Fish On Friday

 

I said we'd get there! And we have. Took a while but it won't be worth it.

Well, how could it be? It's a post about a limited-time event in a game that, by my count, two people who follow this blog might be playing. And all the event involves is fishing.

It's not proper fishing, either. Not even by the standards of the game itself, which aren't exactly rigorous to begin with. Fishing in Neverness To Everness isn't one of the most sophisticated representations of the pastime I've seen in a game. It's more of a caricature than a photo-realist painting.

To fish in Hetherau you need three things:

1. A rod
2. Some bait
3. A chair.

Every game demands the first two but that last one does make it stand out from most fishing mini-games I've played, I will admit. Usually it's enough to get close to the shoreline or the riverbank and cast. Sometimes you might need to wade in a ways to reach the fish. I can't offhand recall another game where I could only fish when seated in a canvas chair.

There are fishing chairs in numerous spots around the city although I couldn't say exactly where. They're all marked n the map, though. 

I do know there's one at the marina and several along the coastal city's long shoreline. There are probably some along the banks of the large lake at the edge of town, on the way to the mountains. I believe you can catch different kinds of fish at the various spots. 

There are certainly plenty of different species, all of which are waiting to be ticked off in your fish collection. Some can be placed in aquariums (Aquaria?) in your house. All can be sold for a shells, a currency you can then use to buy better rods and bait.

And that, vague as it is, is about all I know about fishing in NTE. I tried it when the option opened up in the Hobbies section at Tycoon Level 3 but I only stuck with it long enough to tick whatever box I was supposed to be ticking at the time.

It's not that I didn't like it. I generally find fishing a mildly diverting pastime in any game that has it, although some implementations are certainly more enjoyable than others. Here, the mini-game uses the ever-popular "wear the fish out by pressing a couple of keys" method, whereby you use A and D to chase a bubble back and forth across a bar at the top of the screen. It's meant to represent using the rod to force the fish to swim against the pull of the line and thereby become exhausted, I think.

I wouldn't really know. The last time I fished in real life, I was ten years old. And I wasn't even really fishing. My cousin was fishing and I was watching him. He let me have a go sometimes but I can't say I was pushing for a turn. I thought fishing was a tedious practice even then and I haven't had any fish-based epiphanies since to change my mind. 

And anyway, the fish we were catching were about four inches long at most. They couldn't put up much - or any - of a struggle.

I guess that's how it works, though. Seems logical. It's certainly how it works in games.

And that's fine. I quite enjoy trying to keep the marker in the bubble, especially when it's easy. It's easy here or it has been for me, so far. In some games it's easy to lose a fish or break the line, which is supposed to add some challenge or skill I guess, but if you can lose the fish in NTE, it hasn't happened to me yet. 

I'd done enough fishing before the  event to get to Level 2. There are Fishing Levels because of course there are Fishing Levels. I know we call these"gacha games" but they're RPGs under the shiny surface and what's an RPG if it isn't a massive, squirming nest of levels?

The problem with fishing in Neverness To Everness - and there is a well-known problem - is that it's grindingly, excruciatingly slow. Again, not at all unusual for an RPG but quite odd for NTE, where very little else seems grindy. I wouldn't care but one of the few outfits you can get for the player character without having to spend real money is locked behind Level 10 Fishing.

It's  not a great outfit but it's not bad and Flora would wear it so I want it. But do I want it enough to spend the estimated thirty hours it takes? Someone on Reddit claimed they heard it took someone else nine hours just to get from Level 9 to level 10 and as we all know, anything someone on Reddit says they heard someone else say is easily as reliable evidence as anything an AI will tell you.

It sounds about right, though. As I say, there's been a lot of complaining about the time it takes to level fishing since the game began. It seems as though someone at Hotta has noticed because the new event, Fishing Frenzy, removes a huge amount of the grind from leveling. Or it does on day one, at least. After that it's less spectacular but still well worth doing.

On the first day you get to catch an incredible four hundred fish, in a matter of minutes. I'd estimate it would normally take maybe three hours to catch that many. It would take the same in Fishing Frenzy, if you had to use a rod. But you don't.

The "frenzy" part of the event comes from the gear you use and the fact that you're on a timer. You start off with a harpoon. That only catches one fish at a time but you can throw the harpoon way, way faster than you can cast a line. 

At Fishing Level 3 you get a net. The net catches multiple fish each time, as you might expect. 

And at Fishing Level 5 you get... a bomb! I mean, they could have gone with the traditional dynamite but I'll take a bomb. 

(These are different fishing levels to the ones I was talking about earlier, by the way. They should have called them Frenzy Levels or something. It's confusing.)

So there you are, throwing your net and your bomb and ignoring your harpoon, because who uses a harpoon when they have a bomb, right? These days, I barely bother with the net. The fish are swarming, the timer (Which as far as I can tell is completely irrelevant and I have no idea why it's even there.) is ticking away and the experience is positively rolling in. Good times!

I went from (Real) Fishing Level 2 to 5 on the first day. It took me maybe fifteen minutes, tops. That would have been days and days of tedious casting and reeling and I would never have done it. I'm already capped on Frenzy Fishing.

I also got an unbelievable 500,000 Fons when I sold the first lot of fish. That actually excited me more than the xp. I was imagining making back all the money I've lost at the Catzebo (It's a lot.) and more. 

Unfortunately, on the second day the Fish Pool drops to just a hundred fish, which is the daily limit for the duration of the event. In total you can catch 1500 fish, which means you can drop a few days and still max out. 

It means the xp drops from a flood to, if not a trickle, then a stream. Still totally worth it, though, and miles faster than regular fishing. I'm Level 6 in Proper Fishing now. I'd guess I'll be close to Level 8 by the end. Not all the way to Flora's outfit but getting there.

The money, though, is a bit of a mystery. After that first windfall, I haven't seen any Fons at all from the event. The fish make you a pile of shells, which will be handy for real fishing later, but of Fons there is no sign. Anyone know what that's all about? [Edit: I just googled it and it seems to be related to using up your City Stamina, which explains why people go on about doing that. I've never bothered with it before. I might have to start...]

It's a topic for a separate post, really, but I will just mention that the gacha games in general and NTE and Wuthering Waves in particular suffer from what might be called a content glut. Coming from MMORPGs, and especially from a decade in Guild Wars 2, where the constant complaint was that there was far too little to do most of the time, I find it one of the hardest things to get used to.

Now I'm back in WW, I find myself looking at literally screen after screen of potential activities I could do. The menus scroll right off the page on some of them. It's overwhelming. NTE isn't that daunting yet but give it time. 

As an example, just a day or two after Fishing Frenzy started, another new, time-limited event called Warren Lucky Flip appeared. It's only a screen where you turn over cards but it's still more new content on top of the new content we only just got.

I did yet another survey for Wuthering Waves yesterday. It was a Returning Player survey so I had some proper answers this time. All of the questions are multiple choice and one gave me a long list of possibilities why I might have stopped playing. Hardly any of them were relevant because I love WW and can't find much fault with it. They didn't have one for "I stopped because it was too good and it was doing my head in, man" but I did tick a couple.

I ticked the one about wanting to play new games (Neverness To Everness, of course, the name of which came up in a couple of the other questions so it's definitely on Kuro's radar as some kind of competition.). The other box I ticked was "Too much new content". 

Yes, they had a box for that. They had one for too little new content, too, but there's always one of those. "Are we giving you too much to do?" is not something devs often ask but yes, now I come to think of it, I think you might be.

Not that I want them to stop. I made sure to make that clear in the "Any other things you want to tell us?" box at the end. Keep pumping it out and let me sift it. I'll find the things I like and leave the rest for someone else.

And I like Fishing Frenzy. I like it a lot more than I like fishing, that's for sure. But who wouldn't?

They give you a bomb!