Flame rounds: The tacked-on collection quest


Flame rounds lets us fulfil our yearning passion to be Frank Skinner, taking on his role as Judge, Jury, and Executioner in Room 101. We will be presenting a case for a particular Trope/Character/Item/UI element that pisses us off and then trying to justify whether this thing should go into room 101 (get flame roundsded?).

Cunzy1_1: What're you flaming?
Richie: So you have completed the story of this sandbox game. Congratulations! Now go to all these places on the map and find 100 of this thing. I hate this! So many games, specifically around the advent of achievements and trophies, would have this additional achievement to walk round the map finding glowing orbs or such.  They dub it in the name of exploration, but is just often descends into a nightmare of keeping track of an online item location guide. This is also usually coupled with a lack of any reward short of perhaps a 10GP blip. Tacked on and just annoying.

Cunzy1_1: But Richie, people spent a long time meticulously placing that comical skeleton next to a bin at the bottom of the well. You weren't going to find it otherwise unless you were hunting for all the Glowing-orby-pickups!
Richie: If I cared I would do what every other sane person would do and google/youtube [insert Game name]+easter eggs, and should I care enough (unlikely) I would visit in-game. However, putting in that 'quest' just so you can see a development teams in-joke, is the equivalent of liking your own posts. Ref. meme from circa 2006:


Cunzy1_1: I've got mixed positive and negative memories of collecting pigeons, graffitti tags, zygarde cells, shells, letters, alien garbage, stunt jumps, agility etc. orbs, tower emblems, Kafka signs, insect larvae, hidden packages, Yoshi coins, stars, moons, chests, jigsaw pieces, QR codes... What's the worst it's ever been for you? 
Richie: There are several examples of this, but yeah the pigeon is a good one, no indicator on the map of where they are, no counter for how many you have "got". So you are left reading that online guide for the fourth time (prompting you to print it out), going to all the screenshots of the item and the minimap that. Then catching yourself crossing off that 100th one that is no longer there, but you must have got it? you have crossed off all the other ones... Why hasn't the achievement come up? is it bugged? maybe it was the order you picked them up in, maybe if you start a new game? no! Lets just spend another 6 hours going over the entire map going over all 100 this time... tears.

Cunzy1_1: Waidagoddaminute. The TGAM archives show you're a huge LEGO game fan and they're almost nothing but collecting gold bricks, red bricks, true hero/jedi/master builder, characters, minikits and studs after completing the story. What gives?
Richie: Well and this is where my argument falls down, there are great examples of this being done well! With Lego, there is usually a puzzle connected to unlocking the mini-kits for 100% completion not just "looking hard". And the same can be said for the Batman games and the Riddler Trophies, each one of them is unlocked by using your gadgets in a specific puzzley way, but not only that your progress on these puzzles unlocks more side plot, and an eventual final scene with the Riddler. 

But how do you differentiate these two? Ultimately my argument becomes I want to get rid of all tacked-on collection quests except the good ones. Which can be said for pretty much anything, (therefore my next Flame Rounds will be "Flame Rounds: Bad things") but the pain of what I described above should not be fraught by anyone as such, should you allow this one through, I names it, Flame rounds: The tacked-on collection quest. 

Collection in games is often great, when done well, however when it feels tacked-on and offers you no challenge short of reaching for a printed out GameFAQs txt file, I object to that serving only to fill out the list of achievements, or even worse as you mentioned to frame some silly dev reference to meme or something. These collection quests doubly feel tacked on, usually because they come at end game. As you were proceeding through, you may have picked up a few items, but you cant get a certain item, cuz you cant jump that high yet, or you don't have a grapple long enough, etc etc. 
A very prime example of this is the Heart containers in Zelda OOT, many of these are unreachable without a guide your final upgraded items, but what use is this? you get maximum life, but you have probably already defeated *spoilers* Ganon , on half your hearts (more than enough) already.

Cunzy1_1: Gonna chime in here. In the first two LEGO Marvel games the reward for collecting 100% of everything was a character (Deadpool and Stan Lee?) but there's absolutely nothing left to do in the game at this point. 

Richie: In short, I wanna flame round collection quests which serve only promote a few more hours of longevity to the game, but offer little-to-no return in plot or characters, and more in the way of just aggravating joyless OCD completionistic desires.

Cunzy1_1: LET The tacked-on collection quest BE A-FLAMED ROUNDSDED! Just as long as we don't have to make a ruling on who decides what constitutes 'tacked-on'. 

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