10 Outdated Video Game Design Tropes That Must Die

7. Pointless Collectathon Tasks

The uptick in open-world games trying to compete for players' time over the last few years has seen these titles increasingly saddle players with an absurd number of peripheral content.

And though this is sometimes in the form of meaningful side missions, it too often devolves into developers daring players to hoover up hundreds if not thousands of meaningless collectible items scattered around the map.

The Assassin's Creed games have practically taken this to the level of self-parody in the past, flooding the map with more icons than any single human being can possibly keep up with.

In actual fact, it's simply an attempt to keep the player glued to the game as long as possible, and therefore increase the probability that they'll splash out on microtransactions or become psychologically addicted to the game - and therefore the IP.

A player who cuts through the main questline and moves directly onto another game is a publisher's worst nightmare, and so the inclusion of junky tat to be scooped up for tens if not hundreds of hours is often mandated to developers from on high.

It's almost as cynical as gaming gets. Almost.