Many trophy hunters collect achievements because they crave a challenge. While casual players may struggle to complete a game’s story, trophy hunters won’t stop until they’ve earned the platinum trophy. The most fervent among us often take it one step further, going above and beyond by setting their own goals and restrictions that ramp up the difficulty of completion. On the other hand, some trophy hunters make unlocking achievements more complicated without even realizing they’ve done so.
In this article, we will discuss 9 ways that trophy hunters make achievements more difficult than they need to be. Some of these are decisions made deliberately, while others may be hard to avoid depending on your circumstances.
Table of Contents
9. Avoiding Trophy Guides
A significant number of trophy hunters prefer to go in blind for every new gaming experience. These players often run through the entire campaign of a video game before opening up a guide at all. This can be beneficial because you are less likely to encounter any story spoilers and you don’t feel compelled to adjust your gameplay for trophies at the expense of your enjoyment.
After all, micromanaging how many enemies you’ve defeated in a first-person shooter or checking a collectible guide between stages can be exhausting and immersion breaking. Plus, it feels a lot more special to unlock a trophy during natural gameplay without knowing ahead of time what it entails.
These are all great reasons for delaying the use of a trophy guide until a second playthrough. However, this becomes less and less appealing the longer a game is, especially since there is no guarantee that it will be a game you love. Take the Persona games, for example. These lengthy JRPG titles from Atlus can take anywhere from 50-100 hours per casual playthrough. Being less efficient with your time can backfire immensely, as doing so can quickly ramp up how much time you need to spend cleaning up what you missed.
In my experience, it is best to play without a trophy guide on a first pass through a short game. However, for longer titles, I tend to check a trophy guide for any missable trophies or collectables, and otherwise play the way that is most fulfilling for my playstyle. Also, if a lengthy game requires multiple playthroughs anyway, I save more intentional trophy hunting efforts for a later run.
8. Opting for Harder Difficulties
A lot of games require players to beat their campaigns on hard modes in order to earn their achievements. For example, many Call of Duty games have trophies primed for skilled players whom beat the story mode on Veteran difficulty. However, not all games require players to select the highest difficulty; some even have no difficulty related trophies at all! Yet, just because it’s not required, doesn’t mean us trophy hunters won’t go out of our way to do so. After all, we’re not ones to shy away from a challenge.
One title that comes to mind is Resident Evil 6. The game does indeed have difficulty trophies; There are 4 difficulty trophies in the game, ranging from beating all campaigns on Amateur to Professional difficulty. At first glance, this seems complete; However, Resident Evil 6 actually has another difficulty setting beyond Professional.
No Hope difficulty is available as soon as you boot up the game and ramps things up to 11. You die much more quickly, enemies die much more slowly, you cannot equip any skills, and items are very rare to come by. In short, it is much harder! Although not required, some players may opt to play on this difficulty to test their mettle, either for bragging rights or because it’s simply more fun.
Another example would be Persona 5 Tactica. The game has no difficulty trophies whatsoever, leaving it up to the player to decide what would be appropriate for their skill level. The difficulty of the game ranges from Safe to Merciless, where harder selections even enable friendly fire. While playing on lower difficulties allows players to breeze through the story relatively unfazed, higher difficulties will require a better understanding of the game’s mechanics and strategies. Again, choosing to play on the hardest settings can be a lot more fulfilling for players that prefer a challenge.
Nevertheless, choosing a higher difficulty is likely to make your trophy hunting experience take longer than the average player. After all, being reset to a checkpoint more often than other players will result in longer sessions, thus increasing your overall time investment for the platinum trophy.
7. Adding Mods
This entry may surprise console-only players. On PC, it is possible to install mods for games you own in order to add features, change the appearance of in-game assets, or even expand the world with additional story beats and gameplay elements. Sometimes, mods can make Steam achievements more difficult to complete than they otherwise would be on a vanilla copy of a game.
One game on Steam that is incredibly popular among the modding community is Stardew Valley. Fans of the game have created an abundance of expansions that add entirely new areas to explore fit with dungeons, shops, and new NPCs for you to meet. Stardew Valley is full of achievements that require perfection, like “Gourmet Chef” or “Full Shipment.”
“Gourmet Chef” is unlocked by cooking every recipe, and “Full Shipment” is achieved by selling every item listed in the in-game shipping log menu via the shipping bin on your farm. There are additional trophies that can be unlocked for catching every fish, crafting every item, and completing the museum, too. Since several mod expansions add new recipes and items into the game, it becomes several times more difficult and time-consuming to collect them all.
6. Completing All Games in a Series
Plenty of trophy hunters collect all the trophies in a video game franchise of their choosing. God of War, Spider-Man, and Final Fantasy are just a few examples of highly represented series on trophy hunters’ lists. Some players may even take it a step further and complete every single game in a series, even if it has no trophies at all.
After all, not doing so would be tantamount to taking a bite of a cookie and making a show to an audience that you’d finished the whole thing. A clever magic trick, perhaps, but you know that cookie is far from finished! Even if you have a seemingly complete platinum trophy mosaic of a video game series, it would be a disservice to the franchise not to see it through to the end.
What game series have titles without trophies? More than you might realize. There are over a dozen Assassin’s Creed games with hundreds of achievements spread between them. However, the first game in the series released in 2007 and has yet to be remade or remastered for PlayStation consoles in any fashion. As a result, there isn’t any way for Assassin’s Creed fans to prove to like-minded trophy hunters that they’ve made a clean sweep through the entire series.
Another great example comes in the form of one of my favorite JRPG series of all time: the Tales Of series. These games date all the way back to 1995 with the release of Tales of Phantasia. Although there have been nearly 20 games in the series since then, only half of them can reasonably be added to a trophy hunter’s profile. Tales of the Abyss, the Tales of Destiny duology, several now-defunct mobile games, and even a few Japanese-only releases with online fan translations are all impossible for a vast number of players to add to their lists.
Trophy hunters that collect all platinum trophies in a series in order to show how much they adore it are extremely likely to complete every entry regardless of its achievements. While this doesn’t do your trophy hunting profile any favors, it certainly gives you a reputation boost in the community!
5. Enabling Handicaps
If you watch content on video streaming websites from enterprising gamers, you almost certainly have come across the idea of challenge runs. Content creators often go big to generate more clicks and that has led to the rise of videos with increasingly more ludicrous premises. Nuzlocke rulesets, speedruns while blindfolded, and even playing video games using only voice commands are all ways that players have intentionally made things more challenging.
That said, which of these tactics do trophy hunters employ? More skilled players may choose to select in-game restrictions that make obtaining trophies harder. For example, it is possible to play the Kingdom Hearts games without earning any experience whatsoever so long as you equip the EXP Zero ability. Being level 1 isn’t required for trophies, but it does make the series much more difficult and thrilling.
Another common usage occurs in the Tales Of games. After beating the story, you are able to select various modifiers for your new game plus playthrough via the Grade Shop. Most players tend to select things that are beneficial like 10x experience gain, the ability to keep all unlocked skills, and so forth.
However, there are also options you can select to intentionally give yourself a handicap in the future. You can halve your experience gains, decrease your HP, double damage dealt and received, and so on. In this way, you can tailor your game experience to make it as hard as you like. Of course, this will inadvertently make many trophies much more challenging to complete!
4. Using Only One Save Slot
Unlike the earlier entries on this list, this one is more likely to be triggered by inexperienced trophy hunters. Many casual gamers prefer the neat and tidy appearance of a single save slot being used at a time in their games. After all, if you set a game down and pick it up months later, having dozens of different save slots filled can be very confusing.
On the other hand, trophy hunters that have been around the community for a long time tend to know better. All it takes is getting burned once for a trophy hunter to never again trust the indomitability of a single save file. Bugs, corrupted save files, and missable trophies can all ruin your day if you don’t take appropriate measures.
Spiritfarer is a platforming management sim all about delivering wayward souls to the afterlife. If the premise sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a lot like the story of Charon, the ferryman that travels along the River Styx in Greek mythology. Two trophies are at odds with one another: “Sealed Lips” and “Loose Lips.” If you do not have the foresight to quit and reload an earlier save after achieving one of the trophies, you will be forced to play a large chunk of the game all over again to get its counterpart.
Similarly, the stylistic action adventure game Okami has a missable trophy titled “No Furball on the Menu.” You only have one chance to earn this trophy, so failing to do so and overwriting your save file means you’ll have to play through the story all over again for another chance.
One might argue that these examples will only be experienced as a direct result of an oversight by the player. However, there are plenty of cases in which bugs and corrupted save files can affect prospective trophies. One fairly common issue in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla made it impossible to earn a DLC stack trophy. The Anderitum Hideout raven challenge could become bugged such that the game did not realize you had acquired a key necessary for progression.
Although a patch was eventually released that fixed the issue for most players, it would have been a lot easier for affected trophy hunters to simply reload an earlier save and attempt the challenge again. After all, there was no guarantee that the patch would fix the issue for your particular save file or that Ubisoft would follow through with additional fixes should there be further problems.
Generally, I tend to recommend cycling through at least 3 different save slots. This makes it much more unlikely that you will run into corrupted saves or issues that completely upend a playthrough. For especially long games, I also tend to use a few extra slots to serve as bookmarks after significant story events, such as entering new areas or story arcs.
3. Preferring Single Player
It can be hard to find a reliable player two who has both a similar skill level as you and the motivation to earn difficult or tedious achievements. And, even if this person ticks every box, there is also the fact that you both need to have your schedules line up so you can play together when you’re both free. For these reasons, it can be appealing for trophy hunters to opt for single player experiences rather than co-op in games that let you choose, even if the latter would actually be faster or easier in the long-run.
One of the most infamous co-op oriented platinum trophies out there hails from Unravel Two. You and a friend both control dolls made of yarn in puzzle platforming stages that rely on coordination and teamwork. Solo players can also enjoy the game in its entirety; the difference being that you must switch between the two yarn dolls and solve the puzzles on your own.
Unravel Two’s trophies are extremely difficult as they require players to complete a gauntlet of tight speedruns through every stage of the game. Playing alone can actually make the speedruns more challenging since you can only control one yarn doll at a time. These cumulative time losses mean that you have to essentially be perfect in your movement in order to beat the clock.
The Borderlands series also includes many trophies that can be accomplished with much less heartache when enlisting a buddy or three. For example, the trophy “Vincible” in The Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC from the first game requires players to defeat the raid boss Crawmerax. This fight can be tough alone, especially if you picked a non-Siren character. Between grinding levels, gear, and practice battles, you are likely to spend a few hours more than a player that fights the boss with their friends.
If you are interested in reading more about achievements that encourage playing with others, check out our article on platinum trophies that are better with friends.
2. Avoiding Auto-Pop Trophies
Despite the advent of the PlayStation 5 generation of consoles in 2020, many new titles are still being released on older hardware in order to reach the largest audience. Third-party developers seem especially keen to continue supporting PlayStation 4 consoles. There isn’t much of a downside to doing so since players are able to transfer their saves from their PlayStation 4 console to the next generation once they’ve upgraded.
One quirk that has arisen from shared saves between the two generations of consoles is the possibility of automatically popping an entire second trophy set for one game. For titles that have separate trophy sets for their PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions AND allow transferring save files, you can earn two platinum trophies for the price of one. In other words, if you earn a platinum trophy in a PlayStation 4 game and transfer your save to a PlayStation 5, you can earn a second platinum trophy with no additional effort on your part.
It isn’t hard to see why so-called auto-pop trophies are controversial in the community. They impact trophy hunting statistics for affected PlayStation 5 titles by inflating their completion rate to a higher number than they should be. They also dilute players’ trophy hunting mosaics and profiles, resulting in a more cumbersome viewing experience for those that visit your page. Auto-pop platinum trophies also extricate a lot of the novelty that formerly could only be experienced when you truly earned it.
For all those reasons and more, many trophy hunters choose not to engage with auto-pop platinum trophies at all. Some players are happy having played a game once and stop with the singular platinum trophy. Those that are especially fond of a title might choose to earn the PlayStation 5 stack of trophies with a brand new save file.
Choosing not to unlock trophies with previously completed save files—while an honorable approach—does unfortunately add more time and effort. Sadly, there is no way to distinguish between legitimately earned platinum trophies and auto-pop platinum trophies on a person’s trophy hunting mosaic, so you may still receive some criticism even if it’s unwarranted.
Personally speaking, I tend to go out of my way to avoid unlocking auto-pop platinum trophies. There have been several times where I did not finish a PlayStation 4 title and instead chose to complete it on PlayStation 5 where I’d get the best possible experience. That’s why I have PlayStation 4 games like Borderlands 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 sitting incomplete on my profile. I have earned all of the trophies for these games on the PlayStation 5 version and have no desire to return to the older ones. I do have one auto-pop platinum trophy from Ghost of Tsushima that was an oversight on my part.
1. Playing an Older Version of a Game
In a similar vein to the previous entry, we sometimes play older versions of games even at the detriment of our trophy hunting experience. This can happen from time to time if you start many games, don’t finish them, and then decide to come back years later to clean up any remaining trophies. This can also be a problem for players that wait before upgrading to newer consoles, whether from consideration for their budget or intentional non-consumerism.
And, if you’re like me, you might jump to a new version of a game before you had the chance to complete the original release. While I generally write such titles off, you might be more discerning than me. However, depending on the game, you might be in for a headache.
A new version of a game generally leads to improvements across the board. Opting to play older versions of titles means you are subjecting yourself to worse loading times, performance issues, unpopulated servers, unpatched bugs and glitches, and potentially more difficult trophy sets that developers thought better of later on. Such drawbacks can be more frustrating in the moment but also often lead to more rare platinum trophies.
PlayStation first-party studio, Naughty Dog, has many titles that fit the bill. The Uncharted and Last of Us series of games have seen numerous remasters over the years with an almost uncanny penchant for slimmed down trophy lists.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception on the PlayStation 3 both have several trophies related to a competitive online mode that were removed in the PlayStation 4 release. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End on PlayStation 4 also has trophies for an online mode that were cut from the PlayStation 5 version. Similarly, The Last of Us on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 both included online mode and Grounded Mode trophies that were both excluded from the PlayStation 5 release.
Choosing to play the older versions of these games over their newer counterparts means you’ll be putting in a lot more work to get the platinum trophy. In fact, the servers for these older titles are no longer online, rendering those trophies now unobtainable.
Cyberpunk 2077 is also problematic in a different way. The PlayStation 4 version of the game was mired with bugs and performance issues upon release with many players claiming the game was downright unplayable. These issues were largely improved with the PlayStation 5 version a year later; However, early adopters were stuck with the inferior version of the game on their trophy list. Those that chose to complete it likely took longer than those that played on PlayStation 5, and likely encountered bugs and crashes more frequently. In short, playing the PlayStation 4 version of the game over the PlayStation 5 version meant you’d be making things harder for yourself.
Conclusion
Whether intentional or not, trophy hunters often get in their own way when it comes to collecting trophies. There are so many ways that we choose to make trophies more challenging with in-game settings and self-imposed rule sets. There are also plenty of times where we don’t really have a choice, but persist anyway.
What PlayStation trophies have you made more difficult than they needed to be? Was it a choice you made, or an oversight?
If you enjoyed the article, check out our post about games with unobtainable trophies next. Don’t make things harder on yourself by starting a game from this list that you can’t complete!
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