Extra reward system

The PlayStation and Xbox provide an extra reward system that rewards players with digital trophies/achievements when they achieve certain goals in games. These goals are determined by the developers and generally aim to let the player enjoy every aspect of the game.

The average game nowadays has a main story, side quests and some collectibles. After completing the main story, most players will stop playing the game. If the game is engaging enough, some players will also complete some additional side quests but only a handful of players will collect all collectibles. And why would they?

Trophies

This is where the achievement system comes into play. I’m playing on the PlayStation and the achievements come into the form of bronze, silver, gold and platinum trophies. Bronze is for common achievements like completing a tutorial, silver for uncommon achievements like finishing a story chapter, gold for even rarer achievements like finishing a complete story and there’s always 1 platinum trophy which is earned by earning all other trophies.

These trophies give players an incentive to complete content in a game that isn’t required to finish the main story. I’m more likely to complete an extra side quest if I know it rewards me with a trophy. The same goes for collectibles which have no other purpose than to supply the player with extra information about the game world. If I already completed the game, why would I still collect those things? Yes! For a trophy!

Trophy hunters

Enter the trophy hunters: people who are obsessed with collecting as many trophies as possible in games. There’s an online leaderboard showcasing players with the most trophies. I see myself as a trophy hunter light. I like to collect trophies, but only in games I like to play and only if they are reasonable. I’m not going to replay an entire game in a harder difficulty mode for a trophy (as in Uncharted for exampled). But collecting a million collectibles is worth a trophy in my opinion (as in any of the Lego games).

Hidden trophies

The trophy list of a game can be viewed from the PlayStation menu but some trophies are hidden until earned. That’s probably done to prevent spoilers as most of the time, each story chapter has a trophy with a corresponding title. It could ruin the fun somewhat for a player if he knows how many parts the game has and what titles they have.

Ghost of Tsushima

So far, it perfectly makes sense to hide some trophies. However, not all game developers think this way. I recently “platted” (trophy hunter language for: earned the platinum trophy for) Ghost of Tsushima and got stuck on the last 6 hidden trophies. I finished the main story and all side quests so I figured I would get these trophies after collecting all collectibles. So I scoured the entire island in search of 433 collectibles. Thankfully, the wind guidance makes this task less tedious but it still took quite some time before I collected the last one. And what did I get? Nothing! Those 6 hidden trophies remained mysteriously hidden without any clue what to do to unlock them.

This frustrated me in two ways: first, collecting these 433 collectibles apparently was a waste of time and second: why are story-unrelated trophies hidden? I grabbed the Ghost of Tsushima trophy list from the internet and found out these trophies were my hidden ones:

Only the last one contains spoilers so I understand that one’s hidden. The other ones, though, have no reason to be hidden.

While writing this article, I discovered it’s possible to reveal hidden trophies so that eases the frustration somewhat. I doubt, however, that the description of the Cooper Clan Cosplayer trophy would have given me enough information to unlock it but that’s something else…