From those that take a quantity over quality approach and focus on incredibly easy Trophy lists to those that strive to gather only the toughest Platinums possible, many PlayStation fans have come to adore the platform’s approach to achievements. However, there is always room for improvement, and one recurring issue with multiplayer Trophies shows that clearly.
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Multiplayer Trophies Should Never Become Unobtainable
When players pick up a singleplayer-focused game like God of War or The Last of Us 2, there is no reason to worry about their Trophies potentially being impossible to unlock. Since the games offer no multiplayer Trophies, gamers can come back to them in 10 years or so, playing them heavily to unlock their Platinum Trophies. With multiplayer-focused games, or even games that feature a split focus between solo and online play, this same luxury does not exist.
Whether it is a niche game like Raven Software’s Singularity or a bestselling juggernaut like Call of Duty, most gamers will eventually abandon online modes for something newer and better. For example, while groups of gamers will occasionally come together to return to older Call of Duty games for one night only, the servers for the games from the PS3 and 360 era will usually be dead. Players may find the occasional Team Deathmatch or Domination match, but beyond that, the other modes will remain a ghost town. Hackers are present, too, making the games less fun to return to in the first place.
Many Call of Duty Trophy lists feature objectives that ask players to “Prestige once” or “reach max level,” with games like Black Ops Cold War featuring some extra online tasks on top of this. While these achievements are easy to complete when the game is active and full of players, in a decade’s time, they could be nearly impossible to acquire - forcing players to search online for a boosting session just so they have a chance to get the Platinum. This is even more problematic in less popular games like the aforementioned Singularity, as anything where multiplayer is an afterthought will go completely dormant - making Trophies requiring online play impossible to get.
The recent situation involving Fall Guys’ new game launcher on PlayStation is a perfect example of this Trophy problem. Not only does the list feature frustrating trophies that are luck and RNG-dependent, but said list is only comprised of multiplayer Trophies. This means that when the new launcher arrives and the original launcher for Fall Guys becomes unusable, the old Trophy lists will be frozen. If players are at 90% and never got one of the Trophies, they will be stuck with that incomplete list permanently. This is a problem that extends to any game with multiplayer Trophies, as when the servers shut down or the game’s player base reaches zero, those Trophies become unobtainable.
Going forward, Sony should strive to improve the PlayStation Trophy system by adding a new rule for multiplayer Trophies. While games should be free to have multiplayer achievements in their Trophy lists (especially online-focused titles like Overwatch), there can be a timer for the trophies to automatically unlock. Developers could set this timer to a few years after release, or choose to automatically unlock all the multiplayer Trophies once the support for an online mode has come to an end. This way, PlayStation Trophy hunters revisiting older titles with a multiplayer component would not have to stress about unachievable achievements, with Sony ensuring that no Platinum is truly unobtainable.
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