DLC #121 - Battlefield 1 - In the Name of the Tsar

The final installment of Battlefield 1 DLC keeps up with the consistent theme set throughout this series.

In the Name of the Tsar adds a variety of new maps, weapons, gadgets and vehicles, forever topping up the Battlefield 1 armory, which is very extensive after 4 DLC packs that have done exactly the same thing.

The Supply Drop game mode is a new addition, which gets no love whatsoever from the Battlefield community, though 1 of the 5 trophies on offer requires you to win 5 games of it, which can prove challenging, and may require you to find custom lobbies where you can win a match by yourself with pre-round enabled.

Each DLC pack has also had a tendency to add a couple of new Operations, which is thankfully one of the more popular Battlefield 1 game modes, and another trophy separately requires you to complete a game on both of these new Operations added as part of this package, as well as another trophy awarded for completion of a round across each of the 5 newly added maps. There is a final map to make 6, but this was a pre-release and does not count towards the trophy.

However, for the final time, at least within Battlefield 1, there is another assignment based trophy to discuss;

Filled the Stockpile - Perform a kill with all "In the Name of the Tsar" weapon variants

There are 19 new weapons to unlock within this package, which is significantly more than any other DLC pack in Battlefield 1. The individual objectives within the assignments will require a total of 824 kills, which is by some distance the most amount of kills any of these assignment based trophies demands of the player in order to unlock these particular trophies throughout the set. This spans across a number of readily available guns, gadgets, equipment and vehicles, making it a very diverse task, along with some more standard actions such as healing, resupplies and spot assists. This total also includes the 19 kills needed in order to fulfill the focal task as required by the trophy description, and as before, you can also potentially explore the method of picking these weapons up off the battlefield from downed enemies, though I would personally not recommend this for this particular DLC pack, purely for the high volume of weapons you need to unlock.

This will take some time to get through, and makes this package the most time consuming of them all. Is it necessarily the most difficult? I wouldn't say so, due to the fact the Turning Tides DLC pack had some tough assignment objectives among it, but that doesn't mean to say there weren't a few of these particular challenges here too.

Part 2 of the SMG 08/18 Optical Assault Rifle assignment requires you to destroy 5 tanks with the Anti-Tank Mine, which, for me, was the first sticking point of this trophy. It isn't exactly difficult, nor is 5 too big of a target for this particular objective, but there is alot of circumstantial luck required when judging where to place Anti-Tank mines in order to predict the most likely course for a tank to travel through. Planting them near vehicle entry spawn locations is a sound tactic, but enemies usually get wise to this after the first death, and will look out for them for the rest of the round, and they can also be very easy to spot for drivers who are paying enough attention to the road in front of them, meaning they can also be avoided easily or blown up. I had to play through numerous rounds specifically lying in wait to plant Anti-Tank Mines down on popular routes and waiting for unsuspecting tanks to pass by, frequently playing out entire rounds without a kill. The trial and error aspect significantly slows down your progress here, and is something to certainly watch out for.

Futher to this, Part 2 of the Vetterli-Vitali M1870/87 Carbine Scout Rifle assignment requires you to destroy 1 vehicle with K bullets, which was the single assignment objective I ended up spending the most time on, which is strange, because 1 doesn't seem like a lot, until you actually realise there's a very good reason for the requirement only being 1.

K bullets, which are armour piercing ammunition, can be equipped through the Scout class, and are used to cause damage to the outer shell of heavy armour-based vehicles. They are also still effective on non-armoured vehicles, but still do the same amount of damage points per hit, which is usually 7 or 8. 

Due to this low amount of damage, it's highly unlikely you will have enough opportunity to progressively wear down a vehicle to the point where it will blow up, and the more likely scenario is that the enemy will eventually abandon the vehicle, or an infantry soldier with repair it from either within or outside the vehicle. K bullets are also single shot, and take ages to reload, which simply doesn't give you enough time to be able to fulfill the objective without any assistance.

The only strategy is to take advantage of the assistance of your team-mates, and focus on vehicles that are subject to being targeted and damaged by others, whether this is through Anti-Tank devices such as grenades, mines and dynamite, or through the use of other heavy vehicles. All of the above will do significant damage, and your best chance will be to time a shot in order to get the killing blow. You can use visual clues in order to assess how close a vehicle may be to being destroyed, which can determine the moment you choose to release a shot, but you're still ultimately playing a game of trial and error and that 7/8 damage needs to be placed into a tight window of success.

This is the only strategy I could pinpoint, and I lost count of how many rounds I had to play before I managed to complete this objective. There is some reasonable logic in this method. It makes sense to let the heavy duty weapons wear larger vehicles down and use the visual state of the enemy vehicle to determine when you should start taking shots, but there isn't a way to tell how much health an enemy has at any point, so you're always taking the shot blind and will need luck on your side. I didn't explore any strategies with weaker, non-armoured vehicles, because they're mostly used for transportation rather than combat, and are never the focal points of attack, and since this objective requires the reliance of others to do the work for you, this is why I believed in this strategy being the best option.

Just away from this trophy, it is important to mention that the completion of this package was further held up by the "Secured the Resources" trophy, awarded for Winning 5 games of Supply Drop. It was touched upon above, and this game mode is literally shown no love whatsoever, so to sit in lobbies and win 5 games was just a matter of waiting for the right opportunities to present themselves. You can play games on custom servers with pre-round enabled, meaning you can sit in there alone and win games without anybody else being present, which is a Godsend, because I don't think you'd ever get the minimum number of players available to even fulfill 1 win, let alone 5. It just means to have wait for map rotations to fall your way, which involve a lot of idle lobby-watching.

I still maintain that Turning Tides is the hardest of the 4 DLC packs, but this does come in at a close second. The levels of patience involved sometimes feel insurmountable, but I wouldn't necessarily  equate that to difficulty, because it isn't hard to sit there in a lobby waiting for Supply Drop to turn up in the map rotation again, nor is it difficult to plant mines down, sit at a safe distance and await the fate of an enemy tank. The amount of kills required in this package is way higher than anything else though, and the K bullet assignment objective was the most challenging individual objective across all 4 DLC packs.

Timescales fall somewhere within the region of 20-30 hours, though this is hugely flexible depending on the above.

DLC #120 - Resident Evil 6 - Siege

It's taken me almost a year to realise I hadn't actually finished up the Resident Evil 6 DLC sets, with Siege being the final outstanding installment of the series.

It's also the most challenging set of DLC trophies by some distance, eclipsing the previously reviewed Survivors pack with ease.

Siege mode adds 5 new trophies to the list, and is a team-based game, where one team is tasked with protecting a single BSAA agent from the other team, who are player-controlled creatures attempting to kill the agent as quickly as possible. The maximum number on each team is 3.

The defenders will win the round if the agent survives the onslaught by the end of 3 minutes, where the attackers will win the round if the BSAA agent is killed. You will get the chance to both defend and attack once per game, and in the event that both attacking rounds end with death of the BSAA agent, the team which kills the BSAA agent quickest will be the team that wins the game.

The premise of the game mode is very straight-forward, but this is something that does not translate across the trophies. You can knock out a couple of easy ones early though, for winning 10 games of Siege and defeating the BSAA as a creature without dying once (you can sit back and let your team do the work and still obtain credit for this trophy).

However, the challenges contained within this pack are big ones, and there is some serious graft required if you're looking to earn the trophies which contribute to this challenge;

Everybody Dies - Defeat 100 player-controlled agents and 100 player-controlled creatures
Civilian Casualties - Defeat the BSAA 100 times

The "Everybody Dies" trophy, is split into 2 parts, but only half of this trophy requirement is where the real challenge derives from. Defeating 100 player-controller creatures is the easy bit. This can be any attacking zombie whilst you're on the defending side as a human agent protecting the BSAA agent, and isn't actually just limited to player-controlled creatures. Human players will be accompanied by hordes of computer-controlled creatures, which will also contribute to the kill count, so you can rack this number up at rampant speed.

Defeating 100 player-controlled agents is where the challenge lies, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, player-controlled agents are equipped to make light work of player-controlled creatures, stacked with weapons and explosives which make them undeniably tougher to kill. Even melee attacks from player-controlled agents are strong enough to take out creatures in a couple of hits, so you will find yourself on a the back foot often and respawning a lot when attempting this half of the trophy.

Secondly, player-controlled creatures don't really deal a terrible amount of damage on their own due to some very basic attacks, meaning it can take a while to down a player-controlled agent. This isn't really ideal when you're fighting against 3 minute rounds either, and trying to accumulate what is ultimately a pretty steep number in 100 kills. Well drilled teams of player-controlled agents will seldom struggle here, but against less coordinated groups, you could rack up a couple of kills per game, just don't expect this to often be a quick accumulation exercise for the reasons mentioned above.

The game mode is deliberately designed to be "few against the many", so it makes sense to offset the overwhelming numbers of creatures by making player-controlled agents stronger and more powerful. It just makes it a touch frustrating that there doesn't seem to be any common sense applied when making the kill requirements the exact same number of kills for both parts of this trophy. This half should be a lower total, but alas, it is not.

There are a few tactics which can work in the favour of player-controller creatures. The hordes of creatures that will also accompany players will create a notable distraction, creating openings of vulnerability towards player-controlled agents. This will allow for greater opportunity to achieve kills whilst player-controlled agents are busy focusing on other computer-controlled creatures. Maps also have BOW's dotted across them, larger or more aggressive zombies, which can be released into the fight, and will also cause problems for player-controlled agents, and allow for further openings for player-controlled creatures to accumulate kills.

The "Civilian Causalities" trophy, is actually the more difficult of the two trophies mentioned here, purely for the reason that, in order to "defeat the BSAA", you have to deal the killing blow to the BSAA agent yourself, and teammates contributions will not count towards this trophy. This can be a real challenge when you consider the fact that you're suddenly put into a situation where you're competing with your team-mates to deal the killing blow, and the realisation you have to do this on 100 separate occasions to fulfill the requirements of the trophy is daunting.

With the "Everybody Dies" trophy, there are multiple opportunities per game to accumulate kills, because of the respawn factor. However, no such thing exists here because the death of the BSAA agent triggers the end of the round, so you'll only be able to achieve a maximum of 1 kill per game of Siege, which puts into perspective how grindy this trophy will become. This is especially true when you also further consider the fact that, if you're playing Siege with a team, there is also the added possibility that your team-mates may kill the BSAA agent, rather than you, which is a wasted opportunity.

This is the single most grindy trophy in the entire DLC collection. The amount of times I went through games drawing a blank because my team-mates killed the BSAA agent instead was practically countless, and this trophy alone makes it the most challenging DLC package in the set. The only saving grace is that games of Siege can be played at a relatively fast pace, because they naturally last for only a few minutes, but some regularly prolonged dry spells effectively negated this, so you need to be prepared to be in it for the long haul.

It's tough to put a timescale on the package. According to the statistics screen, I spent 24 hours playing Siege, which is 8 hours longer than I invested in the Survivors DLC, and the "Take 'Em All Down" trophy, which, by my own admission felt like a long slog. It turns out I plugged an extra 8 hours into this package, so there's the added context for you. Both time and skill-wise, it's the most challenging DLC package out of the bunch.