Trophies are a part of PlayStation games nowadays with more than 10,000 games sporting the familiar feature, but not all PlayStation 3 games had them. As spotted by ResetEra, Sony submitted a patent at the end of November that looked into using a process of emulation to unlock Trophies on older titles that originally didn’t have the feature.
The patent describes how an emulation process could be triggered by “a client device” and would be used to detect whether requirements had been met to unlock one or more Trophies. If all of the requirements have been met, the process would then assign those Trophies to the player. The patent is specifically aimed at “previously released or sold video games”. Using current methods, developers of titles that didn’t have Trophies would have to modify their games to implement them. For many of the older titles, this is no longer possible, nor is it worth the time and money to do this. However, the new patent would remove the need for modifying the games.
PlayStation Trophies were first introduced in 2008 but they were far from commonplace. Unlike Microsoft’s policy where all Xbox Live games had to have achievements, Trophies were not mandatory in PlayStation titles until the next year, when all games submitted for certification after January 1, 2009 had to include them. Altogether, 275 of the titles from the first two years of the PlayStation 3’s lifespan don’t have trophies, as well as PS One Classics, PS2 Classics, and PlayStation Minis (though PS2 classics on the PS4 do include them). Sony feels that “ in order to enhance the gaming experience, it would be desirable to be able to award trophies to users playing older games that were not introduced with the trophy feature”.
The patent didn’t mention whether the technology could be used in other situations like awarding unobtainable trophies, where issues in the game’s programming have prevented players from unlocking a trophy in a game despite meeting the requirements. I can think of quite a few people that would love for this to happen, though. Unfortunately, Trophies that are discontinued due to the closure of multiplayer servers would be unaffected as players wouldn’t be able to meet the requirements needed anyway.
Trophies have recently received an overhaul for the PlayStation 5, getting a progress tracking feature, new graphics and share options, and recalculated level progression. One thing we didn’t expect was older games to potentially receive a similar overhaul, although bear in mind that this is just a patent that may not come to fruition. If it does, in which games would you like to finally earn Trophies? Unlock the Trophy for somehow making it to the comments below to let us know.
[Source: PatentScope via ResetEra]
