Is the platforming collect-a-thon genre dead?

[gbpxl]

I grew up playing games like Super Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, Rocket Robot on Wheels, Spyro the Dragon, and Croc. These games primarily involve walking around and collecting shiny things while killing bad guys. They are all cartoonish in nature.

Ive been out of the new gaming scene for a decade and some change but do they still make these games?

It seems that if a game is more innocent or child-targeted, it is a Mario game, but to me, Mario is old hat.

[YoshiM]

Well, there's Yooka Laylee, made by some folk from Rare that worked on the Banjo games. I can't think of any others.

I haven't really seen other collectathons in a long time. It seems games have gone away ftom platforming and went to craft-a-thons (ie uou have to build everything).

[kupomogli]

It's still there, just not as prevalent. On the Switch there's Super Mario Odyssey, PSVR has Astro Bot. Ratchet and Clank was released on PS4.

Technically they're still there as Ubisoft games. Just about anything 3D open world now days features some sort of realism in it. Maybe because now days people expect these massive open worlds(I don't, I'd prefer to have your smaller well crafted interconnected worlds than the massive open worlds we have today) and it is probably just too difficult to make a bunch of unique animal like characters that are appealing to your average gamer, because let's be serious, for the most part it's the average gamer and only the average gamer that matters. There are devs out there that go for the niche audience because they don't have the budget in the first place, but any publisher or developer that's looking for a lot of sales will usually try and attract the attention of the mass majority.

[mailman187666]

There is a game for switch called Poi: Explorers edition that is pretty fun and pretty cheap to buy. It's exactly the type of game you are thinking of too.

[Aussie2B]

I'd ditto what YoshiM said in that the platformer genre as a whole has largely died out, not just specifically collect-athons. These days, there's little besides retro-style indies, the occasional Nintendo offering (Mario, Kirby, Yoshi, etc.), and a handful of other games. In a way, you could argue it's the 32/64-bit 3D platformers that led to the current state of things, because those became more like exploration-focused action adventure games than anything involving actual platforming. That trend went a step further with the following generation, with so-called platformers putting other gameplay elements ahead of platforming, like shooting or what have you. So 3D platformers sort of evolved their way out of actually being platformers.

[WulfeLuer]

I agree with the previous posts about how the 3D platformer genre has become more and more niche as time goes on. Its not completely dead yet. That said, I feel that it has become a set of elements that are present in a lot of other games (much like how 'RPG elements' became a thing). There's an absolute glut of games where platforming is a major part of the gameplay, and collectibles are very much still alive and well across the board. How well these things are implemented and blend into a given game is all over the place, though.

[Jorpho]

Everyone seems to adore A Hat in Time. (It's definitely much better-regarded than Yooka Laylee.)

[BHvrd]

Everyone seems to adore A Hat in Time. (It's definitely much better-regarded than Yooka Laylee.)

I was looking forward to Yooka Laylee on WII U and actually backed it, but after the cancellation I cancelled my funding as it was offered.

It's quite bland and boring design overall but on WII U at least it would have been somewhat relevant as that system needed as many platformers and 3rd party games as it could get, alas its one saving grace was imo lost.