Some PS5 fans are green with envy today, after Xbox announced improvements to the Achievements system.
Sony famously copied Microsoft’s metagame during the PS3 era, introducing Trophies with Super Stardust HD. While it was optional at first, support was eventually mandated and it’s become a big part of the PlayStation experience ever since.
We’ve always enjoyed the format of Trophies; the different types means it’s easy to see at a glance who’s a completionist and who’s not. But the system has barely changed since its introduction, and certainly since the launch of the PS5.
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Some of the new features Xbox is introducing include a new look and feel for Achievement unlocks and the ability to hide games from your profile. We like the Trophy notifications on the PS5 so we’ve got no problem with those, and the latter is already possible, so there’s nothing to add there.
But one tweak the Redmond firm is testing which we really like is the ability to highlight games you get 100% in. These will have a border and gradient effect when friends and family browse your games, making those you’ve fully finished stand out.
We quite like this idea and it seems like something Sony could easily integrate.
We’d also like the ability to pin certain difficult Trophies we’ve unlocked to our profile. You can actually do this with the in-game achievement systems in a lot of gacha games now, so we reckon it would be a nice feature to add to the PS5 itself.
Obviously Sony had grand ambitions for Trophies back on the PS3; do you remember when it floated the idea of a virtual trophy cabinet you’d be able to explore in PS Home? There are definitely ways it could make the experience richer, for sure.
Hopefully Microsoft’s investment in this area will stimulate some kind of response from PlayStation, because while we’re happy with the current level of functionality, there’s certainly more that could be done here.