Trophies are the PlayStation versions of Xbox’s Achievement system. They are awards given to the player when they complete specific tasks. This rewards accumulated and give a score to the player. Kind of like golden stickers, but for nerds.

I love trophies more than most. I am what people would call a trophy hoarder, and that’s the politically correct term. I’m someone who goes out of the way to collect these trophies. Trophies provide a challenging meta-game, they offer a good way to compare peoples skills even if they aren’t playing the same game, and often extend a games live span without asking for more money. Most people are indifferent to trophies don’t take much notice to them. A minority of people don’t like them and find them intrusive to peoples experiences. No matter what you’re opinion is I’m here to right the wrongs of trophies.

Effort

My biggest complaint about trophies is the lack of effort some developers put into them. Lets take my most recently played game, Sound Shapes, and look at it’s trophy list.

From a glance it’s easy to see that there isn’t much variation in the trophies. There are 20 Death Mode, 12 Beat School, a campaign complete, and a Platinum Trophy. There has been very little effort put into creating these trophies. Each set features the same naming conventions, requirements, and the exact same icon. Trophies aren’t an after, to be published on the PlayStation platform you are required to have trophies. Many developers that launched a game before trophies where required. Many developers have gone on record saying they will not patch in trophy support because its hard and expensive to do. So these plain trophies must have a very low priority in the developer’s to do list, for such a bland bunch of trophies to be created.

Rewarding Trophies

On the other side of things Sound Shapes does do some things very right. Along with the recently released Dyad there are very little trophies offered up for just playing through the game. Sound Shapes only gives you one trophy for completing the main portion of the game. It acts like a full stop, which is especially useful seeming as the levels can be played in any order you want. Offering trophies up for just for completing a level is an easy way to pawn off trophies, and really shouldn’t be rewarded with any. Once the campaign is completed alternative levels are unlocked in the form of Death Mode levels. In Dyad the alternative levels are simply named Trophy Level. These levels offer more game content and provide a much high goal to reach for. Each time that goal is reached the player is rewarded a trophy.

Next up are the Beat School trophies. Just like the Death Mode levels these are only unlocked once the campaign has been completed, but that’s not the important part. These trophies encourage players to enter the in-game editor, a feature that is often overlooked by players. Not only do they push players towards this feature but it teaches the player how they could use it at the same time. A similar encouragement can be seen in the LittleBigPlanet games, and in Trails: Evolution. Unfortunately both have their flaws in the way the set about doing this. I hope that more games (Halo) with user generated content pick up on this approach.

Online

Multiplayer trophies often come up as a cause of dispute within the community. There are many good reasons for this. An argument can be made saying that an online environment is too random for people to earn the trophies. People are often forced to get into groups to boost for these trophies. Others feel like trophies can taint the multiplayer experience by making people play in a manner that they normally wouldn’t. Older games often have their servers pulled-down making the online trophies for that game impossible to achieve for people that come late to the game. In my opinion I have been stung more than I’ve been reward by online trophies. I do think there is a correct way of using online trophies though. Exploration should be the emphasis, for example: Battlefield 3 is a game that features a handful of different game mode and classes. I have noticed that a large amount of people decided which mode they are going to play and the character they are going to use. This often creates an imbalance in peoples playing habits. A way to counter this is to encourage player to explore via trophies. The trick is to make sure that they amount of time they have to invest long enough to get a good feel of the differences and not too long to make it seem like a punishment.

Having trophies that require you to perform specific actions in an online environment will make people play in a way that the game isn’t intended to be played. Some good examples of forced play style achievements are in Halo: Reach, although most of them don’t affect gameplay to the extend other games do.

Forcing the player

Another example of forced play can be seen in the Uncharted Series. A common trophy is “Kill 50 Enemies with ‘insert weapon name'”. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception suffers the most from these trophies. The first two Uncharted games had a feature where you could arm yourself with any gun mid-game. Uncharted 3 removed this feature, this meant as I played through the game I was using weapons that where not best suited to the situation. This was because I knew once I got enough kills with that weapon I would have to use it any more. Some of the guns in the game are very rare and have low ammo counts. When I got into these situations I would pick off a handful of baddies and then reset to the last checkpoint. Rinse and repeat until trophy ‘dings’. Warning: Not challenging, and not fun.

Trophy Unlocked!

One way to stop your experience of the game being affected by trophies is to not pay attention to trophies until you’ve finished a game. This is very hard for me to do, especially when so many games feature missable trophies. Until I develop better self restraint I have an alternative solution. Currently there are two different trophy states; unlocked and hidden. Hidden trophies are the same as unlocked expect all of its information is hidden from the player until they earn it. Developers often choose to make trophies hidden to avoid disclosing major plot points, or encouraging certain play styles.

I’m suggesting a third “state”, locked trophies. These trophies can be seen but not unlocked until a certain trophy is unlocked. Lets look at some Call of Duty Trophies. There is one trophy rewarded to the player for completing a the level “Cliffhanger” in the story mode called Cold Shoulder. There is another level specific trophy called Ghost, the player is required to “Plant the C4 in ‘Cliffhanger’ without alerting or injuring anyone in the blizzard”. The chances are that when I came up to that level for the first time I would have gone onto YouTube and looked for a guide for the Ghost trophy. Thus spoiling the actually story, and once I got into game I would have been playing too much attention to following the guide to experience the game. If the Ghost trophy could only be earned after the Cold Shoulder trophy had been earned then my experience wouldn’t have been tainted. Then again, this is more of a personal issue than anything else.

Collectables

Trophies that require collectables are a big no no! Before anyone even thinks of adding in collectable trophies into a game, they need to make sense in the first place. I mean they can’t be something the developer has just thrown in for the sake of it. Collectables need to have a positive impact on the gameplay. In Crackdown there are 500 agility orbs, every time you collect an orb you are one step closer to a higher agility level. Each time you go up a level you are able to jump higher and run faster, many consider this the key mechanic in Crackdown. In comparison, Infamous has ‘blast shards’ hidden around the world. Once a certain number of these shards have been collected you are able to hold a larger electrical charge. This does affect the gameplay, but in a very minor way. It can also be rendered useless by other unlockable skill later in the game, making the collection a chore instead positive feedback loop. Infamous 2 does provide the player away to locate each shard in game, which is now an essential feature for all games with collectable games should have. My point is collectables should have its own reward to make player want to collect them all, before trophies are even thought about.

Additional Hardware

In very rare cases trophies require you to have more than you have. In most cases a gamer should be expected to have one controller, one screen, and one system. Then there are games that are required to have PlayStation Move, Kinect, or another add-on. If a game is required to have additional hardware to play then there is no problem in needing that additional hardware to earn certain trophies. When your playing a game though, and all of a sudden you need to take a photo with PlayStation Eye to get a trophy, and that’s the only time the Eye is mentioned then something has gone wrong. Even asking for players to play a game with more than one controller can throw many people under the bus very quickly. Trophies should be achievable with the equipment that developers know the player has.

Creativity

This kind of goes in with the effort section but can be given it’s own paragraph or two. Lets be inventive in our trophies. The first and probably best way to add some creativity in the trophy world is to make them funny. Borderland is riddled with funny jokes. One of the best is “What a party!” to earn this you have to “Collected 3 panties, 5 fish in a bag and 15 pizzas”. There are many more like this in Borderlands. In Portal 2 they went even further into the depths of funny and timed a trophy pop-up with the game’s narration to act as an extra punchline for a joke!

The second way of doing this is through fairly cleaver and I think I have only seen this once or twice, most recently in Gravity Rush. There are three DLC packs for Gravity Rush; Maid Pack, Spy Pack, and the Special Forces pack. Below are all of the trophies for one of those packs, see if you can guess which pack it is.

There where a few clues in there, but the biggest was probably the maid costume. Once all of the trophies are unlocked in the DLC the player is rewarded a picture of the new costume they unlocked in the DLC. It’s nice some thought was put into this. Unfortunately this can only work on exclusive games as trophies are displayed in a list format and achievements are displayed as a grid.

The third way, out of potentialy many more creative ways to use trophies, can be seen in the recently released Deadlight. Deadlight is a game is a game set in an alternative version of 1986, as a result of this all of the achievement’s are the titles of songs from the 80’s. There is “Wanted Dead or Alive”, “Knocking on Heavens Door”, and “Never Going to Give You Up”. Each one is related, somewhat loosely sometimes, to the action that is required to get them. As a result there is a list of achievements that aren’t generic in any shape or form.

Intrusive Trophies

I mentioned before that there are people that actively dislike trophies. In a podcast I listened to one of the developers of The Walking Dead said that they wish they didn’t have to put trophies in the game. They award a trophy for completing each chapter in the game, in their case they didn’t have much of a choice. It was either that or make player’s make certain decisions. His argument was that every time a chapter is completed the player is given a reminder that they are just playing a game and finished a section. For a story based game, that could easily be described as a experience, it just didn’t bode well with him. Another game that revolves around a story experience is Heavy Rain. They did something interesting with trophies, they delayed the notification until the player entered a load screen. They did this so they player didn’t get pulled out of the experience until they where already being pulled out because of hardware constraints. This confused gamers that didn’t know this, and are trained to wait no more than a few seconds for the trophy to ‘Ding’.