Today I would like to aim some anger at collection missions in games. I absolutely bloody hate them and I really don’t see the point of them. It’s basically a game developer’s wet dream by forcing the player to run around in circles within their open world environments collecting pointless artifacts/power ups/pigeons and for what? A stingy frigging achievement usually. I’ve only noticed in Crackdown that collecting the orbs in this case, actually increases your agent’s skills so there is a fringe benefit to wasting about 6 hours of your life scouring the city like a frantic student looking for the last 20p in the house to buy a Mars Bar. But first and foremost, seeing the 12 out of 2,000 pop up is very disheartening.

But even so the collection missions in Crackdown are an absolute bore. It’s not for the fact that the finding of the orbs is difficult, it’s just that there’s 500 of the fuckers! And that’s just for one achievement. The other achievement there’s 50 more! As a completist gamer, I do like to get a nice round 100% complete statistic but that’s usually impossible because you’re forced to scour the landscape endlessly looking for miniscule pick ups of which you’d need a goldeneye style satellite with electron microscope capabilities to find. I don’t mind it too much if it actually shows were they are on the map like in Batman: Arkham Asylum or Just Cause (yes I’m actually complementing Just Cause!), its when you have to run off and find them yourself. Again, I wouldn’t normally have a problem with that but there’s usually so many of them it doesn’t become worthwhile after the first 2 hours of scavenging.

Grand Theft Auto 4 had the pigeons, Saints Row 2 had the CDs, Prototype and Crackdown had the orbs, Red Dead Redemption had half of Chelsea fucking flower show, and thw list carries on. Yes all the games have brilliant graphics so I can understand the kudos the game developers are after to recognise their hard work, but don’t force it down our throats incessantly.

Lets look at this statistically. For a gamer to get maxouts on the following games:

• Prototype – 250 Orbs
• Crackdown – 500 Agility orbs, 300 Hidden orbs
• GTA4 – 200 pigeons
• Saints Row 2 – 50 CDs, 50 Tag locations
• Red Dead Redemption – 10 levels of 10 flowers and last level is 2 of every kind as well, so 120 total
• Just Cause – 100 dropped items
• Just Cause 2 – 150 faction items.

Right that gives a grand total of 1720 items for 7 games. Lets say it takes on average about 5 minutes per looking for a collectible as usually they’re hidden.

So that’s 1720 / (60 minutes / 5 mins)  = 143 hours, 20 minutes = practially 6 whole days of solid playing. Is it really worth if for some measly gamerscore?

The only thing worse than this is the new achievements in the Claptrap DLC for Borderlands, which has 3 achievements for collecting 25 Oil Cans, 15 Bobbleheads, and 23 Party items (3 panties, 5 fish, 15 pizzas). The problem with this is that the drops are RANDOM and are very rare, so actually getting the achievment is nigh on impossible, all because Mr Lazy Programmer felt like being a prick.