Collectible Maps

I love to explore in video games.  Enter every hidden nook and cranny.  Find every hidden goody.  However, I don't have the infinite time I had growing up to spend hundreds of hours to find everything anymore.  My backlog of games is also growing instead of shrinking.  This is one reason I'm very appreciate of well-designed games with collectibles that give me ways to be efficient about exploring everywhere and finding everything.  One of the tools a game designer can use for this respect is the collectible map.

If you tell me there are 100 whatsits to collect in a given area and it's a fairly large area and that's all the information you give me, I have two choices: wander aimlessly for that 100th item when I have 99 of them found and hope I stumble upon it or play along with a map from the beginning to make sure I collect them all as I go.  Neither of those prospects are good.  One is horribly inefficient, time-wasting, and generally not fun.  The other makes me feel like a miserable, no good, terrible cheater (because I am).  On the other hand, I also understand that wandering around aimlessly to find whatsits can be fun on its own for a little while.  This is why my favorite way this is handled is how most of the Assassin's Creed games handle it - at some point in a game I can buy or am given a map showing the locations of all the collectibles I haven't found yet.  This means that I can try to find them all on my own, but I don't have to beat my head against a wall for that last item.

The absolute best way I've seen this handled is that the map is automatically unlocked once you've found roughly 75% of the items.  That way, you've proven that you want to find all the whoosits, but you probably have only the really hard ones to find left.  The absolute best game designer will have put those items in places where it's easy to see where the item is, but it's a clever puzzle to figure out how to get there yourself.  So put an item up on the edge of a cliff with a narrow path winding around to where the player can't see.  That way, even though you have a map showing you exactly where the item is, it's still fun to try to get all the items.