Completing this final piece of DLC for Uncharted 3 prompted me to look back over this entire set, and actually made me realise how difficult this journey has been.
There are challenges around every single corner, varying from the outrageously lucky, to the highly skilled. Given the ease of difficulty expected from the main list (which is to still be completed), the DLC alone makse it a very impressive 100% completion to have in any collection.
The Flashback Map Pack 2 adds 4 new maps, which are all re-incarnated from Uncharted 2, spanning both Competitive and Co-operative game modes. As standard, there are 10 new trophies added, with a slew of new tasks, and whilst this contains the second half of our treasure related collectible journey previously discussed within the Fort Co-op Adventure pack, there is actually a little bit more to talk about here, still presenting a slightly heightened challenge, which has certainly been a recurring theme within this whole game.
All 3 silver trophies will give you some degree of challenge to tackle here, whilst the other 7 bronze trophies are all focused on in-game medal accumulation again, another recurring theme throughout. None of these medals will cause too much trouble, as they'll mostly be covered off through the large time investment you'll be expected to put into the Competitive and Co-operative modes throughout this journey.
Whilst there are no questions about the treasures being the main focus for this package again, there is a nice little collection of trophies that will give you some challenges here;
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| Invincible - Complete a Co-op Arena Map on Crushing Difficulty without losing a single life Two by Two - Win 50 matches of Three Team Deathmatch Collector - Complete the Antiquity Treasure Set |
The "Invincible" trophy, is a directly influenced from the Flashback Map Pack 1 DLC, which offered the exact same requirements, only applicable to the Co-op Adventure mode.
The same challenges that were present there are also present here. Arena is a very different game mode to Adventure though, and I would personally argue it's more difficult to survive within Arena mode than it is with Adventure mode, making this trophy the tougher of the 2. Where you could deploy some solid tactics to help you through Adventure mode, such as hanging back in certain sections, and allowing your team-mates to clear the way, there is nowhere to hide in Arena mode, and you'll have to defend on the front foot and be aggressive against the hordes of enemies if you want to succeed here.
In order to complete an Arena Map, you'll need to clear all 10 rounds, and to do this without dying, especially at the latter rounds when Brutes, armored enemies and RPG units turn up, can prove to be tough, and potentially get ugly very quickly. It's also important to pick your 2 other team-mates wisely. You don't want to play with uncooperative partners who could potentially let you die when you need to be revived, which will blow your chances of the trophy, and given the fact you have to clear all 10 rounds on Crushing difficulty also means you'll need team-mates with a lot of skill to see you through to the end.
It's also important to pick good partners because you're limited to 15 lives per game, and if lives are disposed quickly by your team-mates, the game will prematurely end when nobody can respawn anymore, so there's a small handful of important considerations needed to unlock this trophy.
The "Two by Two" trophy is the standard game mode win accumulation offering for this package. I certainly believe Three Team Deathmatch is one of the more difficult game modes to accumulate wins in, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's 3 teams competing against each other, unlike most other modes in Uncharted 3, where 2 teams go head to head. That may seem like a statement of the obvious, but competing against 2 other teams, rather than just 1, naturally decreases your chances of winning.
It also seems to be a mode where you run into a lot of pairs who don't like playing bigger team based game modes where they're forced to mix with random players, meaning a greater concentration of better teams that naturally gravitate to Three Team Deathmatch. This could just have been a coincidence, but I ran into a lot of good pairs who seemed to be experienced in playing with each other, and therefore, naturally very good.
Out of all 5 trophies that required 50 wins for the various game modes amongst all of these DLC packs, this was the last one I unlocked, purely because I lost a lot of Three Team Deathmatch games, due to a mixture of the above combinations. I did eventually find a decent partner and managed to win games more frequently, but it was definitely the longest game mode that I reached 50 wins in.
The "Collector" trophy, awarded for Completing the Antiquity Treasure Set, is the second half of the previously reviewed "Hoarder" trophy, in the Fort Co-op Adventure pack, and for the sake of not wanting to tread over old ground, there isn't really much to be said that hasn't already been covered prior to this.
There are a few key differences. The Antiquity set has 16 total treasure sets, with a combined total of 42 treasures, which is 6 sets and 16 treasures shorter than the Artifact set. Whether this actually makes a difference for something that is completely random, I do not know, but in theory, the much smaller collection should be the one you complete first. I have read a lot of strong backing for a theory that suggests you are always left with 1 treasure from each set for full completion, which was also the case for myself, so this, at least from my own experience, seems to be true. I also unlocked the larger Artifact set in full first too, which further disproves the theory that the fact the set is smaller actually matters, but this could be different for the general consensus.
A more relevant difference is the fact that this set also contains a collection of adventure treasures, awarded throughout the Co-op adventure chapters, just like the Artifact set did. However, where the Artifact set only awarded these treasures under the condition that you played the levels on Hard/Crushing, the treasures within the Antiquity set will drop treasures if you play the levels on Easy/Normal, so this is naturally a smoother journey as a consequence.
Apart from those minor differences, all the trials and tribulations you can expect from this trophy are exactly as they were described in the Fort Co-op Adventure pack for the "Hoarder" trophy, they're just not merged and discussed as one because they come from different DLC packs.
And with this, completes another tough set of DLC trophies from a game which isn't usually known for it's difficulty. I am still yet to obtain the Platinum trophy from the main list, but don't anticipate this to be anywhere close to as challenging as this DLC adventure was. When I sit here and look back on all of it as a collective, I can see where both the challenge and hours would have been amassed from. There are an assortment of trophies here, ranging from high skill requirements, time-consumption and the outright absurd. It is a real grueling collection that only those who really want it enough will obtain full completion within. It's hard to look back over everything and determine an overall timescale. I started unlocking some of these DLC trophies as early as 2012, so you can hopefully appreciate how difficult it is to truly say how long this took me altogether, when my only real reference points are my previous reviews of other DLC packs, and a few loose time totals from the online leaderboards. It's easily a 200+ hour experience as a very minimum.
It's massively time-consuming and requires a certain level of mastery to finish everything within these DLC packs and if you manage to beat the clock before that early September deadline for server closure, then make sure you cherish this victory.
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