Collecting all the collectibles in a game can be satisfying at times, but other times it's a boring nightmare, as Joe Morrissey, the designer of Ghost of Tsushima and Unsung Heroes 2, described The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as "Negative textbook", which tells the elements of interesting collection and the reasons for boring collection.

At this year's GDM, Morrissey listed eight key characteristics that he believes can make a collection system interesting: discoverability, whether it offers the right rewards, whether it is fun, whether it requires proficiency in understanding the mechanics, whether it is useful for the structure of the game world, whether there is a fictional justification, how attached the characters are to it, and whether there is consistent placement and a reasonable amount of collection.

Morrissey believes that the first three items, "discoverability, providing appropriate rewards, and fun", are the most important, with "discoverability" determining how players discover more collections. He said that it wouldn't make sense if players "just had to find them randomly", and that people would look up strategies online, such as how the Kroger fruit was found in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and he believed that the process of finding collectibles could be made more engaging through visual cues and a system of scanning the environment.