COLLECTATHONS
This has been an issue in open world games for as long as they’ve been around. After all, the very nature of a large, freely explorable sandbox lends itself to this kind of quest design. If you have a massive space that players can traverse at their leisure, it makes sense to litter it with questlines revolving around collectibles, encouraging players to explore and dive deeper into the world than they ordinarily would have. But too often, games go overboard with it. Tracking down 900 Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild, for instance, is an exhausting activity, and it doesn’t help that the reward for it is literally a piece of crap. Some games do handle collectathons pretty well – Marvel’s Spider-Man, for instance, rewards players with new tidbits of backstory, and knows not to go overboard with how many items players have to track down – but those examples are still pretty rare.
