Unlike my past platinum trophies reviews (which y'all never read for some reason), this one was quite the challenge. At least half the trophies in the game are missable, a couple are buggy, and many are extremely difficult to do without speccing into a particular build. However, as TES6 lacks a respec option, you either have to do multiple playthroughs with entirely different builds just to get a single trophy, or you decide you haven't suffered enough trauma in life and decide to do it all in a single run with a single build and pray to Talos.
Lets start with some of the straightforward notable trophies and work our way up to the more challenging ones.
"Prepared Hero - Complete the Tutorials Flawlessly". While you do start the main story as a prisoner and have to go through a pretty lengthy tutorial sequence, you can choose to skip it. TES6 also has an optional training mode in the Main Menu that gives you an extended tutorial with all the playstyles, upgrades and skills maxed out so you can try out a fully maxed out character. There are also bonus challenges that task you with completing certain activities as best you can with there being time or bonus optional objectives.
This trophy requires you to complete said activities and hit all those bonus objectives. For example, for the Pickpocketing challenge, not only do you have to pickpocket all the things without getting spotted, but under the time limit as well. The Acrobactics challenge asks you to navigate across the rooftops using the parkour/acrobatics moves and complete the mini race faster than the recommended time. The various combat challenges want you to use the prescribed weapon or technique to try out all the suggested moves like countering, parrying, light/heavy attacks and take out every opponent without getting hit etc. You also then need to complete the actual tutorial in the main game without taking a hit.
I actually really like this trophy. Yeah, it can be a bit boring at times but I like that it encourages you to actually try out all the playstyles in a safe and isolated manner so you can actually see what you like before you try building for it in the main game. You ever play an RPG where you invest in something, like say, axes, only to find axes are garbage partway through and you can't switch or respec? TES6 at least lets you know that beforehand which I like. In addition, the game is pretty forgiving with this trophy as you can keep retrying the challenges if you mess up and it will let you know if you ace them.
"Mara's Embrace - Spend the night with another character". This trophy requires your character to get laid. By getting this trophy, you cannot roleplay the average TES player.
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"The Pirate's Treasure- Find the Lost Pirate Treasure". This trophy requires you complete the aforementioned Quest. The quest tasks the player with finding treasure maps and using them to find 6 lost treasures all over the map. While you can collect some of the treasure maps and the treasures themselves beforehand, the game gives you the quests to collect them individually and sequentially. Moreover, this is the only quest in the game where the quest markers are disabled for most of it. Even if you have Guided Mode turned on. On paper, this isn't a problem. You can use the treasure maps to find out where to go and if you get stuck, you can use a guide. Except, with the way how I played the game beforehand, the quests kinda broke.
Ok, so normally, TES6 is pretty good at accounting for the
player doing stuff out of order or completing quests before officially
accepting them. The quest usually then has the player character going
"oh, I already did x" and the quest giver going "Oh great job. You're
even better than I thought. So we can skip this next step you should do Y
now". This pirate quest is in a weird sort of limbo where it will let
you complete some parts of it out of order, but the quest objectives and
progression act like you're doing it "intended way". For example, one
of the middle quests ask you to use a treasure map to find a treasure. I
already found both beforehand 100+ hours ago but the quest didn't
acknowledge that for some time until after the quest "started". I was
then able to turn in the quest but the treasure maps remained in my
inventory and I hadn't seen it yet so it had the "new item" icon on it.
This caused some confusion later on as I was using the wrong treasure
maps thinking it was the newest one.
And one of the later quests task you with using 1 treasure map to go find 2 other treasure maps and using them to go find the 2 actual treasures. Normally, when you find the first spot, the quest updates and points you to a merchant you need to interrogate who points you to a chest you need to loot to get the 2 final treasure maps. And then the game becomes hands off again like it usually is for this quest. But when I reached the spot, it didn't update because I had unknowingly already looted the 2 final Treasure Maps and just had to go find the treasure. I didn't know this and began worrying I had soft locked the quest. When I looked up guides, they said to go interrogate the merchant and loot the chest he points you to. I could still interrogate the merchant and get him to tell me where to go, though no markers appeared like they normally would and nothing in the game indicated I had already gotten what I needed. I couldn't even loot the chest as I had already looted it before. And when I browsed my inventory, the "new map" I had looked nothing like the one from the guides and there was nothing there. I really was convinced I'd had to do a NG+ run or something and properly do the quest. Before trying that, I decided to try one last leap of faith and follow the guides to see where the treasures actually were just to see if that would complete them somehow and not further break the quest. And to my surprise....that worked. I could pick up those treasures and complete the quests and get the final trophy I needed for the platinum. And it was only afterwards, looking through screenshots of other people's guides, that I realized I had all the treasure maps but the hands off nature of the quest and its weird progression didn't inform me.
"Meric's Adventurer: Uncover all Sub-Regions of Hammerfell and High Rock": This trophy requires you to visit every sub region on the map. This game introduced the new ship sailing system and underwater diving and by Talos it's going to make you use it to explore every crevice.
The way the game tracks is that when you open the world map, locations you haven't visited either have a rocky texture if they are on land or have a paper-like texture if they are on water. Once you do visit them, their texture updates to reflect what they actually look like. On paper, this sounds like a fair system. If you explore the map and do all the POIs, you should naturally hit most if not all of the locations.
But the problem is that it includes small random islands scattered all over the map. Some of which have the same texture unexplored as they do explored. So if you haven't been keeping track of which of these random islands you visited, it can be really tedious to find them. On top of that, this also includes all of the underwater locations as they also count as sub regions even though they don't explicitly show up on the map as different locations nor are there clear boundaries or borders so you wouldn't even notice if you entered or left an underwater region.
I only noticed something was fishy when I was looking through my PS5 Screenshots. Unlike other PS4/PS5 games but similar to Witcher 3, TES6 names screenshots based on your in-game location rather some date string. So if you take screenshots in Alik'r, it will name them as either "Alikr-1-A7-01-01-24" or "Sentinel-04-H9-03-02-23" (even the game has a hard time keeping its political borders straight lol). When underwater, most locations, even those that are POIs, will show up as either located in Tamriel, Hammerfell, High Rock or Illiac Bay. But a couple had unique names like "Thraas-Secrets-4-QZ-09-10-24". These are those unique sub regions that you need to visit at least once. But like I said, it's not always clear which you've already visited. Even PSNProfiles doesn't have a good list of which regions count and which are there. My solution was to dump all of my PS5 screenshots to a USB, dump them to my Mac, and cross reference them with a random YouTube Comment and the Unofficial Wiki that listed out possible regions, double checking if that region has multiple possible names. On top of
that, the trophy is said to be buggy where even if you have met the
requirements, it can pop hours later. Fortunately, I got it as soon as I touched Samos Island.
"The Arena's Champion - Defeat all Elite Combatants in the Arena". This was one of the hardest trophies to get. Normally when you're doing the Fighters Guild Questline, you get set to the Arena, this massive Colosseum where you have to fight these overlevelled gladiators in unarmed combat. These gladiators are designed to be extremely difficult to beat and even have instant KO moves they can perform on you if you get stunned too much by their attacks since they are higher levelled and you aren't wearing much armour. When playing casually, this quest isn't an issue because you're supposed to get beaten up so the story can continue. You can even come back later and fight the enemies in a more fair setup. However, the trophy requires you to actually win on this first visit.
I was stuck on this for quite a while. I'd eventually make a mistake, get struck by a stray punch, or get a rock thrown at my poor character's head from an offscreen opponent, get stunned, and then instantly Knocked Out by an opponent doing a German Suplex or Burning Hammer at Mach 8 on my poor character, breaking nearly every bone in his fragile warlock body, killing him instantly.
My only hope was making that strength fists build with some passive magic abilities because it was the only way I stood a chance. My character could deal some damage, dodge, parry and counter without using too much stamina, and recovered somewhat quickly after getting stunned. But even then it took me a long time. And there are people on YouTube who somehow did this without investing in unarmed! Those people are absolute machines!
I ended up repeatedly making attempt after attempt. Slowly learning the intricacies of the combat a little bit more every time I got teeth kicked in. My poor character may have gotten multiple ass beatings of a lifetime, but at least he was making more and more progress every time. Until finally, I slowly became the John Wick of TES6 unarmed combat. I danced through the battlefield, dodging and countering attacks and getting hits in (until I inevitably messed up and had to reset). Until I memorized every possible situation and thanks to my overly specialized build made specifically for this purpose, I prevailed. I beat the shit out of all those gladiators with my bare hands. I performed the same German Suplexes and Burning Hammers they used to break my neck on them, giving them a taste of their own medicine. They had to catch these Hands as they were Rated E For Everyone. Not even Johnny Sins evil Twin Brother, Sohnny Jins, could unfuck the mess the I left behind. And in the end, I earned that bronze trophy for all my hard work. I no longer have to frequent Super Weenie Hut Jr's. I can now eat nails without milk at the Salty Spitoon.
As for the game itself, I really like it. Bethesda has really improved and it feels like all the lessons they learned from Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Starfield coalesced in TES6. Like, the best way I can describe it is like it feels like a better, more fleshed out and fun next-gen Skyrim.
One major change TES6 makes is something called "alternate controls". Here, when you press a button on the controller like left, it changes your default controls to something for different situations. For example, if you're just exploring normally or fighting easy enemies, you can stay in the default controls. But if you get into a fight with a particularly tough boss, you can press left to switch to "combat mode". You lose the ability to pick up objects, interact/talk to people, sneak and jump regularly. But in exchange, those controls are replaced by more combat options like dodge, grab, parry, kick, throw etc. This system, although confusing, does allow you to have more commands and options than what a regular controller can provide. Because yeah, normally, you couldn't fit an additional kick or grab command onto Skyrim's controls scheme given every button was already assigned and did something. This system tries to address that and lets you assign custom control schemes for combat, stealth and parkour. I imagine even Mouse and Keyboard players might benefit from this as they could swap to more convenient setups on the fly rather than reach over and press like the "k" key to kick or something. Although, I have seen some PC players still assign every single possible command onto the default scheme and it just looks wild. How are those people even considered human?
Character Building is really fun. TES6 has the same approach to levelling up skills and attributes from Skyrim with many of the same categories like one-handed, 2 handed, sneak etc. There are some notable additions. Acrobatics, returning from prior TES games, has been modified a bit. Instead of using it to jump crazy high, it feels more "natural" here. TES6 introduces a rudimentary climbing, free-running, parkour and mantling system. It kinda resembles Mirror's Edge. So now it's possible to climb buildings, jump from rooftop to rooftop, scramble up ledges you barely reach, drop down and hang from ledges and do back/side ejects, and vault over or under objects in your way while running. It's really cool to do these in some of the larger cities and the game rewards you by leaving mini treasure chests and free XP hidden across various rooftops. If you see a place you think you can't reach but still somehow find a way to get there, the game rewards you for it.
But in addition, it's also useful in other places. Many dungeons now have alternate entrances/exits, pathways and secret areas and vents you can find if you look around. Like, you can enter or exit a building by climbing through a window you can break by shooting an arrow and jumping through it as long as you can find a way to reach it. It makes combos really nicely with thief and sneak playstyles as you can further silence or hide yourself while climbing and jumping around. There's also synergy with combat focused playstyles as the "roll after doing a jump" move you can unlock helps you with a much better dodge.
And if you can master and max it out, you can do some wacky stuff. The final unlock even lets you wallrun vertically and horizontally for a short while like in the Prince of Persia games. The only downside is just how taxing both the controls and stat requirements are. At low acrobatics, you struggle to even mantle up small walls even in light armour. Higher acrobatics do make that easier but doesn't entirely eliminate the timing aspect. In TES6, if you want to do any of the cooler and more advanced moves, you need to input the right commands with accurate timing. For example, to do a long jump into a ledge grab, you need to be sprinting with decent momentum just as you reach the edge of a ledge. Then hold jump and keep holding it until you're close to the ledge. Then quickly let go of jump, tap crouch (as it brings your arms and legs up) and then tap jump as you land on the ledge. And all while doing this, make sure you have enough stamina. At low acrobatics, some of the slightly higher ledge grabs require you have at least 90% stamina otherwise your character will lose 100% of their stamina, fail to grab the ledge and fall. Higher acrobatics both lower the stamina requirements, give you more speed and height from shorter sprints, and ease up on the timings. But it can still be tricky to nail even the basic moves here. There's some solace in that the game does tell you what you messed up with a quick prompt like "crouched too early/didn't hold jump enough, not enough stamina" so at least you can work on the timings. But given the different distances and heights of various jumps, it can be difficult to learn all the nuances without a lot of practice. Wall running in particular was murder on my hands as you have to alternate moving the left stick forward and neutral in a really fast rhythm in accordance with the wall running animation which begins vary as it progresses. Being slightly slower near the end and angled slightly down. This really messed me up to the point where I refused to try it ever again.
Hand-to-Hand is the big new melee skill TES6 adds. Allowing you to do grabs and takedowns during combat. You can either do this while unarmed, or with certain smaller and more manoeuvrable weapons. This does make combat more interesting as you can parry an incoming sword strike with your dagger and then seamlessly go into a German Suplex or Powerbomb on your stunned target. I especially like the submission style moves allowing you put adversaries in chokeholds. Either to restrain or non-letally take them out or to interrogate them. Be careful as you can accidentally still kill people here. Either by dropping them on their heads or by choking them too much. Oh, and you can even do some of these on non-humanoid combatants. I loved that one time I managed to somehow put a bear into an ankle lock.
This even plays into quests. Many quests often have a "pacifist/non-lethal" branch you can reach by not killing enemies in combat. This can affect how the quest turns out, what rewards you get and even your reputation. Certain quest givers will either refuse or want to hire you for certain quests depending on your kill-to-knock out ratio.
For example, early on in the game, there is a side quest by a guard that asks you to go attack another guard so he can come in and "arrest you" in order to get a promotion. He even offers to pay you. However, the guard he asks you to attack is some crazy high level boss and you don't realize that until the fight begins. If you kill the boss, the first guard backs out of his deal as he's afraid of you and you get a really high bounty that can't be entirely removed until partway through the main quest. But if you non-lethally just restrain him by keeping him locked in a pretty soft chokehold, you can actually tell him the details of the plan. And he'll want revenge so he agrees to "arrest" you and then reward you with double the money. Another side quest will only trigger if you go through several quests with a low kill count but high KO count. A duchess will ask you to to put her in a chokehold because she gets off on it. I found that very uncomfortable and hated every second of it. After she comes, she returns the favour and it was kinda interesting.
The timing, controls and stats for these are tricky here. Even if you do get your opponents in a grab they can be interrupted by other enemies. They can also fail depending on how much stamina both you and your opponent has left, how heavy both you and they are. It's harder to lift and throw a muscle bound fit knight clad out in heavy armour than some random starved bandit wearing rags on the side of the road. Grabbing someone involves making sure all these different factors are accounted for as well as from where you grab. This is where the alternate control system TES6 has comes in handy as you can assign a "grab control scheme" with commands for different attacks, grabbing high/medium/low, and switching positions and throws. It took a lot of fiddling for me but I eventually found something that worked. I put high grab on jump on x, roll/evade on circle, quick strikes on square, position switch on triangle, high grab on L1, Low Grab on L2, Medium Grab on R2, Alt Attack on R1.
There are more weapon types like spears, claws, staffs, chains, handcuffs and whips that have additional commands like twirl and change position that I found too confusing so I won't talk about them here. I'm sorry spears, claws, staffs, chains, handcuffs and whip main. But since there is no trophy for learning how you work, I don't care.
There's also another cool feature that I really like. TES6 brings the "mutations" idea from Outer Worlds and Fallout New Vegas where depending on your actions, you will get these modifiers with pros and cons. For example, if you fight enough rats, you might either get a mutation that gives you additional damage against rats at the cost of taking more damage against them. I got one that gives you better odds when parkouring but any falls instantly shatter your ankles, one for more success performing stealth takedowns but take more damage against fire attacks, and one for better odds of finding loot and bonus XP at the cost of being unable to talk to female NPCs.
-Sailing and Diving
TES6's big new feature is being able sail around the waters surrounding High Rock and Hammerfell. As well being able to dive underwater using a Diving Bell. Think of how Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag did it except it's a lot more seamless. You can, at any point while sailing, literally dive underwater and explore. And on paper it is really cool. You can find entire underwater caverns, cities, shipwrecks, monster and mermaid hideouts and more.
But I don't know, I don't really like it in practise. I find it kills the pacing. Much of the surface of the water is quite plain and it takes a while before you hit any interesting islands on POIs. I get that's how sailing works in every game from Windwaker to AC4 but I've always found that rather dull. Diving Underwater isn't much better since it takes a while before you find anything cool. Also, I chose an Argonian character so I wouldn't have to worry about breathing underwater but it turns out that potions and spells that help with that are so dirt cheap and common that it's a non-issue.
I much more prefer land exploration. Land has more interesting and varied terrain. It's more picturesque, it preserves more of the regular gameplay. Buildings are much cooler etc.
-The Story
TES6 continues the common setup of prior TES games of the player of the player being a prisoner and playing through a short tutorial section that also sets up the main quest before being let loose. This time though, you can choose beforehand if you want to be a prisoner on an Empire or bandit ship via dialogue and the rest of the ship changes to match your choice. This introduces the basics of the game as you do some quick chores for your chosen side, get into a ship battle with the other side, and get attacked by a kracken before getting the option to confirm your choice and start the adventure. This does make replays more interesting than Skyrim at least.
A common criticism people level against many of Bethesda's recent games, especially Fallout 4 and Skyrim is the urgency of their main quests juxtaposed with the player's desire to explore the world and do side quests. Fallout 4 often gets hit the hardest here with "I'm putting off saving my family to go collect glue and explore the world. I have zero motivation to go save them". And Personally, I don't feel Bethesda's approach there is an issue and may even be the best approach for an open world game.
For one, a player can lollygag in
urgent linear games as well. I can play Uncharted and spend my time looking for
useless collectibles for a trophy even though Nate should really be
moving on to facing the villain or what have you. And it's fine for a
game to do this since it gives the player more to do in levels, a reason
to explore, all while the urgent main story is still there for them to
enjoy. Players can separate and compartmentalize different sections of games to enjoy them separately.
In addition, the concept of "zero motivation" could apply to any game. Like, I technically have no motivation in Dark Souls 1 to go ring the bells of awakening. There's no urgency if I don't go and ring it as soon as possible (hell, the world is screwed anyway). My character doesn't have a backstory or explicit reason for wanting to do it. He could just accept his fate and go hollow like others since there isn't even a chance things would work out. But players are still cool with going through it. Since the motivation the player has to play the game is more important than the character's reason in-universe.
Secondly, if we accept this is a problem, then there are only really 2 solutions to address this. The first is the "Jak 2" approach where there is basically no side quests in the open world. It's all just the urgent story. But this defeats the point of an open world which is to allow the player a world to do other things in besides the main quest. The second approach is the Minecraft approach where there is no main story and everything is equally up to you. But this limits the stories such games can tell.
I guess there is a third possible approach. You could do what Assassin's Creed does and have the premise be that you are playing through a simulation of what happened centuries ago. Where your character did actually do the main quest quickly and urgently but since it's a simulation, you're free to go do other stuff in between main quests and it would still make sense. Allowing it to have both an urgent main story, and side quests and have the fact the player can lollygag make sense no matter how they play it. But it's not like the fact AC has this diegetic explanation means its open world main quest is magically the most immersive thing ever. So clearly it's not that important.
Urgency
is often necessary to give a story stakes and something to enjoy. A
main story where the main character just goes and does whatever the
whole time with no real continuity isn't a very interesting story. Even
the open world games people claim "do this right" with no forced urgency
like Witcher 3, RDR2 or Morrowind, still actually have points where
they introduce urgency for stakes (e.g Witcher with Ciri or RDR2 with
Arthur's illness). I often joke that if the people that complained about urgency in open world games wrote Breaking Bad, then the entire first season would have been about Walter White being a chill teacher and the cancer only kicking at the start of season 2. That would really hurt the pacing and flow of the show since it would take forever to get to the actual interesting parts.
Bethesda's approach allows for you to have that main story with urgency to give it stakes if you want to follow through it, while still allowing you the freedom to go explore the open world. It doesn't "dilute" one in order for it to be cohesive with the other because it realizes both can be enjoyed by players. Some players may play the whole main story so that story probably should be interesting. Some players ignore the main story and only do side quests so the side quests should be interesting. Some players do both.
Custom Quests:
One of the coolest aspects of TES6 is that players can create their own custom side quests and share them with others to play. In addition to being all to bring in mods even on consoles. And I really love this aspect. Yeah, the gameplay in these quests isn't much of a departure from the regular quests at this point (likely due to the limitations of the creator and how new the feature is) but the story and dialogue choices can be a lot more interesting. I have played really cool quests like the one where a guy made this parody of Castlevania where you can help this guy named Belmont deal with some sort of monster like Dracula and there were multiple choices and outcomes based on what you did during it. I've also played very boring ones where you have to escort an NPC across half the map. I've played ones that had really boring gameplay, but had writing that was "so bad it's good". Like one of them was this sorta epilogue for the main story and had the player character interacting with their family afterwards. But it was full of edgy deviantart swearing, typos and even some self awareness of that (like when Darius says "I killed the King of Skyrim (I forgot his name btw)"). And in between these conversions, there was an NPC called "Exposition Man" that tells you what's going on and how much time is supposedly passing between you waking between 4 NPCs. I was enjoying it even if it was so laughable.
Some of these were even designed to help the
player level up. There are even these "XP Farm" Quests where you just
kill some enemies or talk to NPCs and get a lot of XP quickly. There is
one that exploits a glitch to help the player quickly synchronize
viewpoints.
-Other Stuff:
I love the game's implementation of Photo Mode and wish it was the standard for all over games. Here, you can enter Photo Mode and take a picture at any point. That photo now shows up on your map and in the games of other players. You can even see the photos taken by other players, upvote them and the photo with the highest votes in the last 24 hours gets highlighted as the photo of the day. Personally, I'd love if this was taken a step further with an optional "Dark Souls-esque" system where you can see in the world, icons that a player has taken a photo here and see the photo rather than using the map. There is one downside however. In more "unique" places such as bossfights with elite monsters or other monsters, or in Divine Temples, there tends to be a lot more photos by players which does spoil the surprise. Personally, I don't mind since so much of the map isn't unique that ways to highlight what content is there that's unique is great.
During the minotaur challenge questlines, one quest requires you to obtain a challenge token. If you choose to buy it, one of the other competitors will admonish you for wanting to "pay to win" and ask you "where is your sense of pride and accomplishment". Which is ironic given the game has a microtransaction store.
If you choose to romance Kyra, the player character says "We have a lot in common. I was hoping when the smoke clears, we could find somewhere quiet". Kyra responds: "And what exactly do we have in common? ". The player characters responds: "I just... We... I just thought that's what people said to each other. I wasn't expecting a follow-up." I found this funny.
I love how the game not only finally has an in-game codex/database allowing you brush up on in-game lore in the game itself. But also how it has an "audiobook" mode for the codex/database where you can listen to those entries as you play the game. Almost like podcasts. It's great.
In closing, I really enjoyed my time with TES6. Yeah. It was a painful game to platinum at times, but the beauty and fun I had is unparalleled. Any minor frustration of annoyance I felt was eventually overturned by how novel this game can be. A true light in the world we only ever blamed for the shadows it created.
I hope you enjoyed reading. Next up for me on the PS4/5 is that new Half Life game. On the VITA side, I hope to platinum that Gran Turismo game exclusive to it. See you all then.
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