There are many games out there that will test your sanity levels as a trophy hunter, and they come in all shapes and sizes.
I have lived through many of these over the years, and there always seems to be a way that certain games will continue to push those boundaries to their breaking point.
I've purchased additional peripherals. I've endured monstrous online levelling grinds. I've completed games 5/6/7 times. I've beaten every possible difficulty level ever named - all in the name of trophy hunting.
However, I can now add to this, the fact I've left my console running idle for over 200 hours in order to fulfil the requirements of one of the worst ideas for a trophy ever designed.
Grid is the first outing for the Grid series of Racing games on the Playstation 4, after 3 previous titles throughout the Playstation 3 era. Grid has always been a solid racing series for me - It might not be in my top 3 favourites, but I feel like it's always offered up a fairly decent experience.
It blends a good combination of simulation and arcade racing, stuck somewhere bang in the middle between the two. The controls are fluid and intuitive, yet require a reasonable level of mastery on some of the more complex tracks using the more powerful vehicles on the roster, and the assortment of cars you can race with is plentiful, with some of the fastest cars offering up the ultimate experience to test your skills as a racer. The locations/track options are way more limited than they were in Grid Autosport, which is a little bit disappointing, but there aren't many real issues with what is an all around solid performer.
You can race vehicles straight off the forecourt, or you can fine tune them for precise balancing. Luxury sports cars, or steady Minis. Assists off, or assists on. It's a perfect blend of simulator vs arcade that hits the spectrum in the right area, and ultimately caters to an audience of wide appeal.
However, my only major complaint - and make no doubt about it, this is a MAJOR complaint - is the trophy list.
Grid comes with 39 trophies, all of which are mostly geared to progressing through the game's Career Mode. Unlike in Grid Autosport, there isn't any sort of requirement to play online to achieve the Platinum trophy, and for the most part, just simply progressing to the end of the Career will get you the majority of the way.
The "Worth its Weight" trophy, awarded for Earning a gold trophy in every Career Event in the Career tab, is the ultimate end goal, and requires you to win all 103 career events, split across a small variety of racing disciplines. It's a fairly typical model for a racing game - beat a few events within a certain discipline to unlock a couple more, and repeat this process until you reach the finale of that particular discipline. There's also a World Series at the very end to cap everything off. You'll get to experience race, sprint and time attack modes, with different types of vehicles around different environments and stages.
However, the Career mode doesn't really do much to stand out, and to see just three types of races in a Career mode that spans over 100 events feels a little bit shallow. Whatever happened to Eliminators? Demolition Derbies? Grid used to do variety well once upon a time, and the fact you see alot of the same locations over and over due to the short selection of tracks does begin to feel very samey.
Going through the Career Mode, you'll also unlock a plethora of other trophies, such as completing all events in any position, as well as beating specific events on your way to the very top as you look to win every event. It's very generous with it's progression-based trophies, and these do a good job of spurning you on, especially when you realise the size of the overall task awaiting you.
There isn't any pressure to win all of these events on a specific difficulty either. I chose to play through the Career mode on hard, and found the AI to be extremely hit and miss. Some events I found fairly easy, whereas others were frustratingly difficult and required multiple attempts before I managed to beat them. This wasn't so bad, as I knew this was helping me master the game whilst contributing to the overall milage goal required (more on this shortly), and whilst it's tough to put a concrete time estimate on this, as it's not tracked anywhere in-game, I felt like I'd exhausted the Career Mode by the time I was finished with it.
By this point, I only had 4 trophies outstanding, but I knew since the very beginning this was going to anything but a simple case of cleaning up a small handful of remaining trophies, so it's about time I introduce to you, one of the worst conceived ideas for a trophy in any game I've ever played.
The "Around the Globe" trophy, awarded for Driving a total distance equal to the circumference of the Earth, requires the player to reach a total mileage of 24,901 miles across every game mode. If your instant reaction is one of disbelief, then that would be a justifiable response. Let's add some perspective and quantify it properly.
By the time I'd beaten the Career mode, I had amassed just over 5,000 miles, and even this felt like I'd already put a decent amount of time into the game - and then you realise this is only around 20% of the total mileage required to earn the trophy.
So what's the method thereafter for the remaining 20,000 miles? You can set up a race on the Indianapolis Oval and unbind the controller settings, in order to only bind the accelerate input to R2, but also have this option inverted - This negates the necessity to rubber-band your controller. This will allow the car to continuously lap around the oval without stopping for as many laps as you want up to 99 before the race ends. Once it finishes, reload a new race and keep going until you've accumulated the required amount of milage. When I read it back to myself, it sounds utterly ridiculous that this is what I had to resort to for this Platinum trophy, but these are the kind of depths we've reached.
On an oval track, the car will just run around the edges of the circuit, with no intervention required to make turnings or corners. This allows you to leave the game running idly in the background whilst pursuing other things. I did run into the odd problem whereby the car would somehow veer off track and end up facing backwards, which would cause a disqualification and cut the race short, but this is mostly a fairly fool-proof method, and should get you what you need eventually.
A race of 99 laps using the Bugatti Veyron (the fastest car), clocking a best lap of around 1:24, but sometimes slightly higher to a variance of up to 5 seconds, would mean each race of 99 laps would finish at around 140 minutes, which is almost 2 and a half hours. The oval circuit is 2.54 miles per lap, which means 99 laps also gives you 251 miles per race. This means, at 4 races per 1,000 miles, each 1,000 miles takes roughly around 10 hours. In turn, 20,000 miles would therefore take an eye-watering 200 hours in total.
So my main issue with this trophy is just simply the fact it's unnecessarily long-winded, but that leads me into my other major criticism. This is very much a passive grind, with practically no engagement. Would I prefer to race this sort of distance with a full requirement of focus? Probably not, but I think that just goes to show that the game has missed so far wide of the mark with this trophy, because they just haven't struck a reasonable balance here at all.
The fundamental problem is the fact that the distance required far outlives the amount of content actually offered by the game. There are just over 100 career events, and even playing on the hardest difficulty level in order to purposely stretch this out, I still only reached 5,000 miles. There aren't really any other game modes. I didn't really want to go through the DLC and play events that had no impact on achieving any of the DLC trophies. The online multiplayer environment is completely dead and I don't actually want to sit there and physically guide a car around an oval track 99 laps per race for 200 hours of my life. I'm not shy of grindy trophies, but I genuinely don't know if I'd be able to do this if there wasn't an alternative, much more passive, method available.
So the passive method it was - A lesser of the evils situation had developed and it was just a matter of allowing the game to do it's thing, only intervening to restart the race and go again every 2 and a half hours. It was also frustrating for the fact that, I'm still predominantly playing Playstation 4 titles, so I didn't really have much else to work on in between on other consoles. I could have strung this out amongst a much longer period of time, and only raced during downtime from gaming, but in all honesty, I just wanted to get this done as quickly as I could.
Then that was it - A 250-300 hour Platinum just like that. I had the Career Mode for this game wrapped up within a fairly reasonable amount of time. I chose to play on the hardest difficulty level, which is purely optional, and not a condition of the trophy list, and it can be challenging in spots. The difficulty never really makes any sense, and spikes erratically throughout the course of the game. I didn't mind struggling through some of the Career events too much though because I knew I was still accumulating milage towards a greater goal.
However, the "Around the Globe" trophy was a genuine mental blocker for me, and I did put this game off for an extremely long time because I just didn't want to do it. It's an awful idea for a trophy that never should have passed quality assurance. There's a fine line between extending the longevity of a game and just making people waste their time, and this just blatantly transcends that boundary with a massive leap - especially when you realise the content isn't even there to compliment it.
I've said this as recently as the Borderlands 2 Platinum trophy - It's in the blood of a trophy hunter to just simply face the music, and just get things done, no matter how ridiculous the task at hand may be. These sort of victories always feel the best, and sort the real trophy hunters out from the rest. I've never backed down and won't start now.
I do feel like you could bump this up beyond a 6/10 and I wouldn't have any objections to anyone trying to justify that. I do feel like the fact this was a passive grind would do a disservice to those other grinds I've done with games that have required my full focus and attention though, so that has to count for something. A Career mode with a challenge to be had for those seeking one - and another challenge absolutely nobody has ever wanted. At least I can now say I've technically travelled the World though...
Notable Trophies -
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| Worth its Weight - Earn a gold trophy in every Career event in the Career Tab. Around the Globe - Drive a total distance equal to the circumference of the Earth. |
Hardest Trophy -
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