Overview:
- Estimated Difficulty: 3/10 (Platinum Difficulty Thread)
- Trophy Breakdown: 12, 10, 6, 1
- Offline Trophies: 29 ( 12, 10, 6, 1)
- Online Trophies: None
- Approximate Amount of Time to : 15-25hrs
- Minimum Number of Playthroughs: 1.5
- Glitched Trophies: None
- Do Trophies Stack: Yes, the difficulty related trophies do stack.
Saves and Difficulty
When you start a New Game you will be asked what difficulty you wish to play the game on. Once you have selected the difficulty you are fully committed to it, you can not change halfway through or even post completion when using level select. The only way to change it is to start a 'New Game' but the consequence of that is you will lose all of your progress which you have made in levels and the weapons which you have collected etc. Think carefully about this as it is possible to obtain all trophies under the game's hardest difficulty. In fact this guide encourages you to do it hard way but take note that if you start on one of the lower difficulties, it will take longer to Platinum the game as you will be forced into another full playthrough.
Bugs and Glitches
You must remember that this game originally came out in 2004 and, although at the time it was quite a revolutionary and ambitious game, it does have a lot of bugs and glitches which can be a hindrance when trying to complete levels. Glitches can come in extreme forms such as your disguise just being randomly blown and guards just start shooting at you. This usually stems from your suspicion bar just spiralling out of control in a unjustifiable manner; this can lead to guards following you for no apparent reason and they will relentlessly keep on checking your ID until your cover is blown.
Mission 4: Beldingford Manor can be particular glitchy in terms of getting your disguise blown, this is because the manor's space is relatively confined and it is therefore easy to bump into people. There is a small chance that they will just stalk you until your cover gets blown. It can be very vexing and considering there are a lot of objectives to complete, it can be very taxing in regards to the time which you will unnecessarily be forced into spending on this mission. Also, the Stable Boy inside the barn can be a real pain as sometimes he will be fine but other times he will freak out and alert the nearby guards.
In Mission 3: The Bjarkhov Bomb (when you blow up the submarine) sometimes the game will start giving loads of alerts, which will effectively ruin your chances of getting the Silent Assassin Rating for the level. It can be down to luck for you to succeed at times!
Do not be too disheartened by these glitches as they will by no means prohibit your chances in Platinuming this game, they will just frustrate you from time to time and a few level restarts may be needed. To put it into a better context you can try to complete a level ten times, all in the same way, five will be perfect and the other five will be failures.
Killing Animals
In some of the levels you may encounter animals. Killing them will have no affect on any of the kill related trophies, nor will they affect your end-of-level rating for that matter.
Walkthrough
Start a New Game, select Professional Difficulty and complete the game fully under this mode in order to unlock: Normal Mode Complete, Expert Mode Complete and Professional Mode Complete. Complete every level with a Silent Assassin Rating for Silent Assassin, 5 Normal Silent Assassins, 5 Expert Silent Assassins, 5 Professional Silent Assassins and most importantly you will get a weapon for each level that you complete providing you get the rating. Building on this make sure you pick up every weapon possible that is obtainable in every level. Educate yourself on the weapon's whereabouts and with careful planning you can make great inroads on all the weapon related trophies. You will definitely have to replay one or two levels twice in order to get all of the weapons. You can complete the game then go back to the levels where there were more weapons to be collected but personally I prefer the more methodical route where you can complete the level then redo it immediately afterwards. This is so you can clean-up and collect the remainder of the weapons whilst the mission itself is still fresh in your memory. Try not to complete levels without collecting any of it's weapons, otherwise you have wasted an opportunity to make some progress in: All Firearms Collected, All Melee Weapons Found, All Handguns Collected, All Machine Guns Collected, All Assault Rifles Collected, All Shotguns Collected, All Sniper Rifles Collected and All Heavy Weapons Collected. In Mission 9: The Wang Fou Incident make sure to pick up the Orthmeyer's Keycard and replay Mission 1: Asylum Aftermath and use the Key Card to gain access to the Minigun and the Gold Dessert Eagle Dual for the Minigun and Double Eagle trophies.
1st Kill, 1st Mission Complete and Firey Fire are all story-related and can not be missed. Throughout your playthrough make sure you poison someone for Poisonous and sedate someone using the syringe for Sleep Well.
After your first playthrough and you have collected all weapons, load up Mission 7: Traditions of the Trade. Go into the hotel unarmed and in this order: Drown Fritz Fuchs for Floater then kill 47 people for 47 Kills In A Mission and Killed The Wrong Guy. Furthermore if you have not yet killed anyone by shooting them in the head in your full playthrough, then do so now for Headshot. Before you extract, kill the Ghost for Ghost Buster and collect the Spas-12 from the florist for Termination then you will have Perfect Assassin .
[PST Would Like to Thank Dr.HelmutMarko for this Road Map]