READ THIS if you aim for PLATINUM

[amauripedrini]

Ok, so I just got the Platinum trophy for AC Syndicate yesterday (29^th Jan 2022 4:42:07 PM). I played it on a PS4, and I bought the game as part of the Triple Pack (Assassin's Creed Triple Pack: Black Flag, Unity, Syndicate) that the PS Store offers.

 

Everything I will say here is related to my own experience in the game and I do not claim to have the last word on this game's trophy hunting. I will make a summary of this post but, purposely misquoting Odin in "Thor" from the MCU, "Whosoever reads it to the end, if he be worthy, shall be clarified of how precisely these trophies are buggy". This will be a LONG post, but you can stop at the end of the summary.

 

SUMMARY (as promised):

"Nothing is fixed, every trophy is bugged" (another misquote on purpose). Given my experience with the game, I'd say that anything can go wrong with any trophy; no one can take any game progress for granted. So try to make backup saves before every last mission that concludes a memory, and also everytime you feel you are before an important milestone in grinding trophies. Example: if you are going for "Children's Aid Society" (liberate 5 factories that use child labour), make a backup when you finish the fourth; if you are grinding cargo escorts for "Guardian Angel", count how many you have successfully finished escorts you have done and make a backup save when you reach 9 (trophy unlocks at 10), and so on.

 

That's it, you can stop here if you so desire. If you want to know in details which problems I faced and how I had my patience tried having to plan how to fix them, read on at your leisure.

 

THE WHOLE STORY

I figured something was amiss when I saw that I had finished about 5 bounty hunts and had not received the trophy when I reached 3. It could have been for the bonus objectives, for I always complete them or I don't go any further on the game. That is when I realized I would have to go for a second playthrough, which I would have to make it surgically precise in order to not waste so much time on it and, at the same time, retaining the progress I already had achieved.

 

So I played on and focused on the story related missions, for it would give me all main story trophies and all I would have to do later would be to go after the grindind trophies. And so I did, achieving "Mentor" for 100% syncronization on all story missions. Then I went to the trophy list to check that the main ones we're all unlocked... right?
"Nooooooo!" Luke Skywalker would cry on "Empire Strikes Back"... "A Run on The Bank", the trophy for MEMORY 6, was not there. How on earth could I have achieved "Mentor" without this? I could not believe it!

 

So I asked Google... and to my surprise, some other unfortunate fellow player had the same problem and asked Ubisoft on its site's forum. He had no reply of support team, which, to me, was already insulting. So I decided to send Ubisoft an email, see if they would ever reply... It goes as follows:

 

"I am playing AC Syndicate and I have noticed several trophies that have not been unlocked to me, even though I have met it's requirements. Example: I have synced all memories on 100% and got the "Mentor" trophy for it, but the story related trophy regarding sequence 6 has not been granted to my account. I have also brought more than 3 bounty targets alive to Abberline and yet have not received "Thieftaker", and so on.

I'm still not 100% on the game, but I intend to do it. How do I unlock the other trophies if they bug as well? Is the game code bugged? What if all this time for a sporty trophy-hunting goes to waste because of glitches?

This game is good, but very time consuming. I sincerely expect that I won't have to play it all again, having had already the progress I achieved. I can assure my internet connection was working at the time of the trophies' achievement.

I appreciate any recommendations towards the solution to this problem and look forward to the support team's reply."

 

This was last sunday... They repplied only today, as follows:

 

"Hello amauripedrini,
Thank you for contacting Ubisoft Customer Support. I sincerely apologize for the delayed response. We have been extremely busy as of late and are working to answer all of the support cases that are coming in.

I am sorry to hear that your trophies, Thieftakler and Mentor, has not unlocked, this is not a known problem as other players have successfully unlocked this trophy.

If you are having an issue with trophies that relates to your PSN profiles, we recommend contacting Sony Customer Support directly:

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/get-help/contact-us/

Unfortunately we would be unable to unlock the trophy for you.

Kind Regards,
Ubisoft Support"

 

They never had the face to mention MEMORY 6! And the other trophies are "not a known problem". Like, "go talk to Sony" was their reply? Come on!

 

Well dear fellow players and courageous readers, it took me 7 missed trophies for the outrage to be complete. They were: Unqualified Success, Flawless Conqueror, Children's Aid Society, Thieftaker, Furious, Guardian Angel and A Run on the Bank. I didn't have any more because I started to check the trophy list more often and understood that only backing up saves could redeem the situation. I grinded every trophy I could before starting a new game, even "Without a Grudge" that, in the words of another fellow player in this forum, is a (un)righteous "disrespect of my time". After I got "Street Sweeping" (which some other VERY unfortunate fellow player missed due to this glitching - felt specially sorry for this one), I finally made a backup on a flash drive so that I could erase the console's saved data and then restart the story to grind the glitched trophies and proceed on the story so far as the end of memory 6.

 

And that was it. I cannot recall how much time I spent trying to plan a solution in my head before actually attempting it. I had to take measures so as to not lose anything so I took it with caution, happily seeing the platinum pop when it was all finally done.

 

Since my wife gave me a PS4, I have never seen anything like this on any game I played. Not that I played many games, I only had the PS4 for last year, got it for Christmas in 2019... but the trophy system was not created yesterday! I am confident this is not the first time someone has trophy-glitching problems, given that it probably has more than a decade and many people might have been seriously wronged by it... but I am also confident that UBISOFT had a decent amount of time (around 7 years, given the game was released in 2022) to patch these nasty flaws off! For example, I probably made more than 15 cargo escorts but the "Guardian Angel" trophy would never pop. If the trophy only pops when you reach 10 escorts, that gameplay could never reach the number of 10 escorts again because the number on the in-game stats can only go higher. Had they some safeguard where some in-game mechanism would attempt to grant the trophy for every number above 10, without the risk of duplicating it on the player's account, none of the game's grinding trophies would be compromised by whatever issues on the code that we ordinary consumers just can't see.

 

Hey, if you've made it this far on this post, you're "worthy" of not having to whip your brains in frustration if you miss anything on your platinum hunt. I hope from my heart that no one needs to go thorough any unnecessary game replay just because of trophy glitches. That is not replay value! I think that the game is a bit more than ok (hard to say "good" after all this), but the fact is that you actually may have some fun playing it (that's what we play games for, right?), and so if you embark on a sporty trophy hunting, be warned it has a significant chance that things might not go as planned or intended... all this was not to admonish anyone, but instead leave a friendly warning and maybe some piece of good advice.

 

Cheers everyone! World peace and game on!

[DaivRules]

So… you experienced a typical Ubisoft AC game and a standard level 1 customer support person. Welcome, stay awhile. May you temper your future expectations based on this experience and find a way to make solace with the chaos that is trying to earn trophies in Ubisoft games. 
 

[AJ_Radio]

Don't depend on customer support for anything, especially a corporation like Ubisoft. You will just be left angry and miserable. A lesson I learned the hard way.

[amauripedrini]

AJ_Radio, that's right, customer support indeed is no solution regarding trophies' troubleshooting. Indeed, Ubisoft don't seem to see it as a flaw in the perspective of it as a product, not as a game.

 

Hey DaivRules, thanks for the heads up! My first AC was Odyssey in January of 2021 and had no trouble on it at all, being my second platinum. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I spent more than 400h on it, having achieved platinum by 120h or so...

Then came Origins, Black Flag (no Platinum on this one due to multi-player) and Rogue, and no trouble whatsoever on any of them either.

I could not, however, have imagined I would reap all bugs that could have potentially soured my past experiences in a single AC gameplay as well themed as Syndicate. ?‍?

When you feel such state of cheat, frustration has no limits.

[Deceptrox]

Did you download the latest update for the game? I played the game a few years ago and I don't recall having any trouble with the trophies, I had the game on disc though. The only issue I had was that the game didn't load correctly some times which was solved by closing and starting the game again.

 

I hope you can find a solution.

[dakk55]

Yeah, you're not the only one, or the last to get a terrible customer support response. Welcome to the Internet, full of jerks and self-entitled elitists. Enjoy your stay.

[Andrea_Soldier93]

Got platinum hours ago, no single problem with trophies, retail version last patch installed ?

[Gwendly]

I had no problems with any of the trophies back when I got this done. On PS5 when I completed the DLC it had quite a few issues with lighting indoors and screen tearing but it was still doable, I'm assuming those were all issues related to it being backwards compatible and not running it natively on PS4 however.

[sum1_worsethan_u]

amauripedrini, I bought the same digital 3 pack of games that you did for the PS4. And had no problem platting Syndicate...as well as Black Flag and Unity. So sorry to hear about your troubles.

 

 

[authist90]

Good to know that this  happened prevents me from trying to plat which I eventually will cause I like assassin creed games but the newer ones except

Origins finish them yeah and too bad this shit keeps happening with ubisoft

[amauripedrini]

On 18/03/2022 at 10:14 AM, authist90 said:

Good to know that this  happened prevents me from trying to plat which I eventually will cause I like assassin creed games but the newer ones except

Origins finish them yeah and too bad this shit keeps happening with ubisoft

 

Yeah, like, seeing everyone else's comments gives me the impression that I might have been a very unlucky exception to an average positive experience. Either way, when I uncovered that one of the main trophies had glitched out, I could not unnotice that it went in cascade as a chain reaction on others, which I could only fix with a rather dull replay and careful planning with some manual counting not to miss them again.

[authist90]

Nice next month I'm playing assassin creed 3 very excited to play this game 

[DdMac679]

Just obtained the platinum via PS5. Graphical issues still problematical, but easy to live with. Only had one trophy glitch (Guardian Angel). Required a new game w/ fresh install (no DLC). 

[Eternal21]

I haven't hit any glitched trophies on PS5.  But had I known how bad the flickering was, I would've not started playing the game in the first place.

Edited December 9, 2022 by Eternal21

[poetic_justice_]

On 3/22/2022 at 9:45 AM, amauripedrini said:

 

Yeah, like, seeing everyone else's comments gives me the impression that I might have been a very unlucky exception to an average positive experience. Either way, when I uncovered that one of the main trophies had glitched out, I could not unnotice that it went in cascade as a chain reaction on others, which I could only fix with a rather dull replay and careful planning with some manual counting not to miss them again.

Amauri, I wonder if your trophy issues were region-related. Your profile says you are in Brazil. I have no experience with coding or writing patches, but if Ubisoft were writing different patches for different regions, your region might have gotten slightly different code than say, North America or Europe. Ubisoft Montpellier was involved in developing both Unity and Syndicate. Unfortunately, they have a history of writing bad game code, so if they were writing patches for Brazil & South America, there is a high probability the code had mistakes.

 

The other issue you mentioned could be data corruption in the PS4 hard drive itself. However, you stated no other games were unable to unlock trophies once the requirements were met, so that lessens the odds your HDD (hard disk drive) has bad sectors. It's a pain in the neck, but reformating the entire drive and reinstalling applications (games) was necessary for me in two instances. I am not advising you to reformat your HDD! It is simply something to be aware of, especially if other games start behaving oddly (crashing, loading screens stuck, weird audio or visual glitches). If these events start happening in addition to glitched trophies, suspect the HDD. Your current description sounds more like a software issue than a hardware issue. So sad you had to go through this. 

[Sunny]

Platinum this one twice and a long time ago, never had any problems other than minor visual glitches.

[amauripedrini]

On 02/01/2023 at 2:45 AM, poetic_justice_ said:

Amauri, I wonder if your trophy issues were region-related. Your profile says you are in Brazil. I have no experience with coding or writing patches, but if Ubisoft were writing different patches for different regions, your region might have gotten slightly different code than say, North America or Europe. Ubisoft Montpellier was involved in developing both Unity and Syndicate. Unfortunately, they have a history of writing bad game code, so if they were writing patches for Brazil & South America, there is a high probability the code had mistakes.

Hey poetic_justice, thank you so much for your support. Indeed, I'm from Brazil. It sounds likely that region-related problems might have been my issue, though I can't say it for sure. Bad coding coming from Ubisoft has been a long time problem for so many players. Since there are also so many people that haven't had any problems at all, I think it might have something to do with it.

 

On 02/01/2023 at 2:45 AM, poetic_justice_ said:

The other issue you mentioned could be data corruption in the PS4 hard drive itself. However, you stated no other games were unable to unlock trophies once the requirements were met, so that lessens the odds your HDD (hard disk drive) has bad sectors. It's a pain in the neck, but reformating the entire drive and reinstalling applications (games) was necessary for me in two instances. I am not advising you to reformat your HDD! It is simply something to be aware of, especially if other games start behaving oddly (crashing, loading screens stuck, weird audio or visual glitches). If these events start happening in addition to glitched trophies, suspect the HDD. Your current description sounds more like a software issue than a hardware issue. So sad you had to go through this. 

I believe HDD was not an issue in my case, but receive my moral support regarding your need to reformat your PS4's HDD twice. I can safely discard HDD issues because, should it have been so, I would not have managed to achieve the unpopped trophies on the first playthrough on a very focused second time hunt for them.

 

Thanks again! Cheers!

[Cloud_SOLDAT]

Played the game until yesterday. Got platinum and finished the dlc. No problems on my end.

 

I just checked ogdb.eu (website is in german language) and the several European versions and the US one (NA) have the same audio and text languages. Only difference might be the 50/60Hz thing between Europe and USA hence the two different CUSAs.

 

Another idea is that your system language is on Portuguese. I read (here or on PST), about a game I can't remember, that a player couldn't unlock one or any trophy bcs his system language was on Turkish. Once changed it worked without problems.

 

I played the NA version with my system on English (UK).

[alexandra-jane09]

I didn't get any bugs either when I got the Platinum and 100% 6 years ago [ mind you it could have become glitchy since then ], however as @Cloud_SOLDAT says it could be your Playstation being set to your native language, however changing it to English may make those trophies pop for you.