It’s not often that I fire up my PS5 — the last time I turned on my ‘PlayStation exclusives machine’ was in January 2023 to pop the platinum for God of War Ragnarök — so my knowledge of the trophy system has become stale. However, before jumping into the Star Wars Outlaws achievements, I decided to check out Sony’s new platformer Astro Bot. While racing towards Astro Bot’s platinum, it quickly dawned on me just how many small changes and neat quality-of-life updates Sony has put into its trophy system and how little Microsoft has done with Xbox achievements in comparison. Microsoft has left its Xbox achievements system to grow stale and gather dustIn 2005, Microsoft revolutionized how we play games with the Xbox achievements system, but since those lofty 360 days, achievements have been left mostly untouched. Sure, we did get rare achievements in 2016 and the ability to reveal secret achievements in 2022, but that’s pretty much it. Sony, meanwhile, has been moving forward with both big and small features for trophies that are changing the trophy-hunting experience for the better. The first trophy-related thing that stood out to me while zipping through Astro Bot’s delightful and colorful stages was Game Help, a valuable feature that’s been around since the early days of the PS5. Game Help gives you instant access to a bunch of official guides and video walkthroughs for specific missions, objectives, or even trophies in a game. With the press of a few buttons, you can quickly find a relevant guide (provided the developer has implemented the feature in their game) within the Game Help menu for whichever part of the game you’re stuck on, pin it to the screen, and follow along while playing. Admittedly, I haven’t used Game Help, but I absolutely see its appeal and how useful it can be to have everything you need to pop a trophy on the screen without looking up a guide on a phone or computer.In recent months, Sony has taken Game Help a step further by introducing Community Game Help, which automatically records gameplay clips from players who have opted in and publishes it as a guide for others to use. I believe this is limited to only a handful of games, but again, it’s an awesome little feature that only betters the trophy-hunting experience. Both of these features are not exclusively used for trophies, but they are nice to have, and I can see how people who might not necessarily be into hunting down trophies get pulled into the hobby by having Game Help and Community Game Help to make the metagame more approachable. I suppose we do have the TrueAcheivements Xbox app, which does something similar to Game Help — perhaps Microsoft should integrate our app at a platform level!The emails are a nice touch, even if my stats are wrongWhile these two examples are somewhat more extensive platform features, Sony has also implemented a bunch of little touches that I really like when it comes to trophies, from a spiffy little platinum trophy animation to an email filled with stats all about the game you’ve just beaten. Once I finished the story in Astro Bot (absolutely play it if you have a PS5), an email dropped in my inbox pointing out that I was “19% towards total completion” (I think I was unlucky as this percentage was sadly wrong) of Astro Bot and urging me to go for the platinum. Later that evening, with all trophies unlocked, Sony emailed again, saying it took me two hours to unlock the platinum, which was “quicker than 100% of Astro Bot players worldwide.” These stats are, again, incorrect (it took me about 18 hours), but it felt good to receive a celebratory email with a round-up of stats about my accomplishment. I know these emails from Sony have been around for a few years now, and I think it’s only reserved for specific games, but I wish Xbox would do something small like this to reward players for getting 1,000G in a title and to tie a neat little ribbon on the whole experience. Microsoft bigwigs love to say things like achievements are “top of mind” for the company, but nothing ever changes, all while Sony creeps ever slowly forward with interesting and new ideas for its trophy system — even if it’s just a silly email with some incorrect stats, it’s still more than what Microsoft has done recently. Microsoft desperately needs to pour some love back into the system it pioneered. I would love to see things like a platinum-style achievement, DLC achievements that are separate from the main achievement list, and a system that ensures unobtainable achievements are a thing of the past, but sadly, I don’t think any of that will happen anytime soon. We might be getting something similar to PlayStation’s Game Help in the future, but it looks like it’ll be a bizarre AI-powered version that I absolutely despise the look and sound (oh, God, the sound) of. While I am doubtful we’ll see any real, meaningful changes to achievements soon, I do hold on to the smallest glimmer of hope that something might happen one day. I believe Xbox achievements are far superior to PlayStation trophies, but Microsoft needs to pay the system some attention to ensure achievements stay that way.
Source link
