What's the point of missables?

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Seriously, what actual point does the potential of missing an item or side-quest serve other than to piss completionists off? Why not provide more non-missable challenges instead?

Anybody else hates this as well?

Well, it's a fine line between "Look at all this extra stuff you can do the next time you play the game!" and "COLLECT EVERYTHING 110% OR YOUR FRIENDS WILL MAKE FUN OF YOU".

Although I do think it's kind of lame when it's a game I will never, ever play again, on the other hand, I think it's even more lame in games like GTA where it's like "Oh, did you screw up that mission? No harm done, just try it again!"

Also, it can help to add a bit of non-linearity to the gameplay. I always think it's fun when some of my friends are playing the same game, and we swap stories about things that happened to one of us.

Hidden content always gets my goat. What is the point in making content, then hiding it.

For the game developer, there are a lot of different personality types. They try to cater for as many types as possible, while making it enjoyable for all.

Personnaly, I wish they'd focus on a particular personality type and advertise the product as such.
- For the manic puzzle solver, this game is for you.
- For the quest completionist, there is 1100 quests for you to complete.
- For the explorers, here's a huge randomised game world for you to explore.
- For the world dominance types, here are 5 races and 25 countries for you to conquer.
- For the collectables, here is a game of faction, collection, dungeon lootz, and mobs to kill and skin.
- For the shoot em' ups, here's a castle and a never ending hoard of baddies trying to take it from you.

My guess is REPLAYABILITY.

There's a spoof game that I THINK is called "Press Space To Win." It won awards because it's a spoof, and some people don't get it, but literally, you only press the space bar and the game moves from one event to another.

What fun would a game like that really be?

I find Xbox 360 achievements lame when you get them just by finishing a portion of the game. Wow! 20 points for getting through the tutorial? I feel so special! (that was sarcasm)

Some of the best games have hidden "easter eggs" and other things you would NEVER know were in the game if you didn't experiment with different styles of playing, crawling over every inch of game area in the game, etc. It can be annoying at times, but I'm amused when I look on YouTube and see a vid of something I could have done in an old game that I never knew was possible.

Newer developers are lazy compared to some of the old school ones. It takes a lot of time to craft some hidden material into a game.

A great example is Fallout. If you made your IQ really low, you'd be too stupid for dialogue, but someone showed how it could be done. You'd use Mentants to boost your IQ long enough to get the IQ boosting surgery. When the Mentants wore off, you were even dumber and could get it done again. This took a character with hardly functional IQ to where dialogue was possible and you got to use all those points from character creation on other things.

How many developers would have thought that through and code it into the game? Indeed, Fallout3 only penalized your odds of success in conversation due to low IQ, but you could still speak. It shows a level of attention to detail I rarely see anymore in the new games.

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However, I will agree to this.... In a BAD game, hidden content sucks. It's fine if you have an awesome game you don't mind playing over and over, but if the game is a drag to get through, the last thing you ever want to do is start over from the beginning to satisfy some OCD need to get a hidden objective.