PSN Trophies: Pain vs. Uncharted

trophy

With Sony releasing Trophy support for their console, some games in your backlog may be getting patches to add the support in.

Pain has new set of trophies, completely unrelated to the ones you may have been earning in game already (also called trophies).  The in-game trophies unlocked new skins for the primary character, while the Playstation Trohpies are added to your Trophy Score.  The Playstation Trophies are only mentioned in your PSN Trophy case and there is no mention of them in the game.

Uncharted also had a built-in unlock system.  They unlocked various extra information, artwork and other unlockables.  They are built into the game and interface.  However, you must earn them again if you have unlocked them already.

So, which system do you prefer?  Games that patch to offer new trophies and assume the old were already achieved, but add clutter to the interface?  Or games that patch into their more elegant pre-built-in system, but requiring a replay through the game?

There are two other obvious choices for companies: don’t bother with a patch, or create one that auto-detects and unlocks.  The former is the common choice, and the latter is unlikely for legacy titles.  Since the PS3 allows for anything to be used as a memory card (usb harddrive, mem stick, or various flash media), the transfer of completed save games is easy to do.  It is only an option for games that locked down their saves per PSN account (and few, if any, did this).

I look at Pain and Uncharted options and see too different strategies.  If I had already beaten PAIN, I would definitely want the new challenges to add extra replayability to my game, rather than redoing challenges I have already done (possibly to the point of tedium).  Of course, if I haven’t beaten, or even opened the game, I’d prefer Uncharted’s approach: the built-in method.

This way I would know what to do to unlock the trophies.  In the initial release of Trophies, PAIN’s were almost impossible to discover since they didn’t appear in your list until you earned at least one, and there was no documentation in-game as to how to earn any.  But there was plenty of documentation on earning PAIN’s “trophies”, which were useless and caused even more confusion by not appearing in your PSN Trophy list.

This leads back to in-game documentation versus exploration and discovery.  How much do you reveal vs. how much you make a player just randomly encounter it (or, realistically, look it up online)?

One thought on “PSN Trophies: Pain vs. Uncharted

  1. As a owner of Uncharted and Pain, I definitely prefer Uncharted’s way of unlocking trophies. I was more than willing to replay Uncharted more than two times for the trophies, which was my first platinum.

    As for Pain…they are hard as hell to get.

    With the news that Sony is making Trophies mandatory in January, we won’t have to worry about patches anymore.

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