The Problem With the Trophy System on the PS3

Posted on January 15, 2010 by John Pencola

I’m a big fan of the PS3, but it’s not without its “flaws”. Two of which irk me relate to how Trophies are perceived and awarded.

The first is that you cannot delete trophy information from your PSN account. This means that even if you put a fresh new hard-drive in your PS3, as soon as you sync back up to the network on your account, all that trophy data will be re-inserted. The only workaround I know of, which sucks, is to create a new account. So, why would anyone in their right mind want to delete those precious trophies? I’ll get to that after I explain irk número dos.

The second thing that fundamentally bothers me, is that game completeness is based off of collecting all the trophies for that particular game. Which would be fine if trophies were 1-1 with every completable action within the game, but they aren’t. The game developers dictate what is worthy of a trophy (and type of trophy) but there are usually lots of other additional completion points within the game that do not award trophies. IMHO those should all count towards the 0-100% value of completing a game.

The reason why issue #1 is related to issue #2 is because trophy collecting is competitive and goal oriented. Its just half-baked though. For it to really work, beyond just “Compare Trophies”, then there are some more rules that need to be implemented. Take for example when a friend drops by to play a new game with you; the first thing I want to be prompted with is a confirmation to enable/disable stats from being gathered and analyzed for that game on my account. I don’t want my stats (Gamer Score and Trophy collection) to be updated because I may never play that game again but its permanently on my “record” with an irrelevant trophy score.

Why does this matter? Because if you really want to make trophy collecting an incentive to the player then they have to feel that the trophies really matter. Platinum trophies should only really be granted if the game has been completely beaten. Right now it appears that is the case, but there are plenty of other in-game easter-eggs and tasks that never count towards those platinum trophies. I think they should.

Ideas? Well, maybe adding a new “tier” above the current trophy system would be enough. Sort of like, I completed tier #1 which is all the game developer trophies, but I also completed tier #2 which is every possible bonus that the game had to offer. Or maybe making the trophy types be those tiers, where platinum trophies equate to actually totally exhausting all a game has to offer. Make the Gamer Score count towards more tangible benefits beyond bragging rights and make it harder to level-up by adding a more sophisticated reward system. That would be cool. Thoughts?

About John Pencola

Hello, my name is John Pencola. I can't get enough of exploring new technologies, discussing software principals, creating programs and having fun with interface design. I will share my experiences here and hope Liquid Language adds some useful information to the vast sea that is the web.
This entry was posted in Opinions, PS3 and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
  • http://www.mindstorminteractive.com/blog Steve

    I couldn’t agree more. The value of trophies has been diluted by the volume and the simple tasks they’re often awarded for, like just beating a low level. They need to thin the herd a

    And without an easy lookup for what trophies are awarded for, a trophy is rarely a goal. It’s normally something you stumble on while playing the game. Perhaps seeing an empty trophy case with goal descriptions in the beginning of the game would help.

  • http://www.johnpencola.com John Pencola

    @Steve:
    Yo! Thanks for chiming in. Excellent point: “…value of trophies has been diluted by the volume and the simple tasks they’re often awarded for…” I think this is going to help me summarize some other ideas I have in the way of “Trophy Hunting”.

    “…a trophy is rarely a goal.” Thats interesting. See, I generally will have a look at the trophy list prior to even beginning a game so that I have some idea of what to try and achieve. I like the fact that some trophies are hidden (the black ones), but in the games I’ve played the Trophy menu on the PS3 dashboard usually gives a good, although brief, description of what the trophy is awarded for.