Platted That! – Days Gone
Disclaimer: Easy, rider. This Platted That! has some minor spoilers.
It’s the time of year all gamers look forward to, the months between Christmas and conference season where we can start catching up on our backlog. I’m not usually able to pick my game of the previous year until March or April when I finally get around to finishing them. This time can also be great for polishing off Platinum trophies, and Days Gone is an easy, enjoyable Plat that should be just what you need to cope with the recent hurricane of delays.
Step one: Kick-start it up and put it in neutral
First off, does the title work for this section? I don’t know how to ride a motorcycle so my ability to make mechanically accurate metaphors and puns is severely handicapped. Here’s what you need to know when you start up Days Gone: there are no missable trophies and no trophies tied to difficulty. Honestly, the only thing that’s going to stop players from getting the Platinum its slow pacing and one trophy that might be more difficult for those, like myself, who are dog-shit at driving mechanics.
Days Gone does feels like a long game, despite the fact that in clocks in at a pretty moderate game time that comes under most open world games. The pacing issue comes from the structure, which weaves trackable storylines in and out of the plot of the game. Some storylines span the length of the campaign while others are chunked together in a way that feels like three or four seasons of a television show.
The pacing is also why I recommend putting the difficulty on easy. Even on the lowest setting, players are going to see Deacon St. John devoured by freakers. This difficulty will also make inventory management easier, and combat a tad less frustrating – so that a sixty hour game is not seventy hours long thanks to grinding for materials and restarting checkpoints due to loss of life. If you enjoy the challenge, updates to the game include New Game Plus, survival modes, and challenges maps that can scratch that itch. Consider getting the Platinum first, and then going for the challenge.
Combat trophies and upgrades
There are a couple trophies dedicated to combat that you’ll want to keep an eye out for, just to reduce post-game grinding. First off, there are a couple boss fights in the game. You’ll know these are happening when a big red bar comes across the top of your screen during a combat encounter. Of these, deliver the killing blow with Deacon’s boot knife on one. This can be done in the wild, and there will be plenty of opportunities, but the health bar makes it easier to chunk away the boss’s health… and then deal a couple quick slashes with the knife. Easy peasy.
Dolling out stealth kills as much as possible is a must. You’ll get a crossbow and silenced weapons that will make stealth easier, but won’t count as stealth kills. Approach an enemy unawares and hit triangle to do this. It will pop pretty quick, all things considered, but you can miss stealth opportunities if you’re always going in guns blazing.
Speaking of guns, consider not using them. The melee combat in the game is simple but feels really good to use. Another trophy requires 200 kills with crafted weapons, so if you stick some nails on a baseball bat and start going to town on every degen from up-country that you find, that trophy’s gonna pop faster than a freaker’s head.
And while you’re doing all this combat, make sure to loot all the human bodies you find. Looting only counts when you actually retrieve something from the body, and due to limited inventory space, this will prove difficult. What you can do instead, especially on easy, is not loot anything laying on the ground (except maybe kerosene), and more efficiently depend on corpse looting. Also, if you loot a body and it won’t pick up the one sterilizer they have, try to craft something to ditch your sterilizer and pick up theirs. It’s pretty straightforward, but if you aren’t aware of it, you’re gonna to spend a long time grinding out this trophy post-campaign.
Clearing the map
By the time I finished the campaign, I had completed all but a few trophies, and nearly all of the trophies related to clearing the map. This includes wrapping up storylines by clearing infestations, marauder camps, and getting upgrades from Nero checkpoints. They don’t take long to clear, and the rewards for clearing them, including health upgrades, map points, and unlocking fast travel, should keep players motivated to take care of these as soon as they’re spotted. There are also a number of collectibles that need grabbed. Most of these will be given to players, and the rest are numbered and easy to locate via a simple internet search. Collectible wrap-up after the campaign will probably be necessary, but likely won’t take more than a few minutes.
Stupid motorcycle trophy.
Really the only trophy that might gum players up is “Burnout Apocalypse,” which requires players to “use nitro and drift at the same time on your bike for at least five seconds.” I looked at guides on YouTube for a solid forty-five minutes to try to unlock this trophy. I tried different locations, different parts on the bike, a different controller, and nothing worked. Finally, as I looked up another guide, my female-friend-who-spends-a-lot-of-time-in-my-house, picked up the controller and unlocked it in fifteen seconds. That’s what I get for ignoring Need for Speed all these years. Never be afraid to accept help my friends. Unless it’s from someone who’s going to be a total dick about it.
So that’s the whole Days Gone Plat. Boy, it sure is nice to write about a game that doesn’t have a subtitle. A lot of people, including myself, slept on Days Gone during a season full of games, but Days Gone has some cool mechanics and some of the best performances in any title I’ve played. Don’t sleep on it!
As always, we genuinely want to know what you weebs are up to. Tweet us your most recent Platted That! moment, let us know what you’re working on, or give us some Platinum tips. Be sure to check out our other Platted That! articles for games like Fallen Order and Mortal Kombat 11!
