SonyI spend an awful lot of time with my PlayStation 4. Too much, some people might say. On a Saturday morning you might see me down the park taking my PS4 on the swings, or snuggling in bed with it on a rainy Sunday.
Weird attachment to my PlayStation aside, my point is that I thought I knew my console inside and out, but after all these years, it’s managed to find a new way to surprise me – and I’m not the only one, it seems.
SonyPlayStation owners will be familiar with “hidden” trophies, which are typically implemented by developers to avoid spoilers when a certain achievement is tied to a story event or some other feature that should remain a secret. Obviously, if a trophy is hidden, you won’t know what you have to do to get it, meaning completionists will likely have searched online for a game’s full trophy list at some point.
As it turns out, the PS4 has long had a feature that allows you to reveal the info for a game’s hidden trophies at the press of a button, and this revelation has shattered my world. All you have to do is select a hidden Trophy, hit X to view its details, and then smash Square to reveal the hidden information.
To be fair, this feature hasn’t always been on the PS4, which is why it probably shocked so many of us. It has however, been on the system for a good few years now, as it was first added in the PS4’s 4.00 system update, way back in September 2016.
Clearly, this feature just wasn’t communicated all that well at the time of the update, because Twitter users had a bit of a meltdown over the revelation when the official PlayStation UK account shared a Reddit post from RockyB95,who’d just made the discovery himself.
FYI this was added in system update 4.0 in 2016 👀 pic.twitter.com/6GWE05NrPe
— PlayStation UK (@PlayStationUK) July 11, 2019
RockyB95’s Reddit thread went on to throw up loads more revelations about the PS4, some of which you might already be aware of, some of which you might never have known.
For example, I already knew you could power the console off right away if you hold the power button for five seconds, but had no idea that if your controller is charging, the slower it pulses, the closer it is to being fully charged.
Every day is a school day, right? Like PlayStation UK said – it always pays to read the patch notes.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.