Wow, I'm surprised you wrote this, dude. I'm not really a huge fan of "Collect-A-thons" either, but calling the formula "best forgotten" is a big stretch, don't you think? Especially considering the types of games you and I still enjoy.
I mean, Yooka-Laylee's quality aside, it just never seems like a good idea to claim that gaming has evolved past concepts that are still fondly remembered and revisited frequently by so many people. In a lot of recent discussions on this topic, I've actually been seeing people try to draw parallels between Collect-A-Thons and Classic Doom, considering both gameplay styles dated and forgettable. Yet over the decades, we've seen modders still find plenty of merits to Classic Doom gameplay versus the modern FPS. Likewise, there might still be more ideas to explore in the Collect-a-Thon formula than we think.
I also don't believe it makes much sense to consider Mario64 good "in spite" of the formula it helped create. It's really just another facet of that formula. One of the things that's had me particularly interested in A Hat in Time is that it seems to be pulling inspiration from multiple camps, similar to how Shovel Knight/Freedom Planet did with 2D platformers. The result comes off more like a "Rare-flavored Mario Sunshine" to me, and I'm very interested to see how people react to that game after experiencing the much more Rare-centric approach that Playtonic stuck with for Y-L.
Take it as an opinion ^_^ I know it's a somewhat controversial one. I also understand how it may come off as hypocritical knowing my tastes, but I'm definitely coming at it from a slightly more critical perspective then old = outdated.
Basically, I feel that that the n64/ps1 era of collect-a-thon developer thought process was as follows:
>We're still learning how to do shit in 3d and don't really have a great grasp of it yet
>However, 3d itself is a thrill right now. People would play a 3d Mario even if there was literally no objective and it was just a window into a 3d mushroom kingdom
>soooo......let's just make a bunch of sandbox areas, plop it full of some items to grab, and call it a day.
And that's really what most collect-a-thons were:
sandboxes with fetch quests. And often times the same sandboxes and the same objectives are recycled multiple times throughout the game.
Mario 64 was IMO at its best when it evoked the classic Mario playstyle of making it through an obstacle course from point A to point B. But where it's aged poorly are the numerous slogging gimmick areas (dire dire docks, etc.), repetitive revisits of already explored areas in order to grab more coins, etc. not to say that everything that diverged from the platforming was bad: Nintendo's signature creativity certainly created some memorably offbeat moments, but there's still a lot of untrimmed fat in that game and even more in its competitors.
Maybe it's a bit much to say the very concept of collecting in a 3d space is bad, but I do
personally feel that the majority of those games have aged
very poorly.
I've never understood why collectathons get so much hate. How can an entire genre be written off as "dated"? Maybe it's not everyone's taste, but that's just taste.
It's all subjective anyway. I personally feel that most of the games were riding on the wave of hype for 3d then, and riding on the wave of nostalgia now. I just feel that there's not a ton worth salvaging, but that's just me. Perhaps "dated" and such are too pretentious/authoritative a way of describing it.