I’ve been playing quite a bit of The Colonists on PS4. I received a complementarity early code, so I’ve been able to get a head start on my Trophy hunting. However, there’s one Trophy in the game that brought all of this to a grinding halt. The Trophy is called Boatbuilder Challenge – LEGENDARY, and it’s the hardest tier of a multi-tiered challenge. The Boatbuilder Challenge requires that, in Mission 3, your colony builds a boat within a set amount of time.
Here’s the breakdown:
- Boatbuilder Challenge – EXPERT
- Boatbuilder Challenge – CHAMPION
- Boatbuilder Challenge – LEGENDARY
Each of those tiers has its own Trophy, and they’re ludicrously difficult. I spent two days working on this, shaving off a little bit of time with each new run until I got my boatbuilding time down to three and a half months, then three months. I was literally the first person in the world to pop the EXPERT and the CHALLENGER Trophies, according to PSN’s Trophy data.
Finally, after more than two dozen attempts, I did it. I came in just under the wire, with a time of two months and 14 days (a month in the game is 28 days).
However, this happened:
That’s right, two months and 14 days doesn’t count as 2.5 months, for some reason. Perhaps the cutoff is exactly 14 days, and even a second more than that no longer counts, but to me that seems like a punch in the face. If the game is telling me that I completed this challenge in two months and 14 days, then I damn well earned that award and its subsequent Trophy, right? (I should point out that the corresponding Steam Achievement has a 0.1% completion rate, though it requires you to complete this in two months instead of two and a half.)
I’m honestly not sure if this is a bug, or just some vague wording in the Challenge requirement, but either way, my enthusiasm for the game’s challenges deflated when this happened. Yes, I pushed on and kept playing The Colonists (I do have to keep writing about it, after all), but I’m no longer working on any challenges.
I think this is where I officially say goodbye to the Trophy list in The Colonists. If the game is going to punish me this hard for going after its most difficult challenges, then I’m simply not going to play along. There’s a lot of joy to be had in the management elements of The Colonists, but these challenges are a vacuum that sucks all of that joy out of the game for me.
The Boatbuilder Challenge – LENEDARY Trophy is a sinking ship, and I’m abandoning it along with all the fleeing rats. Oh, and I’m changing the combat difficulty to Easy while I’m at it, and no one’s going to talk me out of it.
