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! 

The One That Got Away

 

Fishing. Ah, fishing...

Every MMORPG has to have it, for reasons that I find hard to imagine. Is it such a universal pastime? I know it used to be ranked the #1 participatory "sport" in the United Kingdom, when I was growing up in the 'seventies, but people had fewer ways to entertain themselves in those deprived and forsaken times.

You know what? Let's fact-check that. Was it ever that popular? Is it still? It always seemed unlikely to me but I didn't have the worldwide web and an AI assistant to help me check back then. 

Here's what Gemini says:

"No, fishing is no longer the most popular participation sport in the UK. While it is still widely practiced with millions of participants, mainstream activities like football and swimming have surpassed it. Football boasts roughly 11 million players, and swimming attracts over 4 million participants, placing them well ahead of angling."

And as for the supposed domination it used to enjoy:

Where the Myth Comes From
Past Status: Angling was widely cited as the number one participant sport in Britain for many decades through the late 20th century.
Industry Claims: Governing bodies like the Angling Trust still refer to it as "one of the nation's largest" or "biggest" participation sports, keeping the legacy title alive in public perception. 

Hmm. A bit hand-wavy, that, although I'm pleased to see Gemini immediately labeling the supposed popularity a "myth". But obviously we're not going to accept anything Gemini tells us on face value. Luckily, it's citing sources. Or rather a source. Easy enough to check. Shouldn't take long. 

Gemini bases its claims on a 2017 report by the British Disabled Angling Association, which in turn refers to an article in the Daily Telegraph newspaper about the most popular participation sports in Britain. The BDAA piece links to the Telegraph article but the Torygraph (© Private Eye.) has long been behind a paywall and I'm not giving them money to find out what they said in some puff piece almost a decade ago.

Let's assume for the moment that someone at the BDAA read the Telegraph article carefully and quoted it accurately. If so, the reported position of angling (Which is what men who get away from the wife and kids on Sundays by sitting next to canals with a rod stuck in the ground beside them as they swig coffee from a thermos and stare vaguely into space, like to call what the rest of us know as "fishing".) in the 2017 Top Twenty UK participation sports was #19.

So where does it place now? That was ten years ago. I didn't ask for a history lesson, Gemini!

In answer to the question

 "What are the most popular participation sports in the UK in 2026?" 

Gemini, annoyingly, doesn't come up with a nice, tabulated list, as I was hoping. Instead it somewhat vaguely asserts that 

"Football remains the undisputed leader in UK sports participation with roughly 11 million players, closely followed by fitness activities, swimming (4.2 million), golf (1.06 million), and tennis (over 640,000). Emerging trends also highlight rapid growth in racket-blends like padel and pickleball, alongside soaring engagement in casual running and basketball among younger demographics."

The evidence for this comes from a 2025 Press Release about a survey conducted by EY, in which four thousand adults were polled. This survey does come with a tabulated chart, which you can see if you click through. It's ugly and I'm not going to wreck my aesthetic by embedding it. It also only goes to 15, which strikes me as an odd place to stop. Either do a Top Ten or a Top Twenty, guys. No-one wants to see a Top Fifteen.

So, who are - or is - EY? Their About us page says 

"At EY, our purpose is building a better working world. The insights and services we provide help to create long-term value for clients, people and society, and to build trust in the capital markets."

Cool. Why they commissioned a survey on sport, I have no idea but it wouldn't have been the first place I'd have looked. Apparently they were Gemini's go-to, though. 

Which is a bit of a shame, because not only was EY's survey not conducted in the year I asked for (It's from 2025.) but it's not even a survey about "participation sports". It's called an "Engagement Index" and unless there's something I haven't been told, the second most popular participation sport, one that people in the UK go out and actually do, is not likely to involve driving a $20m racing car, so why is F1 #2 after football on the list?

Wrong year, wrong topic. So much for accuracy.

Originally, though, I didn't ask for the year. I just asked Google

What are the most popular participation sports in the UK?

That got me an AI summary that looked fairly similar, but this time it was drawing its data from an entirely different source, a website called SnookerZone. They did have a nicely-presented Top Ten - and guess what? It was from 2026! 

The SnookerZone article, which focuses on the popularity of snooker, or rather the lack of it, as you might imagine it would, doesn't cite any specific source for its chart, other than a vague "Based on typical annual participation estimates..." 

I wasn't all that happy with that for an answer either so I left Gemini and drifted down into the search results proper. The top result was a link to something called SPOND, which turns out to be "an app", part of whose mission statement is "Building connections through sports". They're all about getting people to go out and play sport. 

Finally! Someone that should know the answers to the questions I'm asking! And they have a list. It's from 2025 but it looks like the best we're going to get. Again, I won't cut and paste it here but if you have any interest in the subject, it's worth a look. It has lots of facts and figures. And pictures!

What SPOND's list doesn't have is attribution. The article on their website is from February 2025 so we have a date but the only source cited and linked is to the FA for Football. My confidence in the rest of the list isn't improved by a basic editing error that transposes a whole load of detail about "Soccer" to the section on Tennis, the #4 sport on the list.  Tennis itself doesn't get a mention. 

And yes, anyone can make a mistake, but presumably that one's been there for more than a year now. Has no-one spotted it? I feel like some of this might not entirely be Gemini's fault. There's only so much you can do with unreliable data.

On the substantive point, though, once again there's no mention of fishing. Or angling, for that matter. It doesn't even make it into the Honourable Mentions section, which includes Horse Racing. Again, a participation sport? Really?? How many people own a racehorse? I mean, I know you can join a syndicate and just own a leg, but for it to count as a participation sport, wouldn't you have to ride?

So, what has been the point of all this? Other than to poke fun at an AI, which if it isn't already a participation sport, soon will be. You may well ask! It's taken me the best part of an hour and a half and what have I proved? Other than that I really like doing pointless research for its own sake.

Well I've proved, yet again, that Gemini still can't be trusted to answer a simple question with any degree of accuracy. Even when it cites its sources, it's often wrong. The AI summary at the top of Google Search looks very authoritative, sure, but that's an illusion. I regularly follow the links it provides and they are, shall we say charitably, somewhat less than 100% reliable. Sometimes they're inaccurate, sometimes they're irrelevant but sometimes they're actively misleading.

 

Look, unlike many people whose opinions I have seen recently, I am not against the concept of AIs giving me summaries of search results. I think it's a weird choice for a company, much of whose income relies on advertising, to make but that's not my call. 

No, I'd be quite happy if I could type a few words and get the information I need, in a matter of seconds, all handily packaged and ready to cut and paste into a post. If it was good information. If I could trust it not to make me look like a fool, when someone drops into the comments to point out all the errors. I don't need an AI's help for that!

Unfortunately, it's nothing like good information, far too much of the time. Certainly not good enough to use unchecked. If I have to check everything it's going to take me as long as it would to find it for myself. And I can find better sources on my own, too!

If I'm going to use anything an AI tells me here, I know I'm going to have to follow the links and read the damn articles or look at the damn websites or watch the damn YouTube videos for myself. And then, when I find out how unconvincing the sources are, I'm probably going to have to go look for something that actually tells me what I wanted to know, instead of whatever it is that the AI has picked up as matching whatever criteria it's using. 

The New Yorker, Gemini is not! I always think it's going to save me time and it never does. Maybe one day...

Oh, and the other thing I guess I've proved is what I suspected all along: that fishing isn't anywhere near as popular an activity as legend (Or "myth" as Gemini puts it.) would have had me believe when I was young. I've done my share of keeping that myth alive, too. Well, no more!

All of which is a very roundabout way back to the beginning, where I was wondering why so many MMORPG devs (And survival game devs and now, apparently, open-world gacha game devs, too.) feel their job is isn't done until they figure out some way to shoehorn a fishing mini-game in, somehow. Anyhow. Just so it's there. 

Neverness to Everness has fishing because of course it does. Shame we're out of time today or I'd have told you all about the Fishing Frenzy event. If you play, you won't want to miss it. The event, I mean, not my post about it. When I write one. 

I guess that's just going to have to wait until tomorrow! 

 

Notes on AI used in this post

I wouldn't normally bother with uses as trivial as this but since we're being reductionist for Blaugust...

I used the AI summary at the top of a couple of Google Searches as described in excruciating detail in the body of the post. Gemini is the AI in question. Other AIs are available. They may or may not do a better job than Gemini. I wouldn't know. The amusement value in running the same query through several AIs to see which would make the biggest hash of answering wore out a couple of years ago.

I also used SnapEdit to remove all the UI elements from the final picture. You can see the SnapEdit watermark in the lower right corner. That's there because I used the free version, which I recommend. I use it often and normally I wouldn't even think of mentioning it in this footnote (For new readers, footnoting my AI usage in my posts is something I've been doing for several years, mostly because I find it entertaining. If there's no footnote, I didn't use any. Most posts have no footnote.) 

At this point, I might mention that I have never really believed SnapEdit does use AI to remove stuff from images. It says it does but it's been saying so for a long time now and I'm not convinced AI was up to doing that back when I started using SnapEdit. I always assumed they just bunged "AI" in as a fashionable buzzword, like everyone else was doing back then. 

And what, anyway, is AI in that context? Does it really require an LLM to remove some text from a digital image and replace it with approximately the same color field as what would have been underneath? It seems to me that we've had software that would do that for a long time. A lot longer than we've had generative AI. I've never used PhotoShop because I couldn't afford the license but I've always thought that was exactly the sort of thing people had been using it for for decades.

We need to get some better names for this stuff. It doesn't mean anything to slap AI on every last damn algorithm any more than sticking an "i" on the front of technology or adding "punk" to the end of game titles ever has. I'd bet half this stuff is just good old software playing dress-up anyway...

The Essence Of Nightingale

As you can see, Nightingale has fishing. What self-respecting survival/rpg mash-up doesn't? It's not a very sophisticated implementation of the skill/sport/hobby/pastime but it's fun and useful, either of which trump sophistication in my book, when it comes to pretending to catch imaginary fish in a video game.

I don't exactly remember when, where or how I acquired the recipe to make the fishing rod Flora's holding in the shot above. My best guess is it was one of the basics included with the Simple Workbench but it could just as easily have been a reward from one of the countless Insight, r Agility or Combat challenges. 

Sometimes, when you succeed at one of those, you get a new recipe. I might have gotten my fishing rod that way. I know I had it for a long time before I bothered to make it, which I ony did because there's a quest that requires fish oil you cvan only get from specific type of fish you have to catch for yourself. 

Other than recipes, what you get from doing those challenges are Essences. Essences are the fuel that keeps Nightingale's engine ticking over. I'm not sure it's ever explained what they're the essence of but the human survivors trying to make something of their new lives in the Fae Realms have adopted them as a kind of  universal currency, so you can never really have enough. A small amount of Essence also converts into enough Essence Dust to fund all your repairs for weeks.

OK, I suppose technically you could have enough Essences, eventually. There's a finite number of things to buy with them, for a start and you can certainly have enough of the lower-level ones quite easily as you outgrow the items they can get you. 

Recipe vendors are mostly found in specific Realms. Realms come in tiers and vendors in each tier use the local variety of Essence as coin. Naturally, as you progress through the Realms, becoming ever more powerful as you go, the weaker Essences of the lower tiers and the items they buy lose their significance. Still, I imagine completionists, who must make up a large proportion of players, if not the majority, will want to grab all the sets, no matter how useless they've become.

Essences are also neded to upgrade your gear, a process that, in Nightingale, has a massive effect on your viabilty as an adventurer. I'm used to more incremental progression systems, where it's hard to tell which of two items is better without one of those inbuilt comparison functions to make it clear but there's no need for anything like that in Nightingale, where upgrading an item can almost double its primary stats.

That, of course, means Nightingale is also one of those games where you don't need new gear because you can just keep improving the gear you already have. I don't generally like that approach to progression, mostly because I find it boring. It's extremely practical, sure, but practicality has never been high on my list of criteria for enjoying a video game.

My main objection is to the aesthetics, though, not so much the gameplay. It's not that I want to go back to the turn of the millennium, where getting an upgrade to your leg slot item meant finding out which monster dropped something better for that slot, then finding and killing it, if you even could, so you could steal that monster's pants, strip them from it's cooling corpse and put them on, still warm. Or, more likely, get the alternate drop and have to kill the damn mob several more times before it dropped its pants.

In addition to upgrades, Nightingale does also have a number of different gear sets that represent some kind of progression system in themselves, so you won't be stuck wearing the exact same thing forever. Instead you will be changing your gear approximately once per tier and then upgrading it, multiple times, which is better than nothing but nowhere near as good as a fully-functioning appearance system.

Nightingale doesn't have such a system yet, which is fair enough in Early Access, I guess, although personally, if I were head of a games studio, a fully-functioning appearance system would be a top priority all the way back in alpha. What's worse is that there isn't even a mention of any such system in the recently published Not-a-Roadmap covering the next two stages of development.

The upgrade system, like the Essences it uses, also comes in tiers. So far there are only three and the naming convention used suggests there aren't going to be many, if any, more. There are four qualities: Common, Uncommon, Rare and Epic which come in four corresponding colors: Grey, Green, Blue and Pink. Stop me if you 've hear this one before.

I suppose there's Legendary and maybe Mythical still to come in the standard RPG progression hierarchy, which would allow for enough vertical progression to support at least a couple of expansions. That should see them safely through the next few years.

For now, though, we have those basic four. In theory you could upgrade your Common items to Epic, I think. You can definitely take Common up to Rare. I can't be absolutely sure what happens after that  because I don't yet have the Epic Upgrade Bench or whatever it's called.

I have the one that uses T2 Essences to upgrade Uncommon to Rare. The Epic one, it won't surprise anyone to learn, I'm sure, uses T3 Essences, which come, as you'd expect, from T3 Realms.

The catch is that the vendors who sell the recipes for the Epic crafting stations and the items they produce only take T3 Essences, which means you have to do challenges in T3 Realms to get them. And those vendors want huge quantities of Essences for most of the recipes they sell. A few recipes go for the knockdown price of 100 Essences but the going rate for most is 1300 a pop.

That would be extremely awkward if it weren't for the current state of what passes for an endgame in Nightingale, which at present allows for some appropriately epic Essence farming opportunities. 

When you complete the first chapter of the main storyline and gain access to The Watch, you get a short questline to unlock The Vaults, a trio of repeatable dungeons backed by some very iffy lore. When you zone into any one of the three Vault instances (One for each biome.) you find you're no longer playing solo. Suddenly and without any real warning, the game has turned into an MMO.

I have no idea if there's any formal match-making algorithm operating behind the scenes. It certainly didn't feel like it the few times I went in. I just spawned in at the start with a dungeon run already in well progress. I don't even know how many other players were in there with me. More kept spawning and running past me so I fdidn't waste any time trying to figure it out - I just followed them. 

From the Gear Score next to each character name I could see I was teamed with some people much better equipped than me but also others about the same and one or two quite a bit worse. When I say "teamed", I mean it in the loosest possible sense. There's no organised group or party, just a bunch of people soloing together, much like public events in any post-Warhammer MMORPG. 

There's no shared loot system for drops, either, Anyone can hoover up anything that lands on the ground. That sounds problematic but then again, there's no credit system for completion either. As soon as any challenge completes, everyone in the dungeon can open the Essence chest and take a full share. 

There are regular loot chests, too, and I think they all have hypothecated items for everyone that opens them but there it's harder to be sure, especially since no-one ever speaks. My evidence for the supposition is If I was taking anyone else's stuff out of the chests, they never complained about it and there was always something in every chest I opened, even if other players got to it before I did.

In content, the Vaults are like a collection of the usual Realm challenges bundled together with a Boss at the end. There's some half-assed narrative justification for this in that the Fae supposedly used them for some nebulous sort of training and the Boss is actually always the same eternal etentity, inadvertently brought to the Realms by Qatermain himself, who keeps incarnating in varying forms. Killing him repeatedly is the only way to keep him from overrunning the Watch.  

I was not convinced by any of this but then neither are al lthe people who explain it so I think there's meant to be some ambiguity. Most games don't even bother putting any kind of narrative fig-leaf on this sort of thing so credit to Inflexion for at least trying.

The Vaults would be tough to solo, something you can do by crafting your own Vault card for use in a crafted portal. Soloing would be crazy right now, though. In the four or five runs I did I only saw the boss twice. Once he was dead within miliseconds aof my arrival in his arena and the other time I fought him, tanked him briefly, died, ran back and picked up my loot after someone else fiunished the job seconds later.

At the moment, as a critical mass of players reaches the endgame and tries to grind the tens of thousands of essences needed for the upgrade recipes, the public Vaults are constantly busy. You can zone in and find one in progress immediately. Since you get all the rewards just for being there, it makes no difference if you arrive just as everyone else leaves. You get the same rewards as if you'd been there from the start.

Well, so long as you can find all the glowing bubbles you need to click, anyway. A full run nets about 300 Essences but I could never find all of them - the whole damn place is a maze. 

My fastest run netted me a couple of hundred Essences for the time it took me to run through an empty instance from the entrance to the zone-out. My highest total was maybe fifty more for a whole lot of fighting along the way.  If you can face doing back-to-back runs for an hour or two, you could make several thousand Essences but even that would only buy you two or three recipes. You're going to be at it a for a while.

It's not going to be to everyone's taste, not least because it's a major change of direction from what you'll have been doing for the last 30-50 hours. If you don't like the sudden switch from solo or co-op to open grouping, there's always the option to just carry on as you were. As I mentioned, you can set up your own, private Vault but there's a whole set of open-world T3 solo Realms you can craft and farm. All you have to do is make the cards. There's even a quest to get you started.

I made one last night and had a run around to see how hard it would be. It was perfectably doable with my Rare gear but I'd be lucky to get a tenth as many Essences for ten times the effort. I'd recommend the solo/co-op Realms for exploration and for gathering mats but clearly grinding in the Vaults is the way to go if you want to farm Essences, at least until the current levelling bubble deflates and the torrent of nearly-free Essences dries up.

Other than for the fun of it and to satisfy the inevitable wish to have all the best stuff, there may not be much point in grinding for those recipes anyway. HAvign a full set of Epic gear would certainly make everything a lot easier but the main reason you'd want to be doing that content would be to get the gear in the first place. Once you have it, I'm not exactly sure what the point would be in carrying on.

For that, we'll probably need to wait until some higher-tier content is added to the game. That could take a while. It's not even in the medium-term development plan.

Reaching the Watch does feel like an ending to me. Not the end of the whole story, for sure, but the end of the first chapter, definitely. The driving urge I had to push forwards has all but dissipated now. I feel more inclined to go back to pottering around, exploring the variations on the three biomes, building up my base and generally leaning into the sandboxier elements of the game, which have very much taken a back seat for me until now.

Or maybe I'll just go fishing. 

I wonder if you can upgrade that rod...

Teach Someone To Fish...

I've always wondered why every MMORPG feels it absolutely has to include fishing. Is fishing really that popular in real life, this far into the twenty-first century?

It used to be, or so we all thought, once. Back when I was still in school - and we're talking the 1970s here - I remember hearing people claim repeatedly that fishing was the most popular participation sport in the UK. I was never entirely convinced. I guess it depends whether you're willing to define "Sitting on a fold-up canvas chair drinking warm, flat beer out of a can" as a) sport or b) participation.

In those unenlightened days, I think the general assumption was that most men who went "fishing" (And it was almost always men who I saw doing it.) were really just using rod and line as an excuse to get away from their wives, children and responsibilities as an adult. Sure, there was a competitive sport called "angling" but it was hard to imagine that most of the huddled, humped-over heaps of clothing lining the banks of desolate rivers or deserted urban canals having anything much in mind beyond getting through another Sunday without having to put up a shelf or mow the lawn.

Back then, of course, fishing was also one of those things all boys (Again, just boys. Definitely not girls. It was a very different time.) were supposed to enjoy. It was meant to be every boy's dream to own a fishing rod (And a bike. And a dog. And if you were working class and/or Northern, an air-rifle and like as not a pigeon.). If you couldn't persuade your father or uncle to buy you one, you were expected to make your own out of a stick, a length of string string and a bent pin. 

Seriously, I did that. It doesn't work. Well, it didn't when I tried it. Then again, I was only about eight.

I never owned an actual fishing rod. Not a real one. I think I might have had one that wasn't much more than a toy, for a while. My cousin did, though, and since I grew up almost next door to him, we spent most of our childhood doing stuff together. I tried fishing with his gear and we did occasionally catch something. I think the biggest fish we ever caught might have been six inches long. 

It was also one of the most tedious things we ever tried. I'd had enough of the whole thing after a couple of afternoons. I think he persisted a little longer.

By the time we were ten or so, though, I don't believe either of us would have gone fishing unless you'd paid us. It's very boring until you catch something and then it's gross, disturbing and messy. I can think of a lot of more interesting things to do that meet those criteria now and I could have thought of a few even then...

Fishing in MMORPGs, on the other hand, neatly avoids all the drawbacks of its real life model. You don't get wet. You don't get cold. Your clothes don't get covered in fish guts and have to be boil-washed to get the stink out. 

There are no excruciating moral dilemmas to contend with: does the worm feel pain when you impale it on a hook? Does the fish feel pain when it impales itself on the hook you impaled the worm on? Do you keep the fish or throw it back? If you keep the fish, do you eat it? Do you even like fish? If you throw it back, why the hell did you catch it in the first place?

Best of all, in an MMORPG you never have to wait more than a couple of minutes at most before you catch something, as opposed to several hours in real life. . Often in a game it only takes a couple of seconds. Okay, rather more often than seems statistically likely, it might be an old boot or a piece of wood that you catch, not a fish at all, but then again it might be a treasure chest or a diamond necklace, which seems even less probable - and yet somehow it keeps on happening.

The depth and quality of the experience varies widely. In some games it's perfunctory. In others it's practically a complete game all its own. I prefer something towards the simpler end of the curve.

My first introduction to fishing in MMORPGs came with EverQuest, where it was a skill that increased with use, as all skills did in the original game. You did have to own an actual rod and equip it in your main hand, something that caused much amusement when a gnoll or a wolf snuck up behind and attacked you as you were standing on the river-bank and you tried to fight back, forgetting all you were wielding was a long stick with some string hanging off the end, but other than that all you had to do was click and wait. 

As often happens in online games, after a while things got added until a few years later there were all kinds of baits and lures and tackle boxes to keep them in but as far as I know, even now, all you have to do in EQ is click once and wait to see what you've caught. Such skill as there is lies in your character and their gear, not in anything you, the player, might do.

Rather than leave things to the character in that old-fashioned way, most MMORPG developers prefer to create a mini-game for the player instead. Complexity varies from a couple of simple clicks to the equivalent of a boss fight but you always have to do something active to land your fish. 

I confess I quite enjoy it. I use the word "confess" advisedly because, as must be clear from the introduction, I'm no fan of fishing per se. I do, however, rather approve of mini-games in MMORPGs, a point of view, I know, not shared by everyone.

It's not to say I don't see the merits of a good old "one click and it's done" mechanic and I definitely do not endorse the addition of gamelike elements to basic gathering functions, of which fishing is arguably one. When it comes to mining or logging I draw my line at a few animations but for some reason I'm fine with fishing being a lot more hands-on.    `

At this point I would start to describe just how fishing works in Once Human, only I really haven't done enough of it to say. So far I can confirm you need a rod, which you have to make for yourself and bait, which you also craft. It's possible you can buy either or both from vendors because the game has NPCs who sell you stuff but if so, I haven't run across the right vendor yet.

I can also say that you need to find a particular body of water but not a specific marked spot. I tried fishing in the sea with no effect before I noticed the tool-tip mentioned rivers. When I moved to one of the many inland waterways leading to the coast, I was able to find fish right away.

The mechanics for casting and reeling in are not the most intuitive I've ever used and they're not explained as clearly as they could be either. Even so, it only took me a few experimental casts and some trial and error to figure it out. I managed to land the second fish I hooked.

I'd love to able to tell you I cooked that fish and it kept me fed for a day. I did hear someone in General Chat claiming fishing was one of the best sources of food in the game and I was keen to try it for myself. Unfortunately, I got involved in something else (Killing and looting, most likely.) and by the time I remembered I had a fish in my bag, it had gone off.

With my time in the game now severely curtailed and the beta slowly meandering towards a close, I don'tknow if I'm going to find the time for another fishing trip but at least I have the basics down. 

Then again, I do have a few balls of dough left for bait.

Pity to waste them.

Hey, Ray! Won't You Please Stay?

Just as I didn't plan on doing two consecutive music posts last week, I wasn't intending to post twice in a row about new content in EverQuest II but that was before I checked my email right after publishing yesterday's post on the Myth and Monoliths update and found I'd been invited to this year's Oceansfull Festival. 

It started yesterday and runs for another couple of weeks, finishing on August 24, 2022 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. As I type this my Bruiser is sitting on the edge of one of the platforms in the new dungeon, recovering from having been killed by the second boss. 

Yes, the second. He has indeed managed to kill the first, which puts him well ahead of his dismal performance in Fabled Kurns. It took him a long time, although nothing like as long as it took him to spawn and find the second boss, something that requires an insane amount of swimming up and down pipes, lighting braziers and using waterspouts and whirlpools to teleport around the zone.

 

There's a ferociously detailed walkthrough up on the wiki already. It gives some idea of the nit-picking complexity of the whole affair but you can't get the full, vertiginous effect just by reading two-dimensional text. For that you need to be corkscrewing up a column of water, trying to fend off guards and sharks while watching for the almost invisible exits.

I would say "Thank Prexus someone took the trouble to write such a comprehensive walkthrough" but it's actually not as much help as you might think. For a start, the map references don't really play all that well with the three-dimensional space and as it turns out there's no need to do most of it in the specific order listed. I didn't and all the portals still opened and the named spawned anyway.

In the end I just used tracking to find the guardians, once I'd killed the first and knew what they were called, then swam about almost randomly until I found the portals. Not efficient but it was quicker than trying to follow the bloody locs.

The first boss was annoying. The second boss is very annoying. She's actually the final boss by the walkthrough's reckoning, which might explain the extra level of difficulty. I guess I won't know for sure until I've found the two that come inbetween. 

 

At least they are doable. I know it's my inexperience with the mechanics that's the problem, not a straightforward gear lockout. I'd rather the walkthrough went into detail about how to kill the bosses instead of noting every last twist and turn of the path leading up to the fight. Trying to mouseover the tiny buff icons on the boss in the middle of a fight to see what immunities she has, while scrolling back the through the chat box to see what warnings she emoted isn't my idea of entertainment. I'd rather read the Cliff Notes version from someone who's done it already.

The drops from the first boss were good enough to make it worth the effort, though. 315 Resolve we're up to now on this solo, holiday stuff. That's an upgrade to most of what any of my characters are wearing. 

Aesthetically, the entire zone is gorgeous, although we have seen it before. It's from an earlier expansion, abeit slightly tweaked. The best thing about the whole instance has to be the manta ray at the beginning, the one you have to stand on and ride to the platform. If Daybreak don't make that into a mount and add it to the cash shop they must not like money.

There's also an interesting crafting opportunity you have to find for yourself. It is mentioned in the preamble to the walkthrough but not, as far as I can see, inside the game itself. I thought it was odd that there were fishing nodes inside a dungeon, even one in the Plane of Water, so I got out my rod and after a few casts I somehow managed to fish up a fishing rod, or rather the recipe to make one.

The Oceansfull Fishing Rod lets you breathe underwater, which is something my Bruiser currently needs to buy Totems of the Otter to do, so it's going to be well worth having. Three of the items he needs to make it can only be found in the instance itself. So far he hasn't seen any of them. I hope they don't drop off the bosses...

There's some other new stuff in this year's festival, including nine new items in the clam shells that spawn all around the coast of every major landmass at this time of year. I always enjoy prying those open. There's also a collection from previous years the Bruiser hasn't finished, as I discovered when he was doing the short, fun access quest to the new dungeon.

Given the way yesterday's session debrief got completely out of hand, I'm going to leave it at that. If you play EQII you'll certainly want to go check Oceansfull out for yourself and if you don't you've probably already heard more than you ever wanted to know about it.

I'm off to open some clams. Finger crossed I get something good, not just twenty different kinds of coral.

Thursday Night FIsh Fry

That blur above is my Elementalist, killing a shark. I suppose I should really call her my Tempest. She's been using the Heart of Thorns elite specialization since it first became available. I still think of her as a Staff Ele. She carries a staff and mostly uses core Elementalist spells. She only uses Tempest for the Overloads. She doesn't even have the Tempest's signature Shouts in her build at all.

I dabbled with the Weaver elite specialization when it was added to the Elementalist's toolkit with Path of Fire but although it was powerful I found it a bit too hands-on for my tastes. I don't like to have to time things to perfection and the Weaver needs a certain amount of finesse to shine.

Then, the Elementalist has always been reckoned a fairly challenging class by Guild Wars 2's admittedly lenient standards. It makes it a strange choice for someone as self-avowedly lazy, not to mention old and fat-fingered as myself. 

Over the first year or two of the game's life I tried all the classes, spending probably the majority of my time with the notoriously easy-mode Ranger but once I started playing World vs World regularly, for reasons I can't now remember or even easily reconstruct, the Elementalist became my favorite. I think I just like setting things on fire. Especially other players.

Fire looks different underwater. I guess it would, wouldn't it?

Luckily for her - and me - she hasn't even started to look at the latest elite spec, Catalyst, yet. According to the latest patch notes, people were just having too much fun with it so it had to be nerfed into the ground. 

I will get to it. All in good time. I'm working steadily through my End of Dragons to-do list and it's on there, somewhere.

Yesterday I completed the fourth and final EoD map, Dragon's End. I'm sorry to have finished. I wish there were more. The first two maps were relatively straightforward but Echovald Wilds and Dragon's End were so convoluted I would still be working on them if I hadn't had the benefit of advice from some helpful people on YouTube. 

I would strongly recommend getting outside help when doing map completion in GW2. Either that or hire a local guide. Unless you enjoy spending hours examining maps with a magnifying glass, that is. And even then, you can't know just by looking whether a particular point of interest is locked behind some event that needs to be completed or accessed via a tunnel, whose only opening is on the far side of the map.

Why yes, I bet I do look good on the dance floor. Thank you for noticing.

If you like both puzzles and exploring, though, it can be good time.  I've certainly been enjoying it. After finishing the Dragon's End map I gave myself a little victory lap by finding all the PoIs in the new hub zone, Arborstone. It doesn't officially count as a "Map" in the completion stakes. There's no reward for filling out all the blanks other than your own satisfaction but in a way that makes it even more appealing.

Also, that last PoI, the one that's seemingly impossible to find? It's Canach's casino and it's a nice treat when you get there. I won't spoil it by telling you how find the way in but I will say it's not through a broken stained glass window. Been there, done that, got the splinters.

The vendors at the bar sell all the fish recipes I'd been looking for, there are moa races and a some gambling machines and if you have the patience to collect a thousand of Canach's coins (I got about thirty in an hour so it'll take a while.) there are a few rather spiffy backpacks you can buy.

That really is a long-term project. I'll get back to it. Right now I'm working on my Masteries. That's how I came to be killing sharks.

Sharks, Naga, I'm not fussy.

Back in Heart of Thorns, the last time I worked on Masteries with any intent, I found the easiest, albeit not the fastest, way to get the necessary XP was to buff up with every XP bonus I could grab then go find some mobs in an out of the way place that hadn't been killed for a while and slaughter the lot. 

There's a huge bonus for fresh meat in GW2 although the exact nature of the calculations involved isn't always entirely apparent. Some mobs in the same spot give massive bonuses while others give less or sometimes none at all. Kill em all anyway is my motto.

It took me a while to find a good spot. I tried Echovald but it gets hectic there and it can be too easy to get more mobs than you bargained for. As usual, the neutral, non-agressive animals that everyone ignores are great for bonuses but for every crane and deer I killed, I got a bunch of rebels or jadebots of various kinds shooting at me from a distance. It was good xp but exhausting.

6.5K XP Bonus. That's the bunny!

After a while I jacked that in and tried Dragon's End. The meta had just started so I joined a tag and ran with the pack for a bit. The XP from the big mobs and events was good but there was too much downtime moving from place to place for it to feel efficient. Then we failed on the penultimate phase and the map closed and we all got kicked out so that was the end of that.

It's no wonder people are complaining non-stop about the Dragon's End meta event. I like it but it is very badly judged. It takes a long time, requires a great number of people, has a lot of moving parts and multiple fail states. As someone said in map chat just before we failed, it would go a long way in a two-hour event if there was some reward for trying. There isn't. If you fail you get nothing. That is not a great way to motivate people to keep coming back and if they don't come back they'll never learn to do it better.

Not that it's all that easy to work out how to do it at all. Belghast, a recent convert to GW2, pointed out how badly the game explains just about everything and it's absolutely true. It's always been that way and this latest meta demonstrates that, whatever else ANet have learned over the years, how to let players in on the secret of what they're supposed to be doing isn't one of them.

Naga in the hole!

Killing fish might be a lot less exciting but it's easy to understand and it's steady work. That's what I ended up doing, rather poetically, to fil out the XP for my final Fishing Mastery. I took the waypoint back to Seitung Province and spent a couple of hours in the calm waters just off the coast.

I had the place to myself. Judging by the multi-thousand XP bonuses for every tuna and jellyfish I killed, no-one had been there for a good, long while. I didn't see another player the whole time I was down there. 

What I did see, apart from countless fish and a lot of coral were plenty of chests to open. The sea bed is littered with them. I found an event, too, while I was poking around in a little hole. A bunch of Naga spawned and tried to eat me. That was fun. I did wonder what optimistic developer decided to put an event trigger down a coral tube on the bottom of the sea and just who they thought would set it off but then I thought, well I just did, didn't I? I guess they knew what they were doing after all.

Just as I emerged from the waters like the world's shortest Venus to claim my reward, the final Fishing Mastery, the map meta event kicked off right next to where I was standing. Someone tagged up and started a squad so I joined in just to see what it was all about.

Unlike Dragon's End, the Seitung Province meta takes about twenty minutes, most of it good, knockabout fun. There are even rides! It ends with a big boss fight that we won quite easily. The crowd was in a good mood throughout and everyone went home with presents. That's how to do a meta.

Okay, it's one way. Dragon's End will be a lot more memorable when it's tuned more sensitively and players understand what's expected of them. If anyone's still interested by then, that is. GW2 history shows players will learn if they feel there's a fair chance of success but also that for most of them the bar needs to be set relatively low before they'll make the effort. There are only so many elitie gamers to go around, after all, and right now I imagine most of them are still playing Elden Ring.

Next up on my dance card, Jade Bot Mastery. I'm about three-quarters of the way through. I think that should be something like five thousand sharks.

I'm Going To Need A Bigger Boat

Less than two weeks after the launch of Guild Wars 2's third expansion, End of Dragons, I find myself in the unexpected position of feeling as if I've almost finished it. Given that it took ArenaNet nearly four and a half years to produce and that they've only managed three expansions in a decade, that would present a serious problem for me as a regular player. If it was true.

It's not true, of course. As I said, it just feels that way. It's just that I seem to have done a lot by this stage, compared to what I remember from the first two expansions. So far, I've

• Finished the storyline.
• Got the 250 Hero Points required to open all the skills on the new Elementalist specialization, Catalyst.
• Completed map exploration on two of the four new maps, with the third almost finished.
• Gained enough Mastery Points to complete the full Mastery lines for the three that interest me, Fishing, Skiff Piloting and Jade Bots

For many GW2 players that would barely count as a scratch on the surface but for me it already completes most of the vague goals I had in mind when the expansion launched. I'm not really a "goals" kind of player but even I need some kind of loose framework to keep my whims and fancies in check.

I didn't pay a lot of attention to the promotional push for EoD. I didn't watch any of the livestreams or follow any of the discussions on the forums or Reddit. I didn't play most of the so-called "betas" which, as far as I could see, consisted mostly of running around the live game exploiting a bunch of half-tested new abilities in whatever way would annoy other players as much as possible. I did try out the new Elementalist weapon, hammer, for all of five minutes but that was it.

Running flat-out!

Coming in, about all I knew about the storyline was the title of the expansion itself, which I figured had to be some kind of clue. I also knew we were getting some kind of boats called skiffs and that there would be fishing, possibly from those self-same skiffs. 

Other than that there would be an indeterminate number of new maps, I was guessing four or five, and a whole bunch of stuff I didn't give a damn about, like new Legendary weapons, the stupid turtle thing and some hub zone you were expected to waste time building up until it was nearly as good as whatever hub zone you were already in the habit of using.

The whole thing seemed less than thrilling. I figured I'd pick away at it over a few months, slowly fill out the few bits that interested me, then maybe, if it was any good, go back a few times with other characters over the next few years until ANet ponied up either a fourth expansion or Guild Wars 3.

What I didn't expect was to find the story both interesting and accessible enough that I wanted to finish it in a series of big bites. Nor was I imagining the maps would be so enjoyable to explore I'd find myself so close to map completion just poking around that it seemed rude not to finish.

Does the attitude come with the spec?

If I had any plans at all for becoming a Catalyst they revolved around playing World vs World enough to get the 250 points I needed there, which is what Mrs. Bhagpuss is doing. There's a handy vendor who sells them for the Testimonies of Jade Heroics you can get out of skirmish chests, dozens of which I stack up in a normal week's play anyway.

As for the Masteries, I liked the sound of the skiff and fishing seemed like something I might enjoy (Although I think, if we're honest, we'd probably all have to admit that fishing in most mmorpgs is hardly thrilling.) The one I was probably most interested in was the Jade Bot Mastery, if only for the on-call updraft it was supposed to add to gliding.

Based on my previous experiences, I didn't expect the mastery points to be all that difficult to come by but to get enough for three full masteries would, I thought, take either some time or some effort or most probably both. I seem to remember taking quite a few weeks to get enough points for the ones I wanted in HoT and working quite hard at it, too.

In retrospect, HoT, my benchmark for Masteries, now looks like something of an outlier. To fully complete all five Heart of Thorns mastery tracks requires 142 Mastery points. Path of Fire only asks for about half of that. End of Dragons probably comes between the two but a lot closer to PoF than HoT.

Someone really likes the idea of hiding mastery points on ledges. I  must have found a dozen at least.

If I sound uncertain on that it's because one of my End of Dragons' Mastery tracks is still locked. I do not have access to the Stupid Turtle. That suits me fine because I don't want the idiotic creature. I would rather have a Mastery track that allowed me to hide the damn thing on my screen when anyone else was using it. That would be a Mastery worth having!

As of now, Turtle Blight isn't a big problem in GW2. The big controversy of the expansion is the way access to the two-seater eyesore is gated behind the Dragon's End meta, a massive event that until several recent nerfs almost no-one could finish. Now it's been bug-fixed and toned down and a lot of people still can't finish it. Even if they can, then they have to do a hard mode strike mission...

From an entirely selfish point of view, that should at least keep the number of turtles to a manageable level for a while longer. They will be a huge problem when everyone has them. I saw my very first siege turtle at The Maw last night. The player riding it parked it right on the Shaman and it was so big you couldn't see the boss at all.

From an objective point of view, though, the hoops players are being asked to jump through to get the thing are ludicrous, something that seems to be a theme of the expansion. I looked at the Collection for the Catalyst specialist weapon today and was stunned to find out it requires you to complete the storyline as a Catalyst. 

 And if it can be in a hidden room off a ledge, even better!

Since I just completed the storyline as an Elementalist, that means I'd have to do the entire storyline again, on the same character! And then, if I wanted to get the specialist weapon for the other eight classes, I'd have to do the bloody thing eight more times!

Unsurprisingly, there's a thread about that, too. I would be surprised if there aren't adjustments to both issues over time, although ANet can be both extremely stubborn and glacially slow, so it might not be this year.

Luckily for me, neither issue is crucial or even tangential to my enjoyment of the game at the moment. It does speak badly of the underlying design, though, with many players already suspecting shenanigans. Like Wilhelm, I tend to favor cock-up over conspiracy but I guess we shouldn't really be surprised. In a game known for its soul-destroying grinds, what are a few more?

My own grind, such as it is, looks set to focus on xp, at least in the immediate future. I may have the Mastery Points I need, thirty-two of them at time of writing, but I also need another seven full bars of EoD experience to spend them all. Filling xp bars is something I enjoy so that's not likely to be a problem and seven "levels" shouldn't take more than a few sessions.

All worth having, I think, if only for the exta 2,500 hit points each one adds to your skiff. I've been sunk by sea creatures three times already today.

The real problem is going to be what then? I have a couple of minor goals - getting my two rangers their new pets, for example - and I guess I might fill out the mastery for that hub zone just for convenience. 

After that there's the question of which, if any, of the other classes I care enough about to get the Hero Points for the Specializations. I hear the Engineer spec, the Mechanist, is good. In fact, what I hear is that it's so good it's due a massive nerf. I should probably get that before ANet sand it down and take off all the sharp edges. 

If I'm realistic, though, despite having all the classes, some of them multiple times (There are eleven characters on my EoD account.) I spend about 90% of my time playing my Ele and I'm more than happy with the Tempest build she uses already. I just finished all the EoD content I listed above in that spec so why would I want to change it?

I do sometimes play one or other of my two rangers, one in the base game Ranger configuration, the other as a Druid, so I'll probably try the new Untamed spec for one of them. In fact, as I check on it now it seems that's required to get the new pets so I guess I'll have no choice but to get it for both.

Yes, it's a PoF pet. I only got it yesterday, four years late. It took EoD to remind I'd never gotten round to it.

That probably just leaves the Necromancer, whose new spec is the Harbinger, which is, at least, a decent name. I did try to play as both a Reaper and a Scourge, the two previous specs, but I got bored of both after a while and went back to Core Necro. Chances are the same will happen this time.

Other than going round and round the maps grabbing the same Hero Points over and over (Actually a more appealing prospect for me than I'm making it sound.) there's also Fishing to consider. If I'm bothering to master the skill, shouldn't I use it as well?

Fishing's one of those things, though, isn't it? It turns up in pretty much ever mmorpg ever made, eventually. If it's not there at the start you can bet someone will get around to adding it later. 

I first encountered it in EverQuest, where it was a single key press and a random result, a limitation that didn't stop most of us enjoying it anyway. EQ fishing got fleshed out a lot more later, with bait and tackle boxes and hooks and all sorts but it never turned into the kind of mini-game players expect in their mmorpgs today.

Finally! A use for all these jetties and piers.

GW2's fishing looks to be aligned with the industry standard. Lots of fish of different kinds and qualities, different baits and lures you can use, a variety of difficulties in sundry locations. You can use the fish for recipes and every new species you catch goes into a collection. 

Catching the fish or losing it depends on your skill with one of those mini-games I mentioned. It's about as enjoyable as any of them. I spent an hour or so fishing in various seas and lakes across Tyria this afternoon. I was planning on writing a whole post about it but then I ended up writing this one instead. In my experience that's what always happens when I sit down to write a post about fishing in an mmorpg. If anyone really wants to know how it works, I recommend this guide.

It was enough fun that I can imagine carrying long enough on to fill out those collections. That should keep me busy for a while. I think I have enough mini-goals to keep me going and no doubt new ones will occur to me as I play.

I don't think it'll be like Heart of Thorns, where I played non-stop, taking character after character through the maps and the weapon specs, but it's not going to be one and done like Path of Fire either. I think End of Dragons is settling down to be a nice, cosy, middle of the road experience, which I suppose is what you might have expected from an expansion that listed Fishing and Messing Around In Boats as two of its key features.

Just so long as you weren't expecting an easy ride on that turtle, I think it's going to be fine.