And then we had 100.
I did want to try and find a more fitting game to reach such a milestone with, perhaps something closer to 10/10 in difficulty, or something I had to rescue from the brink of unachievable (GTA 5).
Instead, I'm happy enough to settle for a game whose title summarises my journey well. I've always wanted to reach 3 figures, and here we are.
Destiny is an MMORPG, with a typical MMO experience sitting at the forefront of it. Create a character from scratch (more than one if you want the Platinum trophy), level your character up through participating in a varied level of tasks and activities throughout the game world, earn and craft stronger equipment to improve your character, and repeat this process over until you get bored. Then you can do it all over again with a different Character class.
This is a large trophy list, and whilst Destiny is an MMO, with trophies focused on MMO activities and goals, it does have a Story attached to it. However, it doesn't actually contain any trophies that require the player to progress through the Story to any reasonable level of depth, and therefore, this was something I naturally didn't get too heavily involved in. Despite being a game focused on it's Multiplayer elements, it is still unusual to find games with trophy lists that do not dedicate much focus to their Main Story, especially when this was something that was considered for the 2 DLC packs that came afterwards. You only need to play the first few missions of the Story to grab all applicable trophies, so unless you actually want to see the ending, there is no further incentive for trophy hunters beyond the first couple of hours or so.
Instead, there is much greater priority on the PvP element of the game, though feats related to character development and earning the best equipment is also well represented. Raids and Strikes are also generously supported within the list, and everything just mentioned are all more significant elements to a game like Destiny, because they're aspects of the game that suit the MMO style better than a Main Story would. You can tackle Main Story missions in groups as part of a Fireteam (Which is why I have refrained calling this aspect of Destiny a Single Player experience), but they're not as punchy as competing within a PvP environment against others, or teaming up to finish a Raid/Strike together in larger groups, and earning a ton of loot to strengthen your character for your troubles.
The are a handful of specific trophies worth mentioning, including Raids, but the Raids themselves aren't actually the most challenging thing about the trophies to be mentioned, and I am also conscious of the fact I went into lot of detail about Raids within the Taken King DLC piece, and don't feel the need to tread over old ground.
The "Epic Raider" trophy, awarded for Completing a Raid on Hard difficulty, was actually unlocked whilst I was going through the Taken King trophy list, which contains a trophy for beating the Kings Fall Raid on Hard difficulty, which subsequently unlocked this trophy within the main Destiny list at the same time, and having already touched upon the reasons for the difficulty within that piece, I will digress, though it is important to note that, the Taken King and Rise of Iron DLC packs raised the level cap, and therefore, "Hard" difficulty within the original Raids got much easier as a result.
The "Flawless Raider" trophy, awarded for Completing a Raid without anyone in your fireteam dying, is where things get a little bit trickier, and where you can take the exact same approach and tackle one of the original Raids available at launch on the lowest difficulty level, with an overpowered character that has gone through the level cap courtesy of the DLC, the main challenge with this trophy isn't within the Raid itself.
The recommended Raid to go for in order to obtain this trophy is Crota's End, which will require at least 5 people to beat all necessary steps within the Raid to kill Crota and finish, and this is exactly the challenge. From my experience, and I've spent a lot of time with Destiny, players who Raid will be doing so on the hardest difficulty in order to get the best loot, and that is not a good recipe to achieve trophies that require nobody within the fireteam to die. So, it's not like you can just jump in with a random group of people and hope to unlock it naturally because, even though they are very beatable, the game's hardest Raids on their hardest difficulty levels will kick you around alot, and people will die, so you need to seriously dumb down the experience for the purpose of this trophy.
However, the only people interested at that point will be like-minded players who want to just coast through a very easy Raid, just to get the trophy, which presents it's own challenges because these type of players are a rare breed. In the very early days of Destiny, it was possible to beat the Crota's End Raid solo and this would unlock this trophy, but a later patch required a minimum of 5 people, and that's a big group for something so niche within Destiny. I waited for a handful of weeks to finally find an opportunity to run for this trophy, and when executed, it was finished within 45 minutes of the first try, but as mentioned, the challenge of this trophy was never within the task itself, and more about the arrangement of actually having to find a willing group in order to carry out the Raid and execute it.
The "Hunter Mastery", "Titan Mastery" and "Warlock Mastery" trophies, awarded for Fully upgrading a Hunter/Titan/Warlock Subclass, add a very grindy element to this list, and collectively will be responsible for an uplift of around 40-60 hours on the way towards the Platinum trophy.
It's not usual for me to group mention trophies, but this is literally doing the same thing 3 times over. Usually, when a game requires you to playthough multiple times, there's often something different that's worth mentioning separately that makes the challenge varied, no matter how blatant or slight, and Destiny allows you to choose 3 different character classes to play as, and you can run these simultaneously as part of different game worlds. They do have different special abilities and Subclasses that can change the way each character feels and plays like, along with differing customisation options, but that's about it, and I ended up just running Crucible matches against other players and treating it like a typical Online levelling journey.
I get that this is common practice within MMO's, and people want to be able to play the game with different characters and upgrading different skillsets, but as someone who is not invested into that side of MMO's too much, this just meant to game became an unnecessary grind.
Fully upgrading a Subclass requires you to reach the maximum level for your character, which is 40, and then also fully upgrade any Subclass, which is just a skill tree that reveals more special upgrades and powers the more you play as that character. It is really important to mention that, each character has interchangeable Subclasses, so if you're going purely for this trophy in the least amount of time possible, you'll want to stick with the starting Subclass and never change it. After that, it's just a matter of what your chosen method is to level up your character to level 40, and then unlock every trait within the skill tree.
After initially choosing the Warlock class, and maxing this out through the rest of the trophy list and the Taken King/Rise of Iron DLC, I ended up just playing through the Crucible PvP mode for the other 2 character classes, and this took around 15-20 hours of solid play for each one. I didn't explore other methods, because, to be completely truthful, I had exhausted much of the trophy list by this point, and Crucible mode was the only thing that I could extensively enjoy without any fresh content to go through. I did want to tandem these journeys with the DLC pack, but this plan quickly dissolved when I found out you had to be a certain, very high light level to undertake most of the activities within the DLC, and therefore, this was only an option for my already maxed out Warlock.
The "Suited for War" trophy, awarded for Having all armor and weapon slots equipped with Legendary or Exotic gear, is the height of character maximisation and requires you to have all 11 different equipment slots populated with at least a Legendary item. You can only have 1 Exotic item equipped at any one time, so most of these will need to be Legandary items, which, barring Exotic, is the highest rarity in the game. You can obtain Legendary equipment quite easily, through either purchase or rewards via Crucible/Raids, and having a Legendary item in every slot is very much an endgame goal.
However, the main sticking point with this trophy is that it actually requires you to purchase The Taken King DLC in order to achieve it. This is because you need to be at the raised level cap of 40 to equip Artefacts for the Artefact equipment slot, and the level cap is only extended with confirmation of access to The Taken King DLC. This sits amongst the cardinal sin of requiring extras to unlock all the trophies available within a game. I have completed a few trophy lists in the past that have required additional peripherals to access certain trophies, but this is the first time I've seen a game require the user to have post-game DLC to unlock a trophy contained within the main list, which certainly deserves to be called out.
The game scatters it's trophy list out well amongst it's variety of activities, with PvP, Strikes, Raids and character development all incentivised well, but the tasks are fairly easy on face value, and there isn't much else worth mentioning.
Here's the thing with Destiny though; If you're rating this list purely on the merits of the trophy requirements, it's round about a mid-tier Platinum, but the mitigating factors are what bring the extra challenges out of this list, and they have to be taken into consideration because there aren't any ways around them. After all, the game is an MMO, and as such, was built to be tackled with mates or within groups of people, and this is reflected accordingly within the trophy list, and despite most of the requirements being simple on paper, it is their methods of execution that prove to be the truest challenge behind these trophies. With the trophy requirements also extending to having to max out all 3 character classes, the grind is there for good measure too, clocking this list in at around 80-100 hours in total.
The potential for a greater challenge was there once upon a time, which was alleviated by DLC content that allowed the player to significantly strengthen their character, which made a bit of a mockery of some of these trophy requirements, but in turn, made it more difficult to execute the methods behind them.
Having actually tackled some of the more challenging elements of this list with the added benefit of being able to play through the DLC, where the level cap was raised to accommodate greater challenges, some of these trophies weren't as tough as they maybe could have been earlier in the games life cycle and potential for a greater challenge which was once there, was alleviated by DLC content that allowed the player to significantly strengthen their character. However, I do still stand by the fact that there are extra challenges to the requirements of the trophy that prove to be bigger hurdles and should be pointed out, involving getting together enough like-minded players who are here for the trophies and not necessarily character development.
The difficulty of the trophies within Destiny peaks with The Taken King DLC, where genuine challenge is introduced into the game, but the reliance of teamwork and necessity to acquire support in large groups, along with a high estimated time for completion, notches this up from a middle of the road Platinum, to somewhere just above that.
Notable Trophies -
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| Flawless Raider - Complete a Raid without anyone in your fireteam dying. Hunter Mastery - Fully upgrade a Hunter Subclass. Titan Mastery - Fully upgrade a Titan Sublcass. Warlock Mastery - Fully upgrade a Warlock Subclass. Suited for War - Have all armor and weapon slots equipped with Legendary or Exotic gear. |
Flawless Raider
Complete a Raid without anyone in your fireteam dying
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