Speed-Based
One of the best aspects of trophy/achievement hunting is being able to take time to do side activities or explore the world when you normally wouldn’t. However, if you want to earn all that digital bling, some developers make you throw caution to the wind and speed through a game as fast as humanly possible. The most recent example of this frustrating task comes from The Last Guardian’s Lighting Emissary trophy which asks users to finish the title in under three hours.
While difficulty and virtual rewards go hand in hand, speedrunning a game is just needlessly annoying. In order to unlock this trophy, players either need to follow a pre-made guide to a T or have an insane knowledge of the game’s layout, puzzles, and enemies so they can breeze right by them. This aggravation is only enhanced by the fact that Trico will sometimes arbitrarily decide not to listen to commands. Sorry big guy, but we are on the clock right now and we’d really enjoy having this trophy in our collection.
Limited Save Runs
Having achievements tied to beating a video game’s specific difficulty setting is nothing new and often offers users a fair and interesting challenge that rewards their efforts. We say often because there are a few titles that decide to limit a player’s saving feature in order to arbitrarily raise the difficulty. One of the most notable examples of this is Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s “I Didn’t Ask For This” achievement.
While the general challenge is raised here, the biggest problem is that players have a single save file that can be used as much as you want. However, auto-saving is disabled and if you die, that save is completely wiped, forcing you to start over from the beginning. You can get around this by quickly closing out your application or shutting off the system, but one shouldn’t have to jump through so many hoops for some extra Gamerscore.
Online Multiplayer
Multiplayer-focused achievements are the bane of many achievement hunters’ existences, as they often require a higher mix of luck when it comes to unlocking them. Overwatch is the most notable example, as nearly every single trophy is based around performing a high amount of kills with a hero. The problem is that some of these, such as D.Va’s “Game Over,” tasks players with getting four kills in a single ultimate use, which can be especially difficult.
Given that many of these achievements require players to not only rely on their own skill but also that of their teammates’, these multiplayer-based rewards can be especially annoying. This only gets more annoying when games like Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood has achievements for both single and multiplayer, effectively forcing users to spend an extended amount of time in the online mode.
The Checklists
To earn trophies or achievements, players typically need to either complete a specific challenge, kill a certain amount of enemies, or play a certain game mode. Then there are other achievements such as Seriously 4.0 from Gears of War 4 that requires players to complete a massive checklist of items in order to earn this digital bling.
The problem is that this kind of trophy and achievement can take a long time to actually complete and most of the time requires users to have mastered virtually every aspect of the game. Not only can this stall users from getting a 100% on a certain title, but it also effectively just encompasses what could have been several different achievements instead of one giant one.
Top of the Leaderboards
There is perhaps nothing worse than the trophies and achievements that effectively require a player to get to the top of the leaderboard. While this is rarely seen, popular titles such as The Elder Scrolls Online require average users to do the impossible. Achievements and trophies are meant to be challenging, however asking players to dominate the leaderboards is virtually impossible.
This requires users to put an ungodly amount of hours into the game while playing perfectly in virtually every match. Not to mention, there are always hackers or glitch abusers people will have to worry about, which makes this reward even harder to obtain. No game should ever ask its fans to be the very best like no one ever was if they want to gain a platinum trophy.
While collecting achievements and trophies can be a highly fun and rewarding experience, there are some that just ruin it. It’s important to balance challenge and fairness, which sadly isn’t always the case for a lot of titles. Now if you’ll excuse us, we need to get back to our no-kill run in Dishonored 2.
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