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.

Remember when there was kind of a mini-kerfuffle among Fallout fans because Bethesda wouldn't let you kill children in its games? Because it's okay to set off a nuclear device in the middle of a populated settlement but murking a lippy 14-year-old who's probably just going to grow up to be a wasteland raider is beyond the pale, I guess. Anyway, I bring this up now because Inzoi players made an unexpected and rather startling discovery almost immediately after the game went live: You could kill kids in the newly-launched life sim by pasting them with your car.

Evidence of the surprise feature was shared on YouTube by Velizxr—it's not graphic but, fair warning if you're sensitive to such things, you are about to see a child get launched into the next life courtesy of a sensible, mid-sized hatchback. (You should probably ignore the raucous laughter. It is pretty funny though.)

I am obligated to say that running over children definitely is not funny in the real world and you absolutely shouldn't do it, but videogames aren't the real world and Inzoi, especially in its early access state, is no exception: You can tell by the way the other nearby children in the video don't run screaming and crying in the wake of the wipeout, or even glance in the direction of their distant, departed pal, but instead just stand around with a sort of "aw jeez" demeanor, as though they'd been yelled at by the teacher for being too noisy instead of, y'know, getting tattooed by a Hyundai.

Inzoi's "Teen" rating from the ESRB says Zois "can die from natural or accidental causes," including "traffic accidents," but kids were meant to be excluded from such unfortunate outcomes: Krafton confirmed with IGN that going all road rage on the playground wasn't on the menu, and in fact it doesn't think any of this is funny at all.

"This issue was caused by an unintended bug that has been resolved in the latest patch," a Krafton rep said. "These depictions are highly inappropriate and do not reflect the intent and values of Inzoi. We understand the seriousness of this matter and age-appropriate content and we are strengthening our internal review processes to prevent similar incidents in the future."

I haven't been able to find any patch notes to that effect, but the dedicated professionals at Waypoint put it to the test and sure enough, when you run into a kid now you get a little "bonk" noise and nothing else: The intended statistic doesn't even look at you. It's a tremendously imperfect (and, I would guess, very rushed) solution, but in some ways even funnier than watching small children go from zero to 60 faster than a top fuel dragster. Adults, however, still fold up like yesterday's laundry, so at least we still have that.

(Listen, you can accuse me of being tasteless about this if you want, but never forget that EA intentionally added the ability to consign sims to a slow, watery death in The Sims 4, and we were all happy about it. So don't be acting like I'm the bad guy here.)

If you want to take your own shot at turning pre-teens into road waffles, the first thing you'll need is a car. If you don't have one, don't worry: We have a guide that will get you on the road in no time. Drive carefully.

If you're on social media you've probably stumbled over some quote, clip, or screen grab from one of Studio Ghibli's movies, but with ChatGPT's newest update introducing its most refined image generation yet, you're now just as likely to find an AI facsimile with a startling resemblance to the real thing. Possibly based on someone's vacation photos.

The trend is hitting social media like a hurricane and has attracted the attention of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who changed his X profile image to a Ghibli-inspired self-portrait. But it's not just him: America's very own verified White House X account posted an image in the same style, showing a US soldier putting handcuffs on a woman in tears, referencing a real event in Philadelphia last week.

If you had any concerns about generative AI's implications in regard to ethics, artist rights, or copyright, that conversation is hitting a fever pitch all over the internet. That this latest generative AI fad mimics the work of someone as beloved as Hayao Miyazaki has made it particularly obscene to critics.

As filmmaker Robbie Shilstone said in a thread on X: "Miyazaki spent his entire life building one of the most expansive and imaginative bodies of work, all so you could rip it off and use it as a filter for your vacation photos … I can't think of a worse artist to do it to as well. He is notorious for his attention to detail, his painstaking revisions, his uncompromising dedication to his craft."

User slimjosa concurred, saying in a quote repost of an AI-generated Ghibli image: "The whole Studio Ghibli AI trend honestly gives me second-hand embarrassment knowing how hard Hayao Miyazaki has fought to retain the identity of his films and how many of you are this willing to make a farce out of decades of artistry because you don't actually value it". That post has racked up nearly 50,000 likes.

Also worth noting is generative AI's carbon footprint, as it relies on energy-guzzling data centers to function. While OpenAI doesn't disclose specific data regarding its emissions, a report from Goldman Sachs last year noted "a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search."

It's hard not to think of a notorious Miyazaki clip where he calls a procedural animation technique "an insult to life itself," adding that "anyone who creates this stuff has no idea what pain is".

While he wasn't talking about generative AI as we understand it now, the crew demonstrating their technology to him said their goal was to "build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do." It hardly feels like a stretch to make the connection between that attitude and this technology.

Sins of a Solar Empire 2, last year's brilliant fusion of RTS and 4X, has just received its first piece of premium DLC: Paths to Power.

The DLC throws 10 new scenario maps into the mix, giving interstellar conquerors bespoke objective-based challenge missions with distinct victory conditions.

These include a scenario where you'll have to take out an adversary by destroying their homeworld using your only titan equipped with the ability to summon reinforcements. And you won't have a homeworld of your own to fall back to if things get too heated.

Other scenarios include one where you'll be protecting your territory from an unrelenting alien invasion, another where you'll use new mechanics to subjugate the galaxy using culture, and a scenario where you'll have work together with your rivals (or screw them over) to escape a dying solar system.

While the new scenarios are very welcome, the headline attraction is really the free update, Total Subjugation.

Total Subjugation sees the return of population mechanics from the first game, adding an allegiance system that's determined by the culture of your populations and the culture of your empire, which is then reflected by bonuses and debuffs.

On top of this returning mechanic, you'll also get to play around with a trio of new units: the TEC Stilat Missile Corvette, the Vasari Heavy Fighter Strikecraft, and the Vasari Junsurak Warden Frigate. No love for the Advent, sadly.

Planet variety is also getting a nice boost thanks to another trio of new additions: ice moons, volcanic moons and barren planets.

Ironclad has also rebalanced the entire game, tweaking everything from research to unit durability.

So even if you don't fancy parting with your cash for the DLC, you've still got plenty of reasons to dip back into Sins of a Solar Empire 2. And honestly I'm pleased to see the free update introducing so much new stuff compared to the DLC—which feels less essential, though still tempting.