was actually possible to do so.

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Was there some technical reason related to Turok causing issues? I remember that in the early days stuff like PSN-only games couldn't have platinum trophies but Turok was recent enough that I would assume that functionality would be built into the playstation api's. Always nice to see that kind of reception to feedback in Nightdive's part.

Bad: Releasing a remaster/collection with two (or more) games and combining all the content into one single list.

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I've been playing the Mass Effect collection which does this, I just laughed when I first saw the giant fucking list. At least it prefaces each game-specific achievement with ME1/ME2/ME3 but still.

 

[wafflebrain]

System popop integrated achievements have never done much for me, but I do like ones integrated into the game's own UI, when its tied to unlocks. Vampire Survivors does this and its great. You finish a run, see your achievements pop up and you actually get something for it.

I don't think I'll ever get a platinum in a game unless its some incredibly low barrier to cross one like completing the game on normal :P

 

[purseowner]

If you're not gonna make quips and puns with them, what's the point

 

[Jawmuncher]

Was there some technical reason related to Turok causing issues? I remember that in the early days stuff like PSN-only games couldn't have platinum trophies but Turok was recent enough that I would assume that functionality would be built into the playstation api's. Always nice to see that kind of reception to feedback in Nightdive's part.

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I recall (At least in this case) it was due to trophy ranking/points. They had the original list and it wasn't "worth" enough to have the platinum but by changing some things around you can have the trophy value equal to having a platinum (Which is why Turok 2 has more Gold Trophies). It's a weird system that some developers don't seem to realize they can get around which is why something like "My Name is Mayo" has a Platinum but "Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes" doesn't.

Turok Trophies

0 Platinum • 1 Gold • 5 Silver • 4 Bronze

psnprofiles.com

Turok 2: Seeds of Evil Trophies

1 Platinum • 10 Gold • 2 Silver • 2 Bronze

psnprofiles.com

Arguably, every game should just be allowed to have a Platinum regardless but at least there is a way around it.

 

[Geido]

Things I think make platinums cool.

- No grindy stuff that takes more that 20% of the original time to beat. If I have 20 hour game and need to do 4 additonal hours of grindy stuff it's okay. Sometimes you see games that have an initial time to beat of 8 hours, but getting the plat is 40. That is whack.
- Trophies that force you to see the entire game. So all features, events, area's, etc.
- Getting 95-99% of something instead of 100%. For instance for collectibles. Don't make me hunt down that one pidgeon I missed somewhere along the line. Just give me the gold for having 199 pidgeons.
- I don't mind difficulty based trophies. It's not bad if a game doesn't have them, but a trophy for beating a game at the highest difficulty level just feels right. But, give me the opportunity to select the highest difficulty immediately.
- I like a couple of funny/random trophies thrown in there. Ask me to impale someone with their own spear or other fun emergent stuff. Randomly popping a trophy and then checking what you actually did is always fun.

 

[Diogo Arez]

The Like a Dragon list was pretty good...

Outside of requiring a second run of the Millennium Tower post-game dungeon which requires a ludicrous amount of grinding (15+ hours for that alone to level several jobs to 99). Consequently, it's the only trophy I don't have.

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I actually defeated it with only the default jobs at 99, there are some videos that show a slow but easy way to beat it in case you return to the game.
But yeah that trophy list is 10x better than the rest of the Yakuza games

 

[Ifrit]

Props to Portal 2 for making a pop up achievement that makes a scene funnier

 

[Sausage_Poison]

I am currently playing Uncharted: Lost Legacy and I've noticed that the art for the trophies are really great!

 

[Doctor_Thomas]

Dufficulty trophies? Bad.

Online trophies? Bad.

Trophies that require a number of things but doesn't track it so it's visible to the user? Bad.

 

[AntiMacro]

Recently Halo Infinite broke this rule with its "Revive 3 players in Elimination Mode". The game is currently incompletable as the game mode has yet to be released after 2+ months.

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Not sure if anyone pointed this out, but this achievement is doable now. It should have been in there at the start obviously, but that mode was added recently.

 

[Deleted member 99664]

To me a good trophy list should be 100%able in a single play through, with no missable trophies, no multiplayer trophies and no difficulty ones.

 

[Jawmuncher]

Not sure if anyone pointed this out, but this achievement is doable now. It should have been in there at the start obviously, but that mode was added recently.

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If you're talking about the Event Mode Attrition, that doesn't count (Even though it has revives). It was the first thing I tried to do but 343 tweeted that you can't do it in that mode.

 

[BrightLightLava]

The thing that sticks slightly in my craw about the Halo Infinite one you still can't get is that the game has 119 achievements. So if you remove that one and any other random one, it would have 117, a number that actually matters to the franchise.

Anyway, I've been paying more attention to achievements than I normally would lately now that I'm on that Microsoft Rewards points grind. There are a handful of times where I've turned the game off right before unlocking one so that I can save it for the next day for an easy 50 points.

 

[Noema]

I quite disliked some of the Trophies in Returnal. Having to do so many runs hoping the audio log or glyph you're missing in a particular Biome spawns this time around was miserable. It kinda soured me on the game a bit. I hear it's better now after many updates?


The Shadow of the Colossus Remake on PS4 has my favorite Platinum so far. Most of the trophies involve killing the Colossi in ways that'd you wouldn't normally think of. For a couple of them, you actually have to really learn them and basically apply speedrunner strategies (for example, for the third Colossus, you have to kill it without breaking its armband. Normally, you'd bait it into attacking you so that the armband shatters as it hits the ground, allowing you to then freely climb its arm. But killing it without breaking the armband necessitates using the momentum from its arm to launch you into the air and try to land on its back.) You also have to complete all the time trials, many of which can be very challenging. Finally, you have to beat the game in mirrored mode, and also in less than 5 hours.

There's still a couple of grindy trophies in there (maxing out HP and stamina require multiple playthroughs and finding a lot of fruit and lizards), but overall, it's great at forcing you to get really good at the game.

 

[AntiMacro]

If you're talking about the Event Mode Attrition, that doesn't count (Even though it has revives). It was the first thing I tried to do but 343 tweeted that you can't do it in that mode.

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Seriously? I never gave it a shot, but I assumed it had to count.

 

[Jawmuncher]

Seriously? I never gave it a shot, but I assumed it had to count.

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Yeah and you weren't the only one lol. Multiple people were asking about it thinking it was glitched but it had to be SPECIFICALLY elimination mode lol.

 

[joghia]

Hot take: I like achievements/trophies tied to difficulty levels.
For example, I was disappointed that God of War 2018 doesn't have difficulty achievements. I played through a terribly designed "Give me GoW" difficulty and you're not even going to reward me for this?

What I dislike is "Complete a New Game+" trophies/achievements. Usually there is no significant difference between NG and NG+, so why do you want me to beat your game twice?

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100% agree. Especially with a difficulty as difficult and badly designed as GMGOW mode. Ever since then I always make sure to check the trophy list to see if there's a trophy related to beating the game on the hardest difficulty. I believe I had heard that they never put a trophy for GMGOW mode because they wanted the platinum to be more accessible and not force people to beat the game on that mode.

 

[OGM_Madness]

I really hate Achievements that force you to re-play a game and force you play a certain way (finish the game in 6 hours, don't get hit, etc).
Even achievements like Dark Souls 3 collect all rings have you replay a game 2+ times which is annoying when that's probably all you need to finish (although there's trading to walk around that).

The ideal list is one that gets you to revisit things you might have missed after finishing the game (like end-game or post-game stuff). Multiplayer trophies are also very annoying.

 

[Haze]

I wish for the abolition of the Trophy/Achievement industrial complex

 

[Jakisthe]

Bad Trophy Types:
-Difficulty checklists
-Massive, massive grinds
-Anything MP related whatsoever
-Anything dealing with normal progression
-Missing something which can only happen once per playthrough
-Finding more than 50 of a collectible

Good Trophy Types:
-Unusual ways to play
-Easily repeatable, relatively short (ie sub 3 hour) challenge runs
-Finding truly obscure secrets
-Beating optional superbosses
-Bite-sized feats of tight mechanical skill, like making an almost impossible shot on an out of the way target or whatever

 

[t26]

The Like a Dragon list was pretty good...

Outside of requiring a second run of the Millennium Tower post-game dungeon which requires a ludicrous amount of grinding (15+ hours for that alone to level several jobs to 99). Consequently, it's the only trophy I don't have.

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The original Japanese Platinum is a lot easier, as the True Millennium Tower is a DLC that was added later. Yakuza 6 was also reasonable Platinum

 

[DrScruffleton]

Go! Go! Ready Go!
Go! Go! Leady Go!
Hi! Hi! High!
otome-iro my life 3-2-1 Go!

Getting platinums in all Yakuza games must take a few years off your lifespan.

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Mini game master in Y3 is probably the most difficult trophy I have ever done.

 

[xxracerxx]

Xbox not separating dlc from base game is dumb.

 

[Euler007]

So am I. I had 0 problems sailing past that score first time. I honestly dont get all the fuss about the song, I felt it was pretty easy all things considered. Majima's "Get to the Top" in Dead Souls is a tougher song to consistently score higher on due to its eratic and fast pace and even then I can tend to get to 950 fine. And Id really not say Im "great" with rhythm games, just good enough that nothing Yakuza throws at me is remotely challenging. Im the loner in the corner shouting about getting higher difficulty in the completion lists, thankfully ignored by everyone ;)

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It should be noted that in Kiwami the UI is not the modern ones, the tempo for the UI in Kiwami changes drastically when it jumps up and down. I assume we're both talking about Kiwami, and you adjusted your tempo automatically. Like I said, you're very good at beat minigames if you scored 950 on your first try without knowing the song.

Mini game master in Y3 is probably the most difficult trophy I have ever done.

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Did you have fun doing it? It happened way too often to me that I beat a game in 15 hours, liked it so much I wanted to do and experience everything in it. 25 hours later Iwondered what happened to the devs to make them hate their customers so much. Maybe they spent too much time on online gaming boards.

 

[DrScruffleton]

Did you have fun doing it? It happened way too often to me that I beat a game in 15 hours, liked it so much I wanted to do and experience everything in it. 25 hours later Iwondered what happened to the devs to make them hate their customers so much. Maybe they spent too much time on online gaming boards.

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Some mini games were definitely more enjoyable than the others. A lot of time I was looking up ways to cheese them to make them easier. Like I specifically remember one of the baseball ones it takes away the reticle. So I had to get a piece of tape and place it on my TV to make it easier. I remember there being quite a few cheese tactics people found for a lot of them. Most of them were very difficult.

 

[Klart]

I like it when there is always a Trophy I can aim for.

And I don't like lazy Trophy lists where they were just an afterthought.

Im hoping Apex Legends gets a Platinum trophy on PS5 and extra Trophies for PS4. Dauntless did that the right way.

 

[toadfrawg]

For me personally, I really like how most recent Sony 1st parties have separate trophy list. The main list has a pretty straightforward mostly easy Platinum to get. Little to no missables, so you can pretty much play the game how you want without fear of missing out. DLC is separated out into a different list so it doesn't affect your platinum if you don't purchase it. And sometimes the new game + play through is it's own list too.

I like this setup, because you can play the game and enjoy it, get a nice platinum to put a bow on the experience, then if you want to keep playing you can shoot for the 100% completion and go for some of the harder or more time-consuming trophies.

 

[Curufinwe]

I would like the ability to see what secret Achievements are on the Xbox, and I also wish it would track the time and not just the date an Achievement was achieved. The option to automatically take a screenshot and associate it to the Achievement would be nice, too.

 

[PJTierney]

I more meant for PS / Xbox. They've been a requirement with them for a while now.

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Not only are they required, but there's specific limits on how many Gold/Silver/Bronze trophies you can have in the base list etc.

 

[Japanmanx3]

A lot of Japanese games used to make cool bits of art through sequential trophies (Gravity Rush, the Trails games), but I think that has died out :(

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Never knew this. That's hard!

 

[SilverArrow20XX]

I wanna know who's so obsessed with crafting and gathering that they made it the focus of both the PS4 and PS5 trophy list for Final Fantasy XIV.
From the overwhelming wealth of content to choose from, they thought doing endless thousands of collectibles was the way to go.

 

[iceblade]

Xbox not separating dlc from base game is dumb.

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Sorry for the dumb question, but I keep seeing this being mentioned. What is the problem with it being like this?

Not only are they required, but there's specific limits on how many Gold/Silver/Bronze trophies you can have in the base list etc.

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Isn't this needlessly restrictive?

 

[xxracerxx]

Sorry for the dumb question, but I keep seeing this being mentioned. What is the problem with it being like this?

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Because it makes it slightly harder to see what achievements you got in, say Undead Nightmare from RDR, rather than the base game. This literally happened yesterday when my wife and I were discussing a replay.

It would just be a cleaner system if they broke it up a bit.

 

[PieOMy]

I'm playing Kingdom Come. There is a trophy "find all crosses and shrines". These are basically objects you naturally come across along roads. When you come in proximity of one for the first time, a "discovered" pop up displays, and a marker is permanently added to the map.

In reality the trophy is "Read/Interact with 80% of all crosses, shrines, or murals". I've maybe interacted with 5 total, but I have "discovered" well over 80%.

How did the trophy/achievement description get so botched?