I’ll start with a few:
- Cyberpunk 2077 (PS5). Only 53.8% of players earned the “Lovers” trophy, awarded for clearing the prologue at the No-Tell Motel, and only 77.3% of players earned the “Fool” trophy for clearing the preceding lifepath part of the prologue. Which means that ~20% of the people that played the game never made it out of the character creator, and another ~20% of the people that played the game went out into the open world, faffed around for a while, and then decided they were sufficiently entertained & then went back to playing FIFA.
- Bonds of the Sky (PS4/Vita). You might have heard of Cyberpunk, but I doubt you’ve heard of this game, which is a low-budget Dragon Quest clone. It’s not one of those “pay us 3 dollars/euros/pounds games and we’ll give you an easy platinum” shovelware games that the PS4 had in abundance at one point in time, and yet, the platinum trophy has an insane 59% acquisition rate. (By contrast, Horizon Zero Dawn, a much more popular game with a trivial platinum trophy, has only a 5.4% acquisition rate for its platinum.) The few people that played this game must’ve really loved it.
- Bloodborne (PS4). Only 44.6% of players beat the first boss, Father Gascoigne, but 25.9% of players beat the boss that triggers the endgame to start. So FromSoftware lost half their players in the game’s first area (or the character creator again), but of the roughly half that made it out, roughly half of that half went on to finish the game. Talk about polarizing opinions.
- Kingdoms of Amalur Re-Reckoning (PS4). How common is it for players to rage-quit in the character creator in any given game, I wonder? Because only 69.1% of the people that played the game collected the “Reborn” trophy for clearing the prologue. I don’t get it; a 90% rate would make more sense, but even that would imply that 10% of their players started the game once, decided “oh hell no,” and then went back to playing FIFA.
What are others’ observations? All platforms with achievements/trophies are valid.
He was the second boss for me. The first one I encountered was the Cleric Beast. Then I got so fed up with the frame rate after that I swore off the game, especially since I just found it to be Dark-Souls-but-less. Still, Gascoigne was a hard fight, so it’s not surprising that the first major souls-esque game on PS4 had a huge dropoff at a difficulty spike.
The one that always got me is that even predominantly multiplayer games have a very low participation rate in multiplayer. I’ve heard about 70/30 split from developers in most cases (and I’ve gotten a peak behind the curtain at a few other games where this trend continues to hold up, within a margin of error), where even if your game has a bad single player mode and focuses on multiplayer, only 30% of the player base will ever go online. I’ll bet that’s why these games stopped putting in achievements for “win one online multiplayer match”, because it was astonishingly low. Far more people finished a single player story in Street Fighter V (which were awful) than those who went online to play multiplayer.
Multiplayer trophies are the worst, in general, except in multiplayer-only games. Once the servers go offline, those multiplayer trophies become unattainable. It’s especially a problem on PlayStation where, once the trophies become unattainable, so does the platinum.
Arkham Origins :(