Videogame collectibles don’t have to suck, argues seasoned dev: ‘I’m lookin’ at you, Korok Seeds’

Bear with me, dear reader, and ask yourself: What makes for a good collectible? I obviously have a few good ideas now, because I’m writing this article, but before then I admit I’d be hard-pressed to give you a proper list. I know what makes a bad one, mind, but what gives them the juice? Is it something that makes a little noise when you pick it up? Does it make a bar increase somewhere?

Joe Morrissey, a seasoned writer and director who spoke at GDC this year, has a few solid ideas. In case you’re unfamiliar, Morrissey has quite a few credits, including Diablo 2 and 3, InFamous 1 and 2, and Ghost of Tsushima.

His talk, “Making Collectibles Count”, was an illuminating chat on what makes a pickup worth it. It’s also a very funny, eight-point dunk on Breath of the Wild, which infamously made you grab 999 Korok Seeds for a bit of golden poo.

Morrissey breaks things down into three tiers—one that stamps out the fundamentals, one that elevates them, and a couple of cautionary tales.

The golden rule(s)

First up is “discoverability”, which Morrissey says is “also the one that most developers, including myself, at times, have fallen short on. This trait is the player asking the question, ‘how do I find this collectible?'”

There’s a sort of tipping point he outlines whereupon finding your first gubbin, a player might ask “I wanna [find] more of those, how do I do that?” However, “if the answer is ‘well, you just gotta search for them’ … that’s not gonna be a good time. Nobody is gonna have fun with that. They’ll just go online and find wherever the stuff is.”

It’s here where Korok Seeds catch a stray, and not for the first time in the talk: “I’m lookin’ at you, Korok Seeds.”

The way you work around this, he argues, is to add ways for players to seek out the collectibles—systems where you can scan the environment work, but you can also use visual cues. Ghost of Tsushima utilised black smoke, fireflies, steam, and a little bird that’d try and get your attention to steer you towards a locale.

The second ‘gold-tier’ rule is obvious on the face of it: You gotta reward players for what they find, and that reward has to encourage more exploration—he shouts out the jump orbs from Crackdown here, astutely observing:

“The more of these orbs you collect, the higher you can jump, and the further you jump, the more you’re allowed to get to those previously impossible orbs. So your reward for getting these hard-to-get orbs was the ability to get harder-to-get orbs.”

This honestly tracks—this kind of reward system is something MMOs have used to keep players trucking along when it comes to gear upgrades, so the fact it’s effective in collect-athons scans nicely, as well. It’s a lesson some creative directors have ignored, Morrissey says.

“I’ve talked to a number of creative directors at different places I’ve been at where they’re like, ‘hey, we’re not going to give you the rewards for the collectible’. No one really cares about this, it isn’t a big deal.’ And then, sure enough, we do very early play testing. And all the play testers are like, ‘why would I waste my time doing this?'”

The last point of import is—as you might wager—making it fun to pick this stuff up. “You can create a fun mechanic that actually gives the players some sort of skill that they can improve on,” he says. “It could be collecting the SKATE in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.” These things help to break up gameplay flow, making the whole process more active—think Riddler Trophies in the Arkham Games.

Fluff and stuff

The next tier helps elevate your garden variety collectible with flavor, via worldbuilding, fictional justification, and character attachment.

Worldbuilding’s pretty self-explanatory—the things you collect are an opportunity to “reveal more about the world of the character.” Basically, doohickeys with backstories—he uses the example of the backpacks in the Spider-Man games, which all come with a 3D model and a snippet of backstory to help you get “a sense of the man behind the mask”.

Fictional justification just means making it make sense: “This trait asks us as designers to justify what all of these glowy, hard-to-get-to, often very noisy things actually are in the world.” Despite his enduring love of Crackdown’s orbs, he notes that they fail on this point—nobody’s suspension of disbelief is maintained by the Jump Spheres. “Just take a beat and think about it, because it’s not that hard.”

Character attachment runs a little deeper, and has more to do with overarching narrative. He uses an example from Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey—its Standing Stones being linked in the story to the protagonist’s dead family. “Now it’s on them to kind of go to these places that their son couldn’t.” Essentially, it’s stuff that makes you think: “This is exactly what my character would do.”

The final two points are more about courtesy, and have the lowest weighting in his eventual tier list. Morrissey thinks that collectibles should be in a “relatively consistent location,” because “players will pick up on that, and it’ll make sense to them.” Meanwhile, they ought to be in a “reasonable quantity”. Or, rather, “How many times are you going to make players do this”? Too many, at times. Too many.

He then uses these tiered elements to grade a bunch of different items in games, captured here by PCG’s own Tim Clark. Unsurprisingly, Korok Seeds are C-tier.

Honestly, while it’s funny to see Nintendo’s 999-item long collectathon duly roasted, I’m more impressed with the depth of thought that goes into making something we take for granted. I’m sure we can all list collection quests we were annoyed by, but it’s harder to outline ones we enjoyed and why—as Morrissey has done here.