What makes a Good Platinum Trophy?

** Or Achievement list/1000G list

I’ve been playing video games for 20 years now, and while I’m no developer, I feel I’ve gotten a good feel for what I see as good or bad design. In this series, I’ll cover a range of topics on how I would go about making games and the elements that comprise them. There’s no objective fact here but some well researched ideas. Welcome to “What makes a good …”

Recently (4 Months ago now) I obtained my 100th Platinum Trophy on Playstation. For those not in the know, a Platinum is awarded when the trophy list for a game is completed (if the developers choose to implement one). It’s just that little extra to say well done, you did it. It’s the same as the little ribbon on Steam Achievements. For Xbox players, it’s usually a big gamer score achievement. I talk about it more in my article discussing my 100, which you can find here ………., but as I got more, I noticed trends in the trophies I was obtaining and the ones I avoided. For me, the perfect Platinum list requires:

Actually having a Platinum is a start

This may be a reflection of deeper rooted issues I have personally, but if I see that a game doesn’t have a Platinum trophy, I get sad. Of course people who don’t trophy hunt don’t see the problem and think its ridiculous, which I do get. Completion should be its own award, and usually it is – I’ve 100% a few Mario games for nothing more than the satisfaction. If I enjoy a game, I’ll play as much of it as I can, but the Platinum or “Reward” at the end is the difference between me doing something grindy or not. There are games I’ve enjoyed and done all of the content but not gone back for trophies due to the lack of plat.

I think that’s the distinction, trophies often relate to none content activities (As in trophies unrelated to collectibles – combat, miscellaneous ones). If there’s no Platinum, I’m less inclined to go back for these.

Trophies make for a great feedback loop

Ultimately it’s up to each developer where they decide to put their trophies, but personally I’m a fan of the dangling keys approach – a trophy after every chapter or boss encounter or major story beat is a great way to keep players engaged. It doesn’t have to be that frequent, but it’s kind of sad when a game only has a completion trophy for beating the story and nothing else throughout.

Difficulty trophies are fine, but…

This one is contentious amongst trophy hunters, some people want Platinum trophies they can breeze through on the easiest difficulty, others want their flesh and bone reduced to dust before they’re allowed to move on to the next game. I lie somewhere in the middle of that. I generally play my games on the intended difficulty, whatever the equivalent of normal is. I don’t mind having to play on harder difficulties after the fact for trophies. When it comes to trophies, the problem is when the difficulty trophies don’t stack. For example, if the game has a trophy for beating it on Easy, Medium and Hard, then beating it on Medium should unlock both that and easy, same goes with Hard. Having to play a game again on easy for an extra trophy makes the experience feel like a slog – it might be easy due to difficulty level and accrued skill but it’s still 6, 10 or 20 hours what have you of replaying content you’ve already mastered.

To Collect or Not to Collect

I’ve been playing Collectathons since the day I could hold up a controller, so I’m no stranger to having long lists of items to retrieve. Naturally game design has changed and the kind of games change too. Collectibles are often padding at best or absolute visual clutter on a map at worst. My tolerance for Collectibles trophies relies on the game I suppose, and how well they handle them. In a linear game, chapter select with a tally of collectibles is a must. Bonus points if I can quit out after obtaining them without finishing the chapter. Double bonus points if there are sub chapters so you don’t have to play 30 minutes of a level for a collectible you left next to the exit door. In an open world game, depending on the size of your world, making the trophy pop for only a percentage of collectibles obtained is a god send. I don’t want freebies here, I’d settle for needing 75/80% of them – enough that I have to engage with the game, not so bad that I have to play with YouTube open on my phone, pausing the game or video every 30 seconds. As an aside, mark points of No Return if you don’t plan on letting the player explore afterwards, and don’t put mandatory collectibles in unrepeatable sections – it goes against the importance of the moment and is just frustrating.

Multiplayer trophies

You’ll not hear a single good word said about multiplayer trophies from the community and for good reason. If you don’t play the game on release, especially in more recent times – the online is either dead, hacked or the servers have been taken down, making Platinum impossible.

Ideally, there wouldn’t be any. However, if you’re so insistent on having Multiplayer trophies – there are options:

• Put them in a separate list: As far as I’m aware this would only apply to playstation which puts it’s DLC’s and other newer trophies in a separate list. These do not count towards Platinum

• Auto-Pop: If your servers are shutting due to finances or whatever reason, giving people the trophies they don’t have means they can still engage in the story content. It’s not like they’d be fooling anybody, the trophy date would show it was post closure (If that really matters to anybody)

• Make them available offline: Allowing players to still play against CPU bots isn’t the most graceful solution and probably requires a lot of grinding, but it’s still a legitimate avenue for a player to get the trophies post online shutdown.

This doesn’t just apply to multiplayer modes, it’s anything online. Recently Mirror’s Edge Catalyst had its servers shut down. There was no multiplayer, but two trophies were tied to user created content (Custom races in the world). These are unobtainable now, in a game that was otherwise strictly single player. The same thing applies to leaderboard games when servers close. Something to think about when designing.

Have fun with your trophies

Nothing is more boring to me than bog standard run of the mill trophies – get N kills with N weapon. I’m gonna put the Uncharted series on blast here because every game in the series has a multitude of these trophies, probably one for each gun. If you have to, condense it down to one trophy for getting N kills with every gun. Better yet, don’t include them.

Trophies can exist outside of the games content, as mentioned above. This means you can really have fun with trophies – couple examples of fun things you can do with trophies – reach the highest point of the map, fail an objective intentionally (Like Crash 2’s N-Raged for beating a level 3 times without collecting the Crystal), die in every possible way. Trophies for changing playstyle are fun too – fully stealthing a section, going guns blazing instead of stealth. Depending on your game, the options are near limitless.

Have fun with your trophy’s names

This is less important than everything else here from a mechanical standpoint, but personally I believe it makes a world of difference. It doesn’t have to be clever references to other media, I just like something more than the trophy for beating chapter 1 being “Chapter 1 Complete”. Literally anything would be better than that.

Not naming your Platinum’s “Platinum” “Platinum Trophy” or “(Game Name) Platinum Trophy is a must. It just looks so drab and basic. It doesn’t have to be too fancy - all of the games published by Annapurna Interactive have “All Done” as their Platinum names, which is alright since it’s kind of like their brand thing. I also enjoy titles that incorporate Platinum into the name without just being Platinum – Platinum Colombia (Bioshock Infinite) or Platinum Blades and Dark Corners (Dishonored) just to name a couple.

Of course, these are just the things I look for when I’m looking for Platinums and how I would design my own list. The only real requirement for a Platinum list is making sure it can be earned long after the game has left the public zeitgeist. A Platinum should be forever.

Thank you for reading the first edition of “What makes a good …”, this is a series I’m really looking forward to writing more of. Stay tuned for the next installment!