DLC #150 - Fallout 4 - Contraptions Workshop

After the tribulations surrounding the Wasteland Workshop DLC, I was more hopeful of better fortunes for what is sort of, but not quite, the final piece of DLC within Fallout 4.

Contraptions Workshop, just like Wasteland Workshop, focuses again on the creation element of Fallout, and adds a host of new objects to build in order to unleash upon your settlements.

This package also adds 3 new trophies, which are thankfully both much easier to achieve, and less strenuous on the scavenger hunting necessary for the Wasteland Workshop content.

The focus is still based around building some of these new contraptions you'll have at your disposal as part of this package, but the big difference here is that you won't require anywhere near the level of raw resources to build what you'll need in order to achieve all 3 trophies and complete this list. 

They're also way less glitchy. I didn't have a single issue making any of these trophies pop, in comparison to the trial and error nature of Wasteland Workshop, which, in turn, led to a much swifter completion.

You'll need to build a Weapon, Armor and Power Armor rack - as well as displaying one relevant item on each for 1 trophy, as well as building a Pillory and assigning a settler to it for another - both of which required resources I mostly had, but even a short trip to a trader sorted out the small amount of missing resources I needed.

The final trophy just requires you to produce 100 objects from a builder - A device which can be loaded with raw materials to make certain objects, which can then in turn be recycled through the builder, which is perfect for creating the 100 objects necessary for the trophy.

I would estimate this took me around 45 minutes. A very welcome change of pace to finish off this Fallout 4 DLC set. I do still have some unfinished business in the form of Far Harbor, to go back and grab a glitched trophy, but that will formally seal things off.

DLC #149 - Fallout 4 - Wasteland Workshop

*Sigh*

"Up to 15 Minutes" for completion time in the particular guide I read.

I did come with the understanding that this wasn't technically the reality, based on the fact that this was under the assumption you had already acquired every material necessary to craft the items pertaining to the Wasteland Workshop - and merely needed to build them.

However, I didn't anticipate running into a package full of some traditional glitchy Fallout goodness, which stacked the hours on top.

Before I jump the gun any further, this piece of DLC focuses on some of the new contraptions introduced as part of the Wasteland Workshop, along with 3 new trophies, which take a specifically closer look at animal cages and arena fighting.

There are a couple of prerequisites to note.

Firstly, you will require a pretty hefty shopping list of items in order to build all of the contraptions that correlate to the 3 trophies on offer. These will mostly be for the 15 different types of animal cages you will need to build, and will require you to possess some unusual meats, such as Yao Guai, Stingwing and Radstag meat, which is both hard to farm in the natural wasteland and to buy from traders due it's rarity. Mirelurk Eggs and Nuclear Material can also be a pain to find, but this part of the process is the most time consuming element of this package. You may have alot of these materials already from playing through the game, but as someone who doesn't like to horde junk, and not being that aware of how useful it would come to be, I needed alot of resources, which costs both time and money.

Secondly, you'll need to have invested your skill points into 2 specific skills within the Charisma skill ladder - Animal Friend at level 5 and Wasteland Whisperer all the way down at level 9 - in order to build some of the objects you'll need to tame these creatures. If you don't have them, you'll need to reset your characters statistics and re-distribute accordingly.

The process of collecting all the resources I needed took me around 3-4 hours, due to the aforementioned fact that I never saw the benefit of hoarding junk up until now, and therefore had to spend the time acquiring this vast list of items, so I'd spent this amount of time already without technically getting going. Fun start.

But it's only 3 trophies, and I'd read "15 minutes" so at least we were almost done...

Except we weren't, and whilst the 3 trophies on offer don't really "stand out" per their requirements being complicated, time-consuming or any other form of challenge any given trophy could take the form of - They were just terribly glitchy and problematic in the same way that Fallout games always seem to be.

You get the first trophy for having 5 tamed creatures in a settlement. No problem. Just build any animal cage, power it up with a generator, build an emitter which tames the creature (this is the object you need the special perks for, to be able to build), and the cage will spawn a tamed creature every 3-4 times you sleep for 12 hours.

This went to plan, until my settlers started randomly attacking my tamed creatures, which is detrimental to progress given the fact you have to have 5 creatures tamed simultaneously, and not in total, and every time you need to breed a new tamed creature from the animal cage, you have to "repair" it, which means sourcing more meat from a specific animal which I had already done in preparation for a later trophy. So I was suddenly scavenger hunting again.

Anyway, repeat the process, and then find out that different species of tamed animals will also attack each other, whilst continuing to be attacked by settlers whose natural reaction to this is to also get involved, and all of a sudden, we're back at square one again. There's no way to control which type of creature comes out of an animal cage. I used the Insect cage for this trophy, and ended up spawning Radroach, Bloatfly and Stingwing - Not a good combination apparently.

I eventually stocked up on Mole Rat Meat and went through a constant loop of just pumping out tamed creatures and hoping something stuck, which did eventually get me the trophy at the expense of another 1-2 hours of my time. "15 minutes" it said.

Moving on though, there's also a trophy awarded for starting a spectated arena fight in a settlement, another trophy with simple face value requirements, which also turned out to be anything but.

You can create 2 podiums (red and blue), assign 2 settlers to these podiums, and they will then ensue a fight to the death, which should in turn trigger the trophy. No problem.

Except, after carrying this task out on a settlement so often to the point that there wasn't physically anybody left to fight each other anymore, and still not seeing the trophy pop, I find out that some theories suggest you also need to build a Clocking-off Siren, which, when triggered, summons settlers to the arena area in order to spectate the fight, which is apparently a critical trophy trigger.

So, we reloaded, in order to regain our decimated settlement, and tried this out. Build the podiums. Again. Assign the settlers. Again (which is also glitchy as fuck, because they always run into invisible obstacles or just refuse to move). This time though, we then build this Clocking-off Siren, power it up and activate it and then watch the fight. And nothing happens. Just another dead settler and no trophy.

I then read up and find out that it is possible there are more triggers to this trophy, and large parts of the difficulties faced here are around the general cloudiness of what works vs what doesn't matter, and that you need to make sure the combatants don't see each other before they fight (which usually triggers a premature shootout), AND there needs to be an official spectator to the witness the fight. So I have to build an actual arena that has enclosures to ensure both fighters can't see each other when assigned to the podium and prior to the Siren being sounded (which summons the crowd). There also has to be adequate seating made available, which is populated by other settlers when the Siren goes off.

So I end up building, not exactly an elaborate arena, but something more extensive than I expected was necessary, to only then find out other stuff would occur that just didn't make sense. Settlers would stray from their assigned podium, settlers wouldn't seat themselves and react to the Siren properly and they would still somehow start shooting prematurely, even behind metal walls. The inconsistencies were rife and I was yet another 1-2 hours deep tackling what I now believed was a deliberate mindfuck and that this was the underlying challenge.

I did eventually discover that, it was easier to summon the settlers to watch FIRST, and then assign anybody who wasn't sat down to fight. Even though this still triggered a premature fight, I think they fact that some settlers were seated and started cheering when they saw the fighting was the trigger for the trophy, but I never actually read that method anywhere and merely drew my own conclusions - but at least it worked.

The final trophy just requires you to build one of every type of cage, of which there are 15 and this is where all those resources gathered are needed. This one was actually quick and didn't spring any unwanted surprises, so at least we finished up on a positive note, albeit around 8 hours into a package that absolutely shouldn't have taken anywhere near that long.

This led to pure inconvenience in the end, and even though I was never a big fan of the Workshop element of this game before, this package actually gave me reasons to actively dislike it. However, it gets us one step closer to an end that I'm glad is finally in sight.

DLC #148 - Fallout 4 - Vault-Tec Workshop

Contrary to my own beliefs, I thought I was done with the story-driven content within the Fallout 4 DLC, and it actually turns out that this wasn't the case.

I went purely off the fact that every other DLC within this set concluding with the word "Workshop", cannot be story-driven, and rather focuses on the biggest new addition to the Fallout series - the workshop creation tool, which is also heavily used within the main game.

I won't go into the details of this mechanic here. It's better suited to explain for some of the trophies within the main list, but with the bigger picture in mind, this piece of DLC makes lighter use of it compared to the main game, due to it's relatively short nature.

This DLC pack takes you to Vault 88, which is the main setting for this piece of DLC. After responding to an emergency radio frequency requesting assistance, you will be led to Vault 88, where you meet the Vault Overseer after clearing the emergency (which turns out to be as simple as clearing a group of Raiders around the perimeter of the vault, along with some debris that has blocked the vault exit).

It turns out the Overseer locked up within already had her own plans for Vault 88, but they required people, and since nobody could previously enter or exit the Vault, these plans weren't possible. This triggers a quest-line which sees you take on a handful of quests to populate the Vault and use workshops in order to create experimental equipment and study the behaviours of the Vault 88 inhabitants as you recruit them, with their sole purpose as test subjects to measure the effects of this newly built equipment the questline will take you through.

It honestly isn't as interesting as it sounds like it could be - It mostly just seems like a way to showcase some of the new Workshop objects you can create which have been added as part of this pack, with the questline somewhat secondary to all of this.

This pack does only contain 3 trophies too, and they're all progression-based as you work your way through what turns out to be an adventure of around 2-3 hours upon entering Vault 88.

You'll be awarded  a trophy for completing a quest which requires you to unlock all build areas of the vault, which is effectively just clearing them of the enemies that inhabit them and finding the control panel for the Workshop to start functioning again, as well as a trophy for equipping a jumpsuit and a pip-boy on a dweller, which you can do once you progress to the point where you start accepting outsiders to populate the vault.

The final trophy is awarded upon completion of the final quest, whereby the Overseer will promote you to her position. It is possible to talk her down with certain dialogue options, which will actually deny you the trophy, and you'll have to end up killing her instead if you want it.

I'm not a big fan of the Workshop feature, but it's nicely worked into a questline here, which blends together well. The remaining few DLC packs also focus on Workshops, but this here wraps up the quest-based content for good.

DLC #147 - Fallout 4 - Nuka-World

We've had to slightly deviate a bit here.

The original plan was to move through the story-driven content amongst this batch of Fallout 4 DLC, in order to reach level 50, and unlock any other additional trophies missing from the main list along the way.

This was going to plan, with the completion of the Automatron DLC, followed by an attempt at Far Harbor - Where, unfortunately, I ran into a glitch that has prevented me progressing towards the sole trophy I had left from that list, and will need to restart that particular piece of DLC in order to go back through and gather the remaining trophy necessary to finish the pack.

Starting a new game at that stage would have gone against the goal of reaching level 50 on my current game, and thus, I have decided to park Far Harbor and will return to finish it at some point later on.

With that, the natural next step was to come onto Nuka-World, which adds 10 new trophies and is the final piece of story-driven DLC within Fallout 4.

Nuka-World is an old amusement park, located just outside the Commonwealth, and the pack starts with the player being lured into a trap by a raider masquerading as a civilian, claiming that his family is being held hostage within Nuka-World by raiders. After agreeing to assist, the player runs a gauntlet, kills the Overboss of Nuka-World at the gauntlet finale, and then suddenly finds themselves in control of the entire park as the new Overboss.

It quickly becomes apparent that 3 main gangs still inhibit Nuka-World, co-existing, but still fractious towards one another, and the main story arc revolves around the player being tasked with gaining control over sub-areas of the park and delegating these out towards the various gangs in order to appease them and expand their influence on Nuka-World through possession of territory. These sub-areas are all wildly different with specific themes, and each adds a good change of pace to the questline as you progress through.

Out of the 10 trophies on offer, 4 of these are dedicated to the new story-arc, spanning across 11 individual quests, which provides a much more in-depth story-driven experience than the Automatron DLC (and Far Harbor, for that matter). It will take anywhere between 8-10 hours to take back control of each area of Nuka-World, and eventually reach the inevitable conclusion the story culminates with, and whilst this is generally a very straight-forward, relaxed adventure, the other trophies outside of those awarded for completing story quests make it a fairly time consuming package.

The rest of the trophies will have you clambering around Nuka-World and back across the Commonwealth performing a variety of miscellaneous tasks - Completing 12 generic quests given to you by the 3 gang leaders within Nuka-World along with establishing 8 raider camps within the commonwealth will grant you a couple of trophies, and you'll also have collect 20 unique recipes of Nuka-Cola variants hidden around Nuka-World, along with the resources required to craft them for a couple more trophies. This will then, in turn, require you to kill 40 Nuka-World creatures whilst under the influence of these concocted Nuka-Cola drinks.

These extra-curricular activities probably take the same amount of time as it does to complete the main questline, if not a little bit longer. Collecting Nuka-Cola recipes and crafting them is a nice little addition which keeps things fresh enough, but performing very boring and generic quests for gang leaders and setting up raider outposts is less so, and feel more of a chore at this point of playing the game, when you've seen these bland quests far too much already.

There is also another trophy awarded for redeeming 100,000 Nuka-Cade tokens in the Nuka-Cade, which requires continuously playing the same arcade game over and over on a loop in order to raise these tokens -  a grind of around 3/4 hours in itself.

The standard difficulty of the enemies you'll encounter and the tasks at hand aren't anything to write home about, but it is a piece of DLC that probably floats somewhere in the region of 20-25 hours, which is a generous time sink. I did also manage to unlock the "Legends Of The Wastes" trophy, awarded for reaching level 50, half-way through the contents of this pack, so we've at least managed to achieve what we set out to achieve upon strategically working our way around these DLC packs - Even if it has meant we're going to have to go back to Far Harbor at some point...

DLC #146 - Fallout 4 - Automatron

After having fairly recently taken the plunge into Fallout 4, I suddenly find myself not too far away from finishing it entirely, but it's become one of those games with a main list where a little bit of extra efficiency is required to maximise full completion.

I recently took the same approach with The Witcher 3 : Wild Hunt, whereby although I had the choice to squeeze some optional, non-trophy related content in order to pursue the final handful of trophies within the main list, it made more sense to go after these trophies via the DLC on offer instead, which allows you to achieve 2 tasks simultaneously.

Just for the benefit of full context, I have practically completed the main Fallout 4 list, but still required around 9 levels to reach level 50 and achieve the maximum trophy-related levelling feat. Rather than just sweep through any extra side content that doesn't award trophies, it makes sense to get straight into the DLC, using the progression through these packs to level my character all the way to 50 and achieve these trophies at the same time. There should be more than enough content across these 6 upcoming DLC packs to be able to do just that.

This first pack adds a new questline into the Fallout 4 world, based around "The Mechanist", a protagonist using mass-produced robotic characters in order to terrorise the Commonwealth. You trigger the beginning of the questline by listening to a radio frequency which draws your attention to a specified location where a caravan has been attacked by these robots, where you will save and meet another robot companion called Ada.

Ada explains that the Mechanist is behind the destructive nature of these robots and wishes to seek revenge on behalf of the caravan, which leads you through 4 new quests from beginning to conclusion to put a stop to the production of these robots and foiling the Mechanists plans. This questline also introduces the new game mechanic of building customisable robots and using them as companions in battle, which didn't really serve any greater purpose to myself other than for the simple fact a couple of the trophies on offer are directly influenced by using this mechanic.

Speaking of which, the pack comes with 5 new trophies, and is a very straight-forward journey.

There are 3 progression-based trophies awarded for completing the new questline, which spans across 4 quests in total, and this should take no longer than 3-4 hours to complete in it's entirety.

The other 2 trophies are awarded for unlocking and then installing 10 robot modifications, which can found on the bodies of felled robot enemies you'll encounter throughout the new questline, and can then be used to modify Ada at any point, which caps off a very simple completion. It is possible to miss the modifications if you're not collecting them off the robots you manage to destroy, so it is important to make sure you understand the meaning of the term "unlocking" in this instance, as it's a little bit misleading.

This gained me almost 3 levels in my quest to reach level 50 too, so I'm confident all this additional content should see me through to my end goal quite comfortably.

DLC #145 - Tom Clancy's The Division - Expansion III : Last Stand

This venture into Tom Clancy's The Division has come very out of the blue, and it's mostly been driven by this DLC pack.

This is a game that has been massively overlooked within my collection since I first bought it, and despite having attempted to re-visit it a couple of times in the past, it's remained both mostly unexplored and very low on my priority list.

This did change recently when I discovered that this content pack, specifically focused around the Last Stand game mode, contains a trophy that requires you to win 50 matches within this mode, and you need 16 players in the lobby to start a match - Which was enough for me to promote this game to the top of my current priorities. It turns out that this is still just about a popular enough game mode, though you do generally have to make sure you're playing at peak times of the day to access full lobbies, and  even then there was still a fair share of waiting around sometimes if there wasn't any availability within another current game, so I felt like this was still a good judgement call on the whole.

It is also important to note that you need to reach level 30 with your character in order to gain access to Last Stand, so there was a fair amount of preliminary work required too. This applies to all DLC packs, and even though my character was already level 11, it still meant I had to finish the main story along with a reasonable amount of side content, just to be able to start working on these trophies.

The DLC pack itself is simply an add-on with the Last Stand game mode - A domination-esque game where 2 teams of 8 players have to fight for control of 3 capture points (A, B and C), gaining points for controlling each capture point until 1 team reaches 15,000 cumulative points, or the 20 minute time limit expires - Whichever one comes first. There are also perk machines which pop-up for activation at pre-determined locations and times in order to give the team that captures these a boost in either one of two forms - Points for kills, or capture multiplier - Which also changes the dynamic of points scoring.

It's a very straight forward concept, and is just any domination game mode in it's purest form at heart. The trophies are equally as straight forward, with 5 in total, including 4 of these which will be no problem as you make your way towards the biggest goal within this list. You'll get trophies along the way for capturing 50 objectives and activating those previously mentioned perk machines 10 times, amongst a couple of other naturally achievable tasks.

However, this pack stands out for 1 reason inparticular;

Stand Taken - Win 50 rounds of Last Stand

The "Stand Taken" trophy, awarded for winning 50 rounds of Last Stand, is very self-explanatory, but the challenges I've faced around this trophy aren't really geared towards the difficulty of the trophy itself, but more the user experience.

The Division throughout it's core identity is a PvE game, and Last Stand is the first time it provides players with a dose of PvP, and it's incredibly biased towards long standing players of the game. This is the primary challenge, though there are a couple of other nuances too, but this was the main one I struggled with on the whole.

Last Stand is not a competitively balanced game mode. Stronger players will always prevail, and are never handicapped for the sake of balance or giving new players a fair chance. The only remedy is to spend time levelling your character up and looting from Incursions or the Dark Zone in order to be able to compete with the stronger players in the game. The catch here is, this late in the games life cycle, I found myself massively behind everyone else, so 95% of the games I played in just ended up involving me running around getting killed by practically everyone, and I could serve no other purpose other than just being cannon fodder. You can impact the game in other ways, whether it be via capturing objective points or activating perk stations, but that's about as far as your contribution will go.

I was purely here to win 50 matches, grab the trophy and then leave this pack behind, so I had no intention of spending any time to endlessly grind my character out and get better equipment, just to purely perhaps have a slightly better gaming experience. 50 wins is alot for any game mode, but it felt longer than usual because I was having such a torrid time of it.

On top of this, the game has practically non-existent matchmaking. Teams will be mixed together in completely random scenarios, with no consideration taken towards balancing the overall strength of the lobby. The majority of the players who still play this game mode are all level 99, but you'll often see small groups of lower levels in any given lobby. They're just as likely to all be on the same team as they are mixed together, so not only does the game insist on bias towards strength of loadout, but it also doesn't seem to have sophisticated matchmaking ability. It's an awful blend for someone who is brand new and simply there for the trophies.

I understand that they were possibly lobbying for a PvP experience that rewarded those players who have committed their time to improving their characters and could test this out an in environment against like-minded individuals, and I don't necessarily have an issue with this because it isn't my goal to get better at the game. As someone whose sole intention was to accumulate enough wins to unlock a trophy, they just simply haven't catered to my audience here, and it just ends up being a lousy experience as a result.

Finally, just to add some context to the grind, matches have a time limit of 20 minutes, whereby at the point of expiration, the team with the most points will win. You're way more likely to see a team reach the 15,000 points threshold, and this typically happens within 15-20 minutes, so if we just take the conservative 15 minutes, and the required 50 wins, combining them together, we already have a 12 and a half hour experience.

You'll also need to account for two other things; The losses and the lobby waiting times. The losses are hard to calculate because the game doesn't track these for you, but I would estimate I probably operated at a Win/Loss ratio of around 1.00, which would double the experience to around 25 hours. Stick another 5 hours on top for the amount of time I spent waiting around in lobbies to jump into a free game because of how unpopulated the game mode is these days, and I think that's a fair, albeit loosely based, reflection.

This wasn't one of my favourite gaming ventures. I actually sort of hated it. It actually reminded me of my experience with the Resident Evil 6 - Survivors DLC, in the sense that, I felt completly helpless to be able to influence my progress within this DLC and had to rely on being carried by chance of being on the better side. I tried to do my bit where I could by being an objective-terrorist, but it all led to a very hollow feeling that just felt like a motions exercise.

I'm glad it's finally done, and I ultimately didn't want to a reach a point in time with this DLC where I was potentially struggling to get into lobbies because of the 16 person minimum requirement, so it made sense to get this one finished sooner, rather than later. There's absolutely no doubt we've stumbled over the line here, but we've got to the end, and that's all that matters.

DLC #144 - Call of Duty : Black Ops - Rezurrection Map Pack

Once I'd finally finished up the Annihilation Map Pack back in January 2021, I felt like I was practically over the hill and Black Ops was, at last, merely a formality - A judgement I don't think I could have gotten more wrong.

There haven't been many more games I have frequently had to re-visit as much as Black Ops 1, and the fact I still have an entire catalogue of DLC packs to go through with Black Ops 2 still fills me with dread. It's been a very mentally exhausting experience trying to finish this game to 100% completion, but we have finally managed to get there.

The Rezurrection Map Pack adds 6 new trophies to the Black Ops list, purely focused around the new Moon map, which adds a completely different dynamic to the zombies experience.

It has to be mentioned that I seriously dislike the Moon setting, and this was my least favourite DLC pack within Black Ops as a direct result.

I hate the way player movement is impacted by gravity because it makes it harder to fight and escape zombies. I hate the randomly spawning astronaut that grabs you and teleports you to another part of the map, detaching you from your squad. I hate the P.E.S system because you can't survive in certain areas of the map without making sure you're wearing one. I hate the launch-pads in the Biodome that will kill you if you don't land safely on the padded parts of the floor.

These mechanics have a direct impact on the difficulty of the trophies too, and they all offer perilous situations that cost me on numerous occasions when all I was trying to focus on was fulfilling the requirements of the trophies at hand. It becomes a real pain, and having to juggle these environmental challenges whilst going for a complete set of trophies at the same time is hard work.

The Easter Egg trophy is, thankfully, fairly forgiving this time round compared to the Annihilation Map Pack, and can actually also be done solo, though a team is always the recommended way to approach any Easter Egg trophy, in my opinion anyway.

The other trophies are fairly straight forward too, though a couple of the required tasks at hand will need you to accumulate a reasonable amount of points. The "Fully Armed and Operational" trophy requires you to Pack-A-Punch 3 weapons simultaneously, which will cost 5,000 points each, as well as obtaining the Mule Kick perk, allowing you to wield 3 weapons at once, which will cost an additional 4,000 points. The expenditure of the 3 weapons on top will mean you'll need in excess of around 20,000 points for this, so may need to progress fairly deep into a game to achieve it.

The same logic can be applied for the "Perks in Spaaaaaace!" trophy, which is awarded for purchasing every perk in one game, which will require a combination of 17,500 points across the 8 perks available throughout the map. It is possible to grab these within the same game, like I did, but you're probably better off separating them.

However, the overall difficulty of this DLC pack peaks specifically with one trophy;

Ground Control - In Moon, prevent each excavator from breaching the base in one game.

The "Ground Control" trophy, awarded for preventing each excavator from breaching the base in one game, requires you to stop the giant saw from penetrating 3 separate areas of the map within the same game, using the hacking tool in order to get back to the starting area and hack the relevant terminal to prevent the excavation process.

The 3 different areas are Tunnel 6, Tunnel 11 (which are both situated either side of the starting area) and Bio-dome, which is the large area found on the other side of the map. You're given advance warning at the start of the round via an announcement that excavation of one of these areas is to commence, from which point you have around 2-3 minutes to get back to the starting area with the hacking tool and hack the relevant terminal to cease the process. You'll receive a further warning at 60 and 30 seconds remaining, and if you don't make it back to the starting area in time to hack the terminal, the excavation process will occur and you'll fail this trophy.

There are 2 main things that complicate this trophy. The first one is the fact that the excavation announcement is not at set intervals, and the first one usually occurs anywhere between rounds 3-7 within my experience, and will follow a similar pattern thereafter, making it hard to predict how many rounds you're going to need to playthrough in order to be able to prevent excavation for the 3 different areas.

The second complication is that you're not guaranteed to be given the chance to excavate all 3 areas within the first 3 announcements, and there could be duplication along the way where you've already prevented excavation of one area that pops up again within a latter round where you're left still waiting for the first call of another area, which prolongs the amount of waves you have to attempt to stay alive for. This is definitely the bigger issue of the 2, though it does help ever so slightly that you do not need to prevent excavation for the same area more than once in a game, and therefore can afford to allow the breach to occur in any given area you may have already prevented once prior.

For a bit of context, in my eventually successful run, I managed to finally excavate all 3 different areas at wave 24 after a pattern that went as follows; Tunnel 6, Tunnel 11, Tunnel 6, Tunnel 11 and then Bio-dome, meaning I had a call to excavate both tunnels before even getting a first call for a warning breach of the Bio-dome, and this was a common theme within this trophy. 

By the time you start to reach the latter teens upwards, things begin to start getting hectic, and there were a handful of occasions I was attempting the trophy where we got so deep into the rounds, we eventually got overwhelmed and lost the game by just waiting on the final area we needed excavation for, which was a huge frustration. This was combined with the game mechanics I have mentioned above also contributing to the experience. Imagine trying to scramble back to the starting area with the hacker, which requires you to abandon the P.E.S, so not only am I gradually losing oxygen and dying, I'm trying to dodge hordes or zombies with zero gravity movement as well as an NPC astronaut attempting to grab me. The further you get into the game with duplication of areas, the tougher it'll get, but even if you're lucky, you're probably looking towards the late teen rounds at the very minimum, so skill does play a fairly large part in obtaining these trophies because you'll need to prove you can advance this game mode.

I did thankfully have 2 very good players to help me through, and whilst you can do this trophy solo, I would recommend some competent players to help out if you can find them. It will significantly increase your chances of success if you're running these latter rounds with a good team by your side who can focus on clearing the hordes whilst you look after the excavation process whenever required to. It is possible solo, but I just don't think I'm at that level of being good enough to reach round 24 on my own.

This is the toughest trophy within the entire Blacks Ops DLC set, which subsequently makes this the toughest pack. I have no idea how many attempts this took me, due to the fact I've dipped in and out of Black Ops over the years so often, and it is incredibly demotivating to get close, battle so hard through so many rounds, and yet still fail - Which is mostly the reason I've always been in and out with this game, and that goes for ventures within some of the other DLC packs here too.

This is ultimately a strong 100% completion to have as part of the collection. Not only a challenging set of DLC lists, courtesy of a change in direction to the zombies mode trophies in comparison to their debut in World at War, but it's important to acknowledge the challenge that zombies also bought to this games main list before we got even more of it here for Blacks Op 1. More to follow for Blacks Ops 2...

DLC #143 - Dishonored - The Brigmore Witches

The final venture into Dishonored comes in the form The Brigmore Witches DLC - The second half of the two-part story-driven offering within this set of trophies.

The finale of the Knife of Dunwall DLC ended with the revelation that "Delilah", the figure Daud was to seek on behalf of the Outsider, is a leader of a cult of witches, and her main driver was to use witchcraft in order to possess Emily Kaldwin, and use this possession in order to become the heir to the throne after Daud had executed Jessamine Kaldwin.

It does a nice job of tying things together and making sense of the more expansive background story they have chosen to given Daud within these 2 DLC packs.

Due to the fact this is a direct carry on from the first DLC, there isn't anything to mention that's new or stand-out. The concept works exactly the same, with 3 new missions to complete in various ways, using the same powers and weaponry you already had at your disposal. 

The 10 trophies also follow the same blueprint, so expect a similar experience in practically every sense, though there are a couple of subtle differences within the trophies here that are certainly important to point out.

As with Knife of Dunwall, there is a requirement to complete the DLC twice courtesy of trophies awarded for completing all 3 chapters, and consequently concluding the story, in both low and high chaos, along with a necessity to complete a full playthrough of the DLC without alerting or killing anybody too. As before, this is best played in tandem with the low chaos playthrough, which is recommended as the second run (even though it didn't quite go to plan for myself).

All very straight-forward, however the subtle differences mentioned above to the trophy list here are certainly worth noting;

Enough Coin to Disappear - You survived the Brigmore Witches in low chaos with 10,000 coins

The "Enough Coin to Disappear" trophy, awarded for surviving the Brigmore Witches in low chaos with 10,000 coins is actually a continuation trophy designed to be earned across both playthroughs of the 2 story-driven DLC packs. It requires you to reach the end of Daud's story with both the requirements of finishing it in low chaos, but also having collected 10,000 coins out of all the available loot across all chapters within both halves of the story.

As standard practice goes for most trophy hunters, researching your trophy lists will allow you to scope the requirements of this trophy out early, but there are important things to note here;

Firstly, you still need to make sure you're fulfilling this requirement on your low chaos run, which naturally means you'll also be trying to beat the DLC without being spotted, and also without killing someone, so it quickly becomes a bit of a juggling act to keep on top of everything at once.

The Brigmore Witches DLC has around 7,000 (not exact) coins on offer, which brings us to the second important point to note. You'll need around 3,000 coins carried over from the Knife of Dunwall DLC, using that save to ensure you start the Brigmore Witches with enough coin to reach 10,000 - This is exactly where the benefits of researching your trophy lists ahead of time really come to the fore.

It's also worth noting that you cannot really afford to spend money on weapons, equipment, upgrades or favours, which are tempted at you by the game at the beginning of each of the 3 chapters, as this will eat into your current cumulative total. If you're pursuing a low chaos run, mostly weapons and equipment are surplus to requirements anyway, but it's good practice to avoid the purchase menu altogether.

It didn't really catch me out much, but it did add an extra dimension to how I approached the low chaos run knowing I had to go round gathering coin whilst already trying to be stealthy for the trophies awarded for finishing the DLC without alerting or killing anyone. Save often is the best advice I can give.

Just on a final general note, I somewhat stumbled through this pack in comparison to the Knife of Dunwall, which I managed to complete exactly to plan.

I completed my first run of this DLC in order to obtain the high chaos trophy, however, after completing the first mission in low chaos, and the final 2 missions in high chaos, I still got awarded the low chaos ending. For whatever reason, the game calculated that this equated to low chaos overall, so I had to repeat it a second time for the no alert, no kill and 10,000 coin run, which I managed to do successfully.

I then went in for a third run to order to get the high chaos trophy, attempting to bypass everything but chuck a few kills in to make sure I was finishing the level with high chaos, which worked for the first 2 chapters. I then scored low chaos on the final chapter, to then be awarded a low chaos rating overall. I couldn't make any sense of this at all as I prepared for a fourth run, extremely sick of Dishonored by this stage.

I made a point to kill everything that stood in my way on a last run, and finally managed to complete this DLC pack across 4 playthroughs, when in reality, it should have been done in 2.

But done it is, and that adds another full completion to the trophy collection. I will still maintain the Dunwall City Trials were the peak of this entire journey, and after pre-emptively assuming these final 2 pieces of story-driven DLC would go down without a hitch, in typical fashion, it didn't quite go to that exact plan, though it still wasn't too bad in the end.

In normal circumstances, you can probably expect to spend another 8-10 hours on a list that is practically the same as the previous DLC pack, but factor that in as more like 12-14 for my chaos-based mishaps along the way via slightly butchered methodology on the way to the overall end-goal.

DLC #142 - Dishonored - The Knife of Dunwall

After the gruelling Dunwall City Trials DLC experience, a change of direction to finally close off Dishonored for good was hugely necessary.

In hindsight, I would have perhaps been better off completing the Trials DLC last, because the burnout has made me just want to finish up here and move on as quickly as possible.

Anyway, that wasn't the case and here we are, with the Knife of Dunwall, the second of three DLC packs for Dishonored, and the first of a two part story-driven experience that sees you take control of Daud, the leader of the assassins and protagonist from the main story.

The spin-off is based on events that occur just after the beginning of the main story, immediately following the aftermath of Daud's involvement in killing the Empress, Jessamine Kaldwin and the kidnap of Emily.

Daud is immediately stopped by the Outsider, who informs him that he's now in a bad situation and his actions will have consequences, but is also given the chance of redemption if he can find out the meaning of the name "Delilah".

This story is told over both remaining DLC packs, starting here with 3 new chapters to progress towards the halfway point of this new plot, with the core gameplay being mostly unchanged from the standard Dishonored experience of having the option to fulfil the end goal of each chapter however you see fit, with multiple options provided to the player as you progress through the level.

There are a couple of neat gameplay additions, including new upgrades exclusive to Daud and his assassin powers, such as Void Gaze, which allows you to see objects and people through walls, and the ability to buy "Favors" from assassins pre-mission, which will bribe you advantages or important pieces of intel to assist you throughout the level. It is mostly an unchanged formula though.

The pack also adds 10 additional trophies, most of which are progression-related, but you'll also be required to run through the 3 new chapters at least twice courtesy of 2 trophies that are awarded for beating the DLC in both low and high chaos respectively, following the trend from the main game's list.

In another closely followed trend to the main list, there are also a further 2 trophies that also require you to beat the DLC without alerting anyone, and also without killing anyone, which are best done in tandem within the low chaos playthrough.

The game will offer the option to choose a difficulty setting at the start of the content, but the trophies are not difficulty specific, and you're free to play through without any repercussions for choosing a lower difficulty level. I decided to play through on the default setting, which was Veteran, the second least challenging difficulty out of 4 options and found it relatively straight-forward on both low and high chaos runs.

You do have to make sure you save often on the low chaos run, particularly given the fact you should also be running for the trophies awarded for finishing the DLC without alerting anyone, and also without killing anyone. It can be easy to be spotted suddenly, so ensuring you save often will limit unnecessary rework, though my only real gripe was the fact that it made it somewhat tedious having to save so often with the fear of being unexpectedly spotted around a blind corner.

There are also 2 further trophies that are considered missable, due to the fact they require you to perform chapter specific actions. They're not hidden, so I wouldn't consider them spoliers to reveal them - So you'll need to assassinate an enemy by jumping from the top of the Empress statue in chapter 3, and you'll also need to speak to the statue of "Delilah" in the Timsh Estate in chapter 2. If you don't grab them on either your low or high chaos playthrough, you'll need to go back through for another run.

As a final note, you'll need to make sure you grab enough coin on the low chaos run in order to account for a directly linked trophy present in the Brigmore Witches DLC follow up pack. It won't make sense here to go into that in detail, but you need to be finishing the low chaos run with anywhere between 3000-5000 coins in hand.

With 2 runs of the 3 chapters, you can probably expect to complete this within 8-10 hours. It'll probably take slightly longer on the low chaos run as you go for the no alerts/no kills trophies at the same time, and as long as you remember the 2 chapter specific missable trophies, this is a fairly relaxed completion in comparison to the Dunwall City Trials. Just make sure you don't overlook that final point about the low chaos coin in hand in preparation for the final DLC pack.

Platinum #107 - Wreckfest

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 4/10

As someone who much prefers the realistic simulation racing titles, the destruction racing genre is possibly one of the most untouched genres in my entire collection.

I've never really looked any further beyond the Motorstorm series, and even then, the most recent Platinum trophy I have for that was from the latest instalment in Motorstorm : Apocalypse, as far back as late 2012.

I do also have the Burnout Paradise Platinum from my very early days of trophy hunting at Platinum #2, but aside from that, this is a scarcely featured genre.

Wreckfest is a demolition derby style game with huge variety in vehicular racing. It has the mixed vibes of the original Destruction Derby games on the Playstation 1/2 with it's track-based banger racing elements, and Motorstorm with the vehicle variety that will see you racing stock cars, campervans, buses and even lawnmowers. 

Despite there being some nice attention to detail to the simulation aspect of racing, including tuning, upgradable components and other customisation options, this is still a destruction racer at heart, and those elements are quickly forgotten about through some excellently realistic damage modelling that impacts the performance of the vehicles and also looks the part visually when things quickly descend into chaos, which, after all, is ultimately the most important selling point of a destruction racing title.

The trophy list is small in size, with just 21 trophies including the Platinum, and is almost an entirely Single Player experience, barring a solitary Multiplayer trophy.

Truth be told, it's a pretty disappointing trophy experience, and it's entirely down to the fact that the trophy list doesn't really encourage you to go any further within the Single Player Career than the absolute bare minimum required to reach the end goal.

Despite the destruction racing genre being relatively untapped, I do have alot of experience with simulation racing titles, and most of them follow relatively universal patterns, where the Platinum trophy will require you to win races and events consistently, reaching more prestigious events to then go on to win further championships, usually culminating in you having pushed yourself to the very top and beaten everything. Need for Speed follows this blueprint, as does Grid, as does Dirt, and they've all been rated in difficulty accordingly, but Wreckfest is different, and also the reason this ends up rating much lower on the scale.

The "World Masters Champion" trophy, awarded for Completing World Masters Championship, is the climax of the Career mode, and will be awarded as you progress through 5 different Championships, ranked in order from Regional Juniors right through to World Masters, with progression based trophies awarded for passing each Championship with enough points in order to unlock the next.

Each Championship contains a series of events, with a specific number of points allocated to each event. The points correspond to your placement within each event, whether this be an individual event or a series of events, and the number of points awarded will depend on your overall position, with more points naturally awarded for higher placed finishes. Once you've accumulated enough points collectively, you'll progress and be promoted into the next Championship, to then repeat the process with a fresh set of events until you reach the end.

Whilst this gives you the freedom to be able to cherry pick which events you play, and the full flexibility to be able to leave some behind entirely and ignore them, this makes it a fairly easy journey to the top. The points threshold in order to advance to the next Championship is not set particularly high, and whilst winning events will give you back more points, you don't necessarily need to win them in order to promote yourself into the next Championship, which is where I mostly feel like this list wasn't maximised to it's full potential. Racing should have an emphasis on winning, but maybe that's just the standard I'm used to based on other games I've played across the racing genre.

As a consequence of this more relaxed progression approach, it's a very straight-forward Career mode. You can alter the AI difficulty if you want to increase the challenge, along with settings for vehicle damage which can add extra dimensions to the challenge, with "realistic" damage impacting vehicle performance and handling, as well as durability.

Even choosing the "hard" difficulty, I was seldom challenged, and whilst I didn't win many events, the lack of necessity to do so meant the difficulty level didn't really make much of a difference. I'm going to assume it was harder to win because of the tougher AI, but without any reasons to go back over the events to actually try to win them, that will remain speculation.

You can grab 5 trophies, which is exactly a quarter of this list, on your way to achieving this one, as you progress through each of the 5 different Championships, with other trophies being unlocked along the way as you play through events. These also include 3 level-based trophies for hitting milestones at level 10, 25 and 50 respectively, as well as other naturally achievable trophies for expanding your car collection and earning race winnings.

The "Highballer" trophy, awarded for Completing all Career Challenges, needs to be mentioned purely for reasons based around making sure you don't make the same error as I did.

This trophy is awarded for beating the 23 events that are labelled as "Challenges" within the event card display graphic, which I had naturally beaten all but 2 of throughout the Career. However, every single event/race has a secondary objective, which is exactly what I thought this trophy related to, meaning I fulfilled the requirement of every single objective in the Career for every race - An incredibly grindy and tedious journey.

Of course, it's my fault for misunderstanding the trophy requirements, though I do believe it could have been signposted better, especially after reading up and finding out it wasn't just myself that had misunderstood this task, and is also specifically referenced within certain trophy guides not to get the secondary challenges mixed up with the Career challenges.

It actually ended up slightly changing my overall difficulty rating, as these secondary race objectives were more akin to the challenge I had been looking for, throughout this experience, because they require you in some instances to win the race, or win it by a certain distance, for example, and playing on "Hard" difficulty tested my capabilities to win races in conjunction with these secondary tasks.

However, it turns out you just need to beat the 23 special challenge events, which merely require you to fulfil a specific goal to beat the event, whether this be a winning a 1 v 1 race, wrecking an entire grid before the reaching the finish line or wrecking a certain number of opponents before being wrecked yourself. They're all much easier than the secondary objectives, so I won't list this trophy at notable, though I feel like it was important to share this particular experience because I felt like it was a part of the journey, albeit an unnecessary one.

The "Human Lover" trophy, awarded for Winning 20 Events in Multiplayer, is where the challenge from this list will mostly stem from, as you venture online to take on the Wreckfest community and win 20 times against them.

The rules for online racing communities are relatively universal, regardless of whether destructive racing is encouraged or not, and this will always be your biggest challenge when it comes to any racing title that includes online trophies. Clean racing is often disregarded anyway, but at least it's more befitting of the environment here.

You can choose to earn the 20 wins through whichever game mode you're most comfortable in, whether than be a banger race or destruction derby and you can even filter out lobbies specifically by car class or tracks so you can race with vehicles you're most comfortable with on the courses you're most comfortable with, so the added customisation flexibility is something you should look to take advantage of.

I managed to get 20 wins within 92 races, which isn't a terrible return, but is still the biggest challenge within this entire trophy list. I found it easiest to approach each race with a survival mindset, and also avoided destruction derby events for this reason too. Being able to be cautious and steady, rather than fast and reckless allowed me to at least finish races in most instances, as I watched others crash out and bail out of the race. It sort of goes against the nature of the game, but it's going to yield the best results.

You will have to be aware for common online racing perils, such as other players deliberately intent on wrecking you to the point where they'll drive around the track backwards, or sit at cross junctions lying in wait for you, but there's not much you can really do other than try to avoid them as best as possible. These hazards do contribute to making this the only difficult trophy in the entire list. 

Given how small the trophy list is, there isn't really much else mention. The remaining trophies are very random and involve tasks you can easily fulfil within any mode.

I think it summarises this list well that the most challenging element of this game I faced ended up coming from my own misunderstanding of the trophy requirements, which meant I ploughed alot more time into this list than what was necessary. Some of those secondary objectives within the individual race events were the most challenging aspect of the game, but ultimately not required for the Platinum trophy, and therefore not factored into the final difficulty rating. I think the fact I practically had to accidentally create my own challenge nicely summarises the justification for what is a very low score.

All you'll need to focus on is the accumulation of 20 wins online, and you're practically free to enjoy a very leisurely Career mode within Single Player that doesn't demand much from the player at all. Just make sure you understand the trophies and their descriptions.

Notable Trophies -

World Masters Champion - Complete World Masters Championship.
Human Lover - Win 20 Events In Multiplayer.

Hardest Trophy -

Human Lover

Win 20 Events In Multiplayer