A trend for games that, in my opinion, has recently escalated beyond reasonable means are the dreaded collectibles. During my whole career as a gamer, collectibles have been something I both hate and love to pursue in games until they became more and more of a nuisance when GTA3 introduced the lovely hidden packages. Not going to mention GTA4 anymore than right now because it was obviously a sadist who invented that, not much to do about it in that case.Rock Star Games seems to have realized the hidden packages could get a little bit excessive, at least for achievement hunters, and pardoned everyone from that hell in Red Dead Redemption.

In the olden days, the collectibles actually served a purpose beyond showing off you actually have the patience to perform a, most likely, boring and menial task within a game. My most recent encounter with this is Alan Wake's coffee thermoses. They are not mentioned anywhere within the story and it makes no sense for Alan to randomly pick them up, plus they already have several other different collectibles in the game that actually adds to the mystery and lore of the Wakiverse. The manuscripts provide insight to what will come or what other characters have gone through, the radio shows tells you about how other people currently experience the events happening in Bright Falls, the TV-shows are just freaky and bizarre and the signs provide relevant lore to the history of the area.

Why, then, would they feel the need to add a completely and utterly nonsensical collectible as well? Most likely because that's what a lot of other games are doing. Don't get me wrong here, I do not mind collectibles at all in games. They can be fun and challenging to collect, but there's a thin line between what makes sense and what adds to the experience of the game and what takes away from it. In Alan Wake, the concept of the elusive Coffee Thermoses just takes away from the overall experience as I found myself trying to look through every nook and cranny of every area just to get a piece of them, which in terms makes you appreciate the creepy environments less and takes away from your focus of enjoying the game. The other collectibles didn't pose that problem as a lot of manuscript pages were in plain sight and the rest were more or less not hidden at all, same with the signs, tv-shows and radio-shows.

Collectibles in general are getting old, real fast. Developers, we want to enjoy your game and I really doubt anyone, anyone at all, can say that the Coffee Thermoses in Alan Wake made that game a better, more challenging or more interesting game. I doubt anyone can say that swimming around underwater in GTA:SA forever to find oysters made that game better, more challenging or more enjoyable. I doubt anyone can say collecting flags in Assassins Creed made that game more challenging(AC challenging?) or more enjoyable. Just because you have a big game world it doesn't mean you have to clutter it with random objects for people to find.

Tired thermose hunter signing out.