{"id":1836,"date":"2013-06-30T09:32:49","date_gmt":"2013-06-30T08:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stevebromley.com\/blog\/?p=1836"},"modified":"2019-11-06T17:44:58","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T16:44:58","slug":"trophy-design-in-the-last-of-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stevebromley.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/30\/trophy-design-in-the-last-of-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Trophy Design in The Last of Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

I should say upfront that this article will contain no spoilers, in case you haven\u2019t finished The Last Of Us yet!<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written before about the importance of trophy and achievement design and the effect it can have upon the player\u2019s experience<\/a>. I recently played The Last of Us, and noticed that they made some interesting decisions in their choice of trophies which are worth discussing.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The most obvious thing is the lack of trophies \u2013 I\u2019d played through 50% of the game before I\u2019d earned one, and finished the game with only three. Compared to the typical experience from other games, even including story-driven games like Heavy Rain, this is incredibly restrained. In contrast Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 gives the player a trophy just for starting the game.<\/p>\n

The effect of this is to make trophies irrelevant to the game, and improve immersion \u2013 without the meta-game, it\u2019s easier to forget that you are playing a game at all.<\/p>\n

The game does give some trophies for levelling up; however they are not achievable during a single play through of the game, which lessens the effect they can have upon the player\u2019s behaviour. Because the trophies are not accessible, the player is discouraged from altering their behaviour to earn them.<\/p>\n

Other trophies in The Last of Us relate to collectables, for example finding all the comic books hidden throughout the levels. These are extremely missable, since the game doesn\u2019t inform the player where to look, or if they\u2019ve missed one, which I\u2019d previously listed as an example of poor achievement design for Alan Wake<\/a>. However while playing TLoU I found that I was ignoring the collectables entirely, and that I\u2019d internally given up on collecting them all, so didn\u2019t explicitly change my behaviour to find them. Upon completion, the game allows the player to revisit specific areas, and gives an indication on whether all the collectables in each area have been discovered, making this trophy much more relevant for subsequent playthroughs.<\/p>\n

Because of these design decisions, it made a radical difference to my freedom while playing. When playing previous Uncharted games, the existence of trophies radically altered how I played. Uncharted\u2019s achievements included many weapon based ones, such as \u201cDefeat 70 enemies with the FAL\u201d or \u201cDefeat 50 enemies with the Dragon Sniper\u201d, which encouraged me to play using the same weapon until I hit the trophy, then move onto the next weapon. This led to completely inappropriate choices, such as using the shotgun over long range battles. Despite this, the existence of these trophies encouraged me to maximise my efficiency \u2013 playing like this reduced the time it would take to \u201ccomplete\u201d the game by achieving all the trophies. I assume Naughty Dog must have looked at the data from the Uncharted games to influence their trophy decisions for The Last of Us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I should say upfront that this article will contain no spoilers, in case you haven\u2019t finished The Last Of Us yet! I\u2019ve written before about the importance of trophy and achievement design and the effect it can have upon the player\u2019s experience. I recently played The Last of Us, and noticed that they made some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[117],"tags":[63],"class_list":["post-1836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games-user-research","tag-achievements","grve-entry-item","grve-blog-item"],"yoast_head":"\nTrophy Design in The Last of Us - Steve Bromley - User Research<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.stevebromley.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/30\/trophy-design-in-the-last-of-us\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trophy Design in The Last of Us - Steve Bromley - User Research\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I should say upfront that this article will contain no spoilers, in case you haven\u2019t finished The Last Of Us yet! 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