ACC Platinum Trophy Guide
For up to and including version 1.6.5.199810 10/04/2021
Let me start off by saying that this is the hardest Platinum Trophy I have ever achieved in a racing game ……. Ever!
So for anyone wanting to give it a go, here is some very important information to bear in mind.
If you think you are too slow, all you have to be is 2.5sec faster than the AI in career on easy and you will get the goals. (5 secs at Spa)
Here is THE most important tip. This game has more crashes than a demolition derby so it is vital to continually save and back up to USB. The game usually crashes just as you finish an event or go to exit to the next one so if you don’t diligently back up every time before an event (or practice/qualifying session) ends you WILL get caught and lose hours of hard work. Example: long career Spa 24hr race is 12hr in real time. It crashed on me half way through so I would suggest doing a save to USB every other pit stop or every couple of hours at least.
The career has a few test sessions that range from easy to almost impossible if you don’t know what the goals are. Once you know what is expected you can work towards them.
Usually all you have to be is quicker than the AI and you get through but there are 3 events where you must beat a time.
First is: Brands Hatch Wet Test. The goal here is to do 7 (clean!) laps in about 10minutes. I have achieved Gold with the slowest at 10:12 on one play through.
Tip: don’t be slow out of the pits at the start, there are valuable seconds going to waste here and do a save every lap so if you mess a lap up you can redo it. And don’t forget to save to USB before the orange countdown timer triggers
Then there is Silverstone wet/damp/greasy test. You must achieve a time here of <2:04.5. This is by far the hardest and I have personally spent a lot of time on this on each run through.
Now here is something very interesting I found about this test. When you first do it the track goes from Wet > Damp which makes it **VERY** challenging. If you hit re-start before the event finishes it goes from Damp > Greasy and actually appears dryer. On short it got the time on damp but on medium I couldn’t do it until it was greasy. Having said that there was an update and the physics and some cars performance were adjusted. I have also done this with wet and dry tyres so it is down to picking the exact track conditions for the tyre you are using
Lastly the Spa test. Not hard, you just need to do a 2:24 lap. Like I said above, knowing what the game wants is half the battle. What makes this “challenging is the 15 mobile chicanes that the game throws at you and all at the wrong time. The time is not the hard bit, getting a clean(ish!?) run is.
The trick for career is to drive > save > back up, rinse and repeat ;-)
Tip: You can’t do a save when the orange overtime event timer has triggered. VERY important to remember for Brands Hatch and Silverstone. You MUST do a save (and back up) before the timer triggers. It is almost guaranteed to crash on you at least once here.
Did I mention this game crashes all the time? ;-) Just wait until you get a gold time at Brands or Silverstone only to have the game crash on exit and delete your time. *&$%!
Another idiosyncrasy of this game is that you must be made aware of and your regime of game saves will help here too. Even when you finish an event and meet the required time having scored Gold when you exit to the next career event the game *MAY* downgrade your overall score to silver. I hear you all say WTF!? If you complete an event and don’t get the required time and score lower than gold *IF* you hit restart the game remembers the first score and awards that when you complete it with a Gold score. So DO NOT hit restart event if you fail you *MUST* exit the game and do a saved game restore from your USB. Ignore this tip at your peril ;-) Also, if you know you aren’t going to make the requirement it is perfectly safe to “Restart Game” before the end
Tip: use two USBs. 1 that has the current saved game restore point and the other from the end of the last event you did in case you need to delete a whole game.
Just ask me how I found this out. I did a game restore from a USB that had a restart event on it with a silver time L
While we are discussing game saves I also back up my USB saves to files on my PC so that I can go back to any point in the career.
Why is that you ask? Well you may wish to change cars (like I did) and there are two points in the career where you get to choose what car you want to use. Or (like I did) you merrily carry on with career getting gold and then notice your overall score has dropped to silver EVEN though you got gold at every event. (see above about the game remembering previous scores in restarted games) >:-(
Perhaps I should elaborate further on games saves. The game automatically saves at the beginning of an event. A saved game during an event will take you back to that exact same point even if you quit out and restart the game. If (*WHEN!!!*) there is a crash your game save point gets deleted and you are started back at the beginning of your current event. This means in an endurance event you could lose a free practice session of 15min, 3 x15 min qualifying sessions and a 4 hour (or 12hr) race. So by saving 10 seconds before the end of each session (and race), quitting out of the game and doing a saved game data backup you are potentially saving yourself many, many hours of lost time. When (not IF) it crashes you only lose 10 secs of racing and the time it takes to quit and reload the game. Believe me when you do it for every session and race during the career you do get pretty quick at it. Also it seems to reduce the number of crashes. Certain events are more prone than others like Brands Hatch wet test and Silverstone wet test seem to crash the most for me. Don’t forget, you can’t save once the orange countdown timer triggers. BTW you will be racing into this at Brands Hatch Wet Test so save before it triggers.
Tip: Assists, stability control, is a waste of time and can actually make you slower so don’t even think about it in those wet tests.
I think I have covered all the points here and like I said there are only 3 hard ones BUT you have to do them all 3 times each ;-) Short, medium and long careers ;-)
Another tip that *WILL* catch you out. When you re-start a saved game the game will change your current set up to default “SAFE SETUP”. If you restart during an event your old tune will be current *until* that session is finished and when you start the next session it will be the default safe setup. Guess how many races I started to discover the car handled like a POS only to find out that I was running the default tune.
Tip: ALWAYS before a session starts check your current tune.
I hope some of my points here will you and good luck (you’ll need it) in getting your Platinum Trophy. I think this will be a very exclusive club I am now in ;-)
Just some rambling thoughts now. This has to be one of the best driving sims I have ever driven, it is really great but at the same time this has to be one of the biggest buggfest games on PS4! I don’t think D3T have a clue about racing or coding for that matter. Here are some examples, after this last update Hungaroring Career the race starts before the start line, there is no driving in formation before the start, when the game loads you are off and racing and at Spa you have be *exactly* in the right place on the track or the race won’t start.
In career the hammer time, overtake bonuses etc etc have no meaning what so ever so don’t bother trying to get them.
Did I mention this game crashes all the time? The record is 4 save game restores from USB before it would actually proceed to the next event.
Button mapping disappeared with the last update too >:-(
So I am going to replace my first message in this thread with this so anyone searching here will find this easier.
