Xbox Finally Has a Platinum Trophy, and It’s Called a Mythic Achievement

Unlock every achievement in an Xbox game and nothing much happened. Your Gamerscore went up, the list showed complete, and that was the ceremony. PlayStation has handed out a platinum trophy for the same work for years. On September 29, Microsoft announced its answer, the Mythic Achievement.

The bar is every original achievement in a game. Clear them all and the game goes Mythic. Achievements added later by DLC or a title update don't count against you, and they can't take it back. "It's yours to keep," senior product manager Alex Charters said.

Your old games may already qualify

Microsoft applied this retroactively, and it reaches back to Xbox 360 titles. "The next time you visit your profile, you may discover that some of your favorite games have already reached Mythic status," Charters wrote. If you cleared a 360 game years ago and stopped thinking about it, the credit is already there.

What it looks like

A Mythic Achievement displays in what Xbox calls a heroic frame. More useful is the progress bar that sits above each game's achievement list, showing how close you are to the full set. The fuzzy sense that you're "pretty close" on a handful of games turns into a number you can act on.

All of it lands in a new Gaming tab on your profile. Your friends' tabs work the same way, so you can open one and see their Mythic Achievements and completion percentages. A platinum is worth chasing on PlayStation partly because other people can see it, and Xbox has copied that part too.

You probably can't use it yet

Mythic Achievements are live for Xbox Insiders, Microsoft's beta program, and nobody else. Microsoft has not announced a public rollout date, or a window, or whether the feature ships in this shape when it gets there. If you're not an Insider, the Mythic status sitting on your library is real and you can't look at it.

If you're the kind of player who reads the achievement list before starting a game, this is aimed at you, and it hands you credit for work you already finished. If you're not, a progress bar over a list you'll never complete won't change much. The frame is a nice touch. The bar is the part you'll use. Both are behind an Insider signup until Microsoft names a date.