With Sony yanking Concord off the PlayStation Store just two weeks after it launched, the hero shooter’s platinum trophy is now more coveted than ever among diehard PS5 players. So some of them are trying to speedrun the grindy achievement by immediately killing themselves at the start of every match.
Obtaining the Concord “Living Legend” Platinum trophy is a process that would have normally taken players months, or even a couple seasons to complete if just playing casually. But now that the game is officially being deleted from storefronts on September 6 and going offline for all players whether they already own it or not, fans only have precious few hours left to get every trophy in the game. And some players have determined that jumping off cliffs in Rivalry mode matches, which award the most XP of any mode, is the fastest way to achieve that.
A video clip shared by YouTuber Real Radec that went viral showed exactly that, with players jumping off at the start of each round of the elimination mode to clear a match as fast as possible. Washington Post critic Gene Park hopped into a match and was able to replicate the results. I did the same last night and had mixed luck, with half the team’s offing themselves at the start while the others kept playing. Clearly not everyone was on the same page, but if you get a squad of five together you can make it work, though even in a private lobby its projected to take around 70 hours to actually reach level 100.
The reason players have to race to earn XP this way is that Concord’s Platinum trophy requires, among many other things, to get to level 100. That’s clearly something that’s meant to be achieved over weeks if not months, since new weekly and seasonal jobs net you tons of bonus XP that speed things up. Otherwise just grinding round after round is a real slog, which is what Real Radec discovered. “I’ve been doing this shit for an hour and only went from Level 44 to 45,” they tweeted in a follow-up. “I am NOT getting this Platinum bro.”
The Platinum trophy currently has a rating of “ultra rare” on PSN Profiles, suggesting that less than .1 percent of Concord players tracked have unlocked it. Considering how low the hero shooter’s play count appears to have been to begin with, with some estimates placing it around 25,000 players or less, that’s a rarified group to be in, and we know how much PS5 fans love their exclusivity.
I’m mostly bummed because I was enjoying chasing the Concord Platinum at my own pace, with the game growing on me the more I progressed. I figured it would become a testament to a dead game at some point, but not this fast. And unfortunately, unlike some other players, I don’t have 48 hours to spend holding back on the analog stick.