Design Club: Hooked on Fishing!

[music] [music] Good time zone, internet. Hello and welcome to Fish Club Live. I am your fisherman host, Will, joined as always by my angller buddy, Jeff. Say hi to the people, Jeff.
Fish, I mean, hi to the people, Jeff.
Hey, everybody. I am Jeffrey Tekken, the studio director of Extra Credits and Extra History and longtime game designer. And more importantly for this episode, someone who does not actually really enjoy fishing, but has designed fishing in an MMO or at least worked with a group that does.
Yeah. Uh, okay. So, so behind the scenes, something you all should should know and understand. Um, fishing is one of the things that I enjoy in video games uh for a bunch of interesting reasons. Um,

and I've recently completed quite the journey in in uh my MMO of choice, Final Fantasy 14's fishing um expedition. And so I thought we could talk a little bit about the peculiarity because until you point it out, I don't think a lot of people find it peculiar how often fishing randomly shows up in video games.
And not just some video games, like across a broad spectrum of games.
Yeah. It's it's one of those things that is oddly ubiquitous, right? But without I think us being able to point necessarily at a direct specific like
Oh, I have thoughts.
Yeah, I have thoughts as well, but I don't think we could point at like and then Johnny Fisherman built this mini game.
I actually I have thoughts on that.
Okay.
Which I haven't told you yet, just so I could save it for

All right, great. So, um, let's let's talk about where we find fishing video games to like establish that they're broad. Then we can talk about why and we can talk about like what's up with them and then we can talk about some of the intricacies that are why I like them so much. I think let's let's go in that order. So,
so, as a quick thing before we dive into this, as you could tell from Will, Will Will is very excited about this. Will has spoken my ear off on many occasions about fishing in Final Fantasy. Um
yeah,
like and um has a good number of achievements specifically related to the I don't know 30 or 40 minutes he spent. Oh, I'm sorry. What is it? Hundreds of hours he spent.
I I don't know about hundreds of hours. Um it's it's a significant period of time to to give you all an idea. double-digit amounts of hours he spent fishing in his MMO that actually has

nothing really to do with fishing, but does have fishing.
Correct. Um, for anyone who does play 14, I have recently obtained the title of the golden scales, which is only awarded to those who have uh received or have caught every big fish in the game. Every fishing hole has at least one big fish. Um, it's a got a different color background and it's got special requirements to catch it. And every fish's requirements are slightly different. Uh, and as of right now, of the 200,000 some odd people who track their achievements through LA achievements, I am one of only 659 who have gotten this achievement, aka 26% of all registered players on this website that's used to track uh, Final Fantasy 14 achievements. I like for
which means it's probably significantly higher because my guess is midcore and people who don't play a lot don't necessarily register on that
right and are also unlikely to have that

achievement like
Yes.
Yeah. So
that would go hand in hand.
Yeah. Um
Okay.
Yes. So like fishing shows up in a bunch of video games, right? Like that's it's it's shown up in video games for a really good long time. Um it shown up in some games where it makes like a kind of sense, right? It shows up in farming games. Stardew Valley has a at this point infamous slashf famous fishing mini game, right? Uh it's not the I don't believe it's the first one to use that style of game, nor is it the best style of the move the bobber up and down. It's got one of the like the you have to keep the fish in the bar and the bar moves down on its own and you have to pop it back up by pressing a key.
That's actually reminiscent of some of the actual fish fishing games as opposed to fishing mini games.
Yeah. So, um the uh that and Harvest

Moon both have this sort of very pastoral inclusion of fishing, right? either as part of your farm's economy or just because you're in a place where fishing might happen. Um, so that's that's a pretty easy like first one, right? Where we see this kind of thing a lot.
And then also in a vein that kind of makes sense. It it makes an amount of sense is when we include fishing in survival games, right? Uh, three that come to mind real easy. Minecraft pal world and then we start to stretch credility with no man's sky. So, okay, Minecraft makes sense. It's a simple way to catch fish. They're fishing bodies of water. They've got this whole like ocean update with like coral and everything else and that makes sense.
But does it actually do anything for the game or is it just one of the like we're going to get to this, but one of the things about fishing is it's an easy system to build.
Yes. And so a lot of games

that are looking for kind of extra things
that it makes sense, fishing is on there. And I'll I'll get to why.
Yeah.
Uh later, but
um I I think it does it does add something if it is one of the ways to get materials without exposing yourself to risk that you need to build things like potions of water breathing. Mhm.
So there is like it's a safer path to resource acquisition. [clears throat]
Um and I think that that is why it really exists though it does predate those. I think originally existed for like its own sake and then eventually had a had like [clears throat] was given a greater purpose with ocean monuments.
Um
and you said Pow World and I see you actually on our notes have Pokemon later. Do you think
Yes. Okay, it's different. Okay,
because in in POW World, okay, so I I've actually been playing POW World, right?

I I I decided that hearsay was not enough and I sat down and played it. Allow me to tell you, Jeff, it is nothing like Pokemon
and everything like Ark.
It is It looks like Pokemon. And that's where the similarity really ends. It is much more like Ark, I would say, than it is like Pokemon in that it is very much about um like building a workforce rather than like taming like your best friend. Though there is some relationship thing, but it's kind of the same as with dinosaurs. Um, and the context is in a survival context, and that matters a lot because the reason that you go fishing in Pow World is to catch um unique fish that give you resources that you need, right? So, if I need a particular drop, one of the best ways for me to go get it is to go fishing. Um, as opposed to Pokemon where I'm fishing to catch a specific Pokemon to be part of my team.

I'm doing it for the resource acquisition and the survival aspects, right? Those are two different buyins for me.
Yeah.
Okay. I was [snorts] just kind of curious. So, it fits into the survival version. Cool.
I think so. Uh, and of course, there are other survival games that do it. I'm pretty sure Terraria does it, and I'm pretty sure Enshrouded does it, and Valheim, and suffice it to say, it is a staple of survival as a way to acquire food and sometimes resources that you need to progress your gameplay.
Um, then you get like action.
Sure.
Like Red Dead. Um,
Sure. I
Is it in Grand?
I don't think it's in GTA. Chad, does does GTA have fishing? I've never heard of it, but I wouldn't be surprised.
It feels like one of those things that might be in there, but like Red Dead and strangely enough, even though it isn't fishing, like I think one of the early God of Wars had it and you like pulled up a monster you fought. Like fishing as a trope also in action games to like

make a thing appear.
Mhm. Like I've seen I think there was a Tomb Raider where there was a fishing pole to like raise a thing. Like it's been worked its way in both on the fishing and the fishing gear,
right?
Because action games don't usually stand still long enough for fishing.
Correct.
But it's still a thing that gets incorporated in.
Right. It it is still a thing because fishing has become, and we'll talk more about this later, part of video game iconography in a way that is recognizable to people playing video games. Even if it
When I was actually looking or Yeah. when I was googling images like of games with fishing to use for the thumbnail, the sheer amount was fairly staggering. And like I looked at things too, I'm like, "Oh, I didn't know that game had fishing." But none of them surprised me.
Yep. Near Automata has fishing. Um, Yakuza has fishing. Yeah. Okay.
Okay. So, action. And then your staple

MMO fishing.
Yeah. So this is really where I think the the conversation is like becomes something different because in the the following all have fishing. Final Fantasy 14, WoW, Elder Scrolls Online, Ultima Online, EverQuest, Runescape, uh Lord of the Rings online I believe has it. Um
Star Wars Galaxies had I'm pretty sure had fishing. I thought Star Wars Galaxies was one of the very few that didn't. Oh, no, no, no, it does. Um, Old Republic doesn't.
Star Wars Republic Online uh doesn't. Um, Genchin, Black Desert, right? All these MMO style things. And the interesting part is that in these cases, unlike in action games, unlike in survival games, unlike in farming games,

here it begins to feel like it is done largely for its own sake or for a very contrived reason. So, well, let me I'll I'll use 14 as the example because that's the one I'm most familiar with. There are I'm actually going to pull it up as of this patch. Uh we are in uh patch 7.56 cuz the 15th of September. There are currently 1,86 fish in Final Fantasy 14.
And you've caught them all?
All but all but one. They're in two categories. One of them is landfish and one of them is ocean fish that you have to catch in a fishing derby. that you need people to like help with that and I haven't been able to track down a group of people. I've done all the fish I can catch solo. Um and those are not part of the of the golden scales.
So there currently is one that got away.

It's very annoying. Um for anyone again for the 14 nerds, it's Aapara. It's the stupid turtle from the new group. Um and it only comes up every like 14 or 15 hours. 14 16 hours. Um, so okay. And of those, most of them, the overwhelming majority of them are useless. Full stop. They have no purpose other than their acquisition. And to check off the list on the on the fishing log, they are not used in a craft. They are not consumable as a source of an XP bonus. They are not really useful for um breaking them down and turning them into things past a very limited early game usage. They serve no functional purpose. It is fishing for

its own sake. in a game about killing gods, dethroning kings, saving the known universe, crossing plains of existence, you know, solving like the greatest calamities of this or any age. But first, I got to go catch this fish cuz the weather's right in this one zone and it'll only be up for 5 minutes, right? There's this disconnect, right? The fishing starts to become for its own sake or now there are some fish that do serve purposes. Um, you can catch some fish that are used as crafting ingredients primarily um uh or to give to someone who wants a specific fish as part of like a weekly turd quest. That's about it though. Um, and that's a very small number of the total 18,000 or 186 fish. Um,
so will
Yeah. Do you want to talk about my theory about how this got started because it it's in this category? Yeah.

Or do you want to run through some others and then come back to that?
Um, let's I I feel like we can divert a little. We've been pretty good and on topic. So, yeah. What what Okay. Where do you think this
the first I'm going to take you back to the late 90s.
Wow. The late 1900s. Ultima Online came out.
Uhhuh.
And the thing to remember about Ultima Online is that it very much was a simulation or more than it leaned towards simulation where EverQuest leaned more towards game. Like on in UOO, there were monsters. They were in ecosystems. There was a lot of crafting. to go to to the crafting. You'd head out to the woods and you'd chop down a tree and you'd bring the tree back to do the se so and so and you get the it was one of the first games that really had all the component

pieces.
Yes.
That if you wanted to make armor, you needed ore and if you needed ore, you had to, you know, go out and mine some or buy it from somebody who had mine some and brought like they set up this whole kind of ecology and this whole system specifically for there to be lots to do other than killing things. like it was supposed to be a game
that was kind of more on that style.
Yes.
One of the very first ones that actually it was the first MMO style one that was anything like that because it was one of the first MMOs,
right?
Fishing was in UOO and it was part of this whole thing. In the same way that like if you needed to make a shirt, you had to find sheep and you had to shear the wool to get the so and so. Fishing was a valuable thing you could do because it brought in fish which it was something you could eat, you could make stew, you know, it was one of the base, hey, let's go make food and other things like that. And so in kind of this whole ecosystem of chopping down trees and mining and fishing and well, all of

that, that was one of the staples. You know, if you had a if you chop down a tree, you could make a fishing rod. All of that. EverQuest, which came out a little bit after, was not that kind of game. It was grab a sword, grab some friends, you know, go kill that giant rat out in front of Kenos and work your way up to giants and dragons and, you know, planer raiding later. So, more of a game, less of a simulation.
Yeah. But because UO came out first and was popular,
there were certain we weren't planning to put trade skills in
like EQ. There was no initial plan on EverQuest for any trade skills, but that was such a part of UO and such a popular part that trade skills got added in as a last minute kind of thing like and you can tell from the early economy that it wasn't balanced towards trade skills because it was balanced towards

adventure. So when we were looking at things to put in, like we couldn't chop down trees, you know, they were using sprites, we were using 3D models. Our environment wasn't built to have that kind of thing,
right?
So part of the resource gathering, a lot of it was from killing monsters. Um, and you'd bring it, you know, parts back to turn into other things. But fishing, on the other hand, is non-destructible to the environment.
Yeah. and we had lots of lakes and bodies of waters and rivers and so fishing we also put that in as a system with the side benefit that it got you to stop and look around and it was honestly fishing is easy to build.
Yeah. And so I think like we did it because UOO did it but we you know EverQuest blew up to be the biggest MMO on you know that gen that first kind of gen of the 3D MMOs and every game after

in the same way we'd looked at UO to see were there any killer features looked at EverQuest and said oh EverQuest has fishing and people like it even though it didn't do much and when I say didn't do much you caught fish and you could turn them into certain kinds of food. Food was cheap. You could just go to the store and buy rations. And for a long time, food was food. It was just a thing you had to have in your inventory. And if you didn't have it, you slowly started getting debuffed. Otherwise, it didn't matter if you had a pickled fish or a loaf of bread or whatever. And it was cheap. So, like fishing didn't exactly save or make you large amounts of money, but people enjoyed it in the environment for what it was. But again, groups looking back were like, "Oh, you all had it. We should have it. EverQuest has it. It's the biggest one. We should have it. You know, the one that finally passed us was World of Warcraft, who very specifically had studied EverQuest, put fishing in because EverQuest had it and they expanded on the system. And I think once

you have that, it just became a checkbox feature of you have a large realm that feels either persistent or semi-persistent kind of thing. people expected at this point.
And I think that that is I I agree with that. And I also think that there are a lot of benefits from uh that are uh not very expensive from a design and development point of view. We'll talk about that later because I agree with a lot of what you just said. Um the interesting part is that each of those still manages to have its own distinct take on it, right? like I don't [clears throat] think there's been a def like there is no definitive fishing but I think because of where it came in hit and because of the game's popularity
um for multiple in a row that it just became the
hey look there's a body of water and we're you know
let's put fishing in
and the other thing that it's impossible

to ignore for for some is JRPGs are from a country where fish is by a fantastically wide margin the staple protein Yeah.
Yeah, that also makes sense, right? We can't ignore the cultural influence of of
and that's one of the things the original Final Fantasy online
y
also borrowed very heavily from EverQuest. I know this their designers came over and like came to our studio.
Yeah. 11 11 by the way is about to get a free trial. it. They just updated it with modern dev tools and it is still kicking after all this time. I'm amazed.
Yeah. Anyway, just I I wanted to say like when I was thinking about this, I hadn't thought about it when we started the episode, but I believe that
that really is kind of one of the big vectors in and why it blew up in games of these styles.
Yeah, I think I agree. I think there's and I think a lot of people also reach a similar conclusion about why beyond the

they had it so we should have it right there is also the we have this big zone right think think about your favorite MMO
okay now think about that zone in the first expansion that you go through for the story once they spent all of this time building this giant zone and you went through it for the story and then never came back. That's kind of wasteful, right? Like they're not they're not getting the mileage out of that zone design that they could be. And so fishing is a way to make you retread stuff, right? I have spent more time in some zones than I think many other players have because I need to get all the fish from all the different fishing.
All resource gathering for crafting. Like fishing is one, but there's still people who go to lots of older zones to gather the components
needed for fueling a trade a good trade

skill economy, good trade skill system.
That's true. I think there's a difference in uh kind between fishing and something like mining or or plant gathering, herbalism, botany, whatever you want to call it, right? in
there's an angle of interaction with fishing.
Would you say it's an angler of interaction?
Okay. Anyway,
because fishing is a type of hunting.
Yeah.
And you know, it's not a hey, I see a daisy. I'm going to go pick it up so I can pop it in my stew. You know, it's a casting. It's a what kind of It's It's funny. It's a little bit like the Witcher with what kind of potion do I use to, you know, or what kind of oil do I put on my blade to go fight the so and so, you know, oh, I'm looking for this kind of fish, what kind of lore, what kind of bait because that actually has a, you know, that is a real life thing.
Yeah. And that varies extensively. Um,

let's speaking of real life things, let's talk about some real like some more true-tolife fishing video games. We'll recap with some other weird examples and then we'll get back into the meat of of fishing. So,
because yeah, like actual fishing fishing games have been around almost as long as computer games have. It feels like
I mean Sega had a really popular one. What? Sega Bass Fishing. It came out in 97.
Yeah. for the arcade release
on the Dreamcast and sold over a million copies which at the time was like that's a lot of copies.
Yeah. In 97 a million is a lot of copies.
Mhm. Um you've had fishing simulators all sorts like I think there's a Yeah.
There's a licensed Bass Pro fishing game.
Yep.
Um
that was actually partnered with the Nintendo Fishing Rod on the Wii, I

think. Sure. So there have been
there have been actual fishing peripherals that were made for the games for the like
and fishing arcade cabinets, right? And like so it's not merely
Okay, but so when we talk about these,
but those are dedicated fishing ones as opposed to fishing that shows up in other games. But I threw that in as a note because I think it's important to say that, you know, there are dedicated fishing games. But this is the weirdness that it's taking a lot of those things and just sticking them in another game as the not the main purpose,
right? It's something oddly pastoral that like has shown up in a lot of places. Like you don't have in most games you don't have deeply like meaningful geode cracking or other means of resource acquisition. You don't have like a deep and expansive lumber treatment mini game where you

have to saw like trees down into planks or whatever. That's actually I'm trying to think of another one where not the crafting but the gathering part is as gamified because like you're you know there isn't the strike precisely here on the ore to get the thing to you know not fracture it or you know cut the plant in the right way or gather the honey to make the bees not aggra like none of those usually that's a very simple for everything except fishing Yeah,
it's a very simple sometimes even automated thing where you can click like an autod do as you wander around and it
picks your flowers for you know or your herbs for you.
Yeah, there was Yes, they did try that in 14 and then they took it out where they took out all the other bad stuff that was in 1.0. Correct. Yeah, because most people just don't care about like if you made a sculpting mini game where you know which or

sculpting you'd expect more something on that, but that's like the end component. That's the part where you're doing the crafting once you've gathered the resources. The fishing is the actual part of the gathering resources. So again, it's just that people for some reason feel more inclined to do that part because they find it fun and relaxing than all of the other parts usually have stuff unless it's a dedicated game.
Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that.
Mhm.
Okay. I know.
Tell me the weird stuff.
Okay, cool. Zelda has a really odd like history of fishing games. It's in Awakening and Breath. Not uh Breath. It's in Awakening and Ocarina of Time and it's a like chart fishing is a core part of Wind Waker and there's like fishing bait and stuff. It's just been in Zelda for forever and we just kind of take it for granted that like Link also just fishes sometimes as part of a miniame or part of a whatever. But it's

shown up in like 2D and 3D games with similar ideas about like and it's not something missable, right? I mean, it is, but if you're going for like a reasonable percentage, there's a bottle that you get from fishing in Ocarina. I think I think it's a bottle.
And there's a piece of heart in a fish's mouth in in Awakening. So, like Zelda has some weird like But again, that could just be Japan.
Uh, fishing is a staple of the culture.
Japanese games overindex on fishing given the choice.
Yeah. Um, meanwhile, Ganondorf is also canonically weak to fishing rods. True. Um, and then [clears throat] my favorite, uh, of course, Pokemon has it where you catch water Pokemon by using a fishing rod to begin the water encounter. You can also get in the water, but you get different encounters if you fish or get in.
It's interesting. It's like a whole

other system for catching some specific Pokemon. For instance, um, Magikarp, right? You can aim for a Magikarp specifically. It comes up in Nuzlocks and other challenge runs. You can get a Magikarp specifically with an old rod. That's kind of cool.
But, and a lot of that, I think, comes just from the anime uh and manga before that.
And just got carried through into the games. I think it's also interesting because they have like a fisher type enemy and I or a fisher type opponent like an opposing trainer, an NPC trainer and I I'm not sure whether fishing came first or the fisher came first and they were like, "Oh yeah, we should make it so you can fish."
Um,
bass. And then my absolute favorite
okay
nonsensical pointless inclusion of fishing is in Hades.
Why Hades?

Because it's secretly an incredibly precise miniame that gates uh progression down several god story lines until you catch a specific number of fish. in a mini game. It doesn't tell you as a miniame and doesn't tell you as important. Wild. Actually wild. Uh it is ridiculous in my opinion. It's it's definitely my like favorite one to point out and be like this is this is not Yes, princess. Can I help you chat? Uh design club chat. Uh this is Clover. Say hi to Say hi.
Say hi to Clover. Clover is new. uh breakfast. Met her last Friday, but uh if you hear loud cat meowing or see a tail, that's Clover. Um she's a new addition to my family. Uh
I love the cattail randomly picking up on screen.
Yeah, it's great. Um the so the fishing in Hades feels like the

most like weird tacked on. Like there's also this incredibly precise fishing miniame that you need to do even though you don't like it never explains that it's a timing miniame. You just have to get the timing right to get the legendary fish in order to advance the plot line. Right. It's sort of one of my my best examples of like this is just a weird egregious inclusion that was like for no reason other than we should do it. You're also like lava fishing weird. I don't know. It's just I don't know how to put it, but it it's definitely one of the ones that shows up as like this is weird, right? But that
Yeah,
but that also
I think if there's any others that have really surprised me. I know. It's funny. There are some games where I see there's fishing and it's actually kind of a turnoff to me because I'm always wondering if I haven't gone and like read through all of the online

stuff like wait, am I supposed to stop here for hours and do this thing, you know, put down my guns, you know, stop exploring the ruined temple, you know?
Yeah.
Etc., etc.
Yeah. in solo exploration games it feels better to me than in multiplayer games.
Um though in MMOs I'll have to say and this we'll come back to this later. One of the reasons I liked fishing in those games a bit was there's a games with other players in MMOs often involve waiting. You're waiting for somebody to show up. You're waiting for somebody to go to the bathroom to get a cup of coffee. they're finishing up a thing and you're gonna take five minutes to hop on their bird and come on over. And so it's one of those things you can do. You can whip out your fishing rod, fish in the stream, whatever, and you feel like you're making minor amounts of progression in a game that's m minor

majorly about progression. It's an extra bit of progression at your own pace and it kind of gives you that thing to do. And often though not always, they're not super time based. So you can actually like throw your line in. And again, not always, but some of them
can throw your line in. And there's others that are much more interactive.
So let's let's talk a bit about that. Um, so the these games,
actually, having just said that, give me 20 seconds to bam for 20 and then
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, and yes, Feldar, it definitely beats jumping around in circles, though I am also guilty of uh streamer hopping. If you've ever seen a Final Fantasy 14 streamer or some someone running in circles, hopping around, it's probably that they it could be that they're streaming and just running around in circles because they don't know what they're doing and that's just a thing that we've all somehow adopted. Um I don't I don't know. Um

back in WoW, there was a raid boss that you had to have an appropriate level fisher to fish up the encounter. What? I mean, that's cool, but what what um and I'm not sure I agree with this. The at this point, oh, there's fishing feels like just one more blip on the Ubisoft tower. I don't [snorts] I don't know about that. It feels like especially because we've got games that are like nowhere near like the AAA status doing this, right? If we let off with Stardew, right? If there's ever been an anti-ripa game, it's Stardew.
Oh, Stardew.
Yeah. Um Oh, okay.
So, can you pet the dog? Is the modern Is

there fishing correct? Um, so fishing is also interesting in that it runs a very significant range of complexity that are all nevertheless identifiable immediately and unquestionably as fishing. Right? So on one end we have cast line into water, wait for bobber to move, interact, receive fish, right? That's you. I imagine that there's one where you can just cast a line and then it'll auto you'll auto receive a fish. That might be Animal Crossing. I'm not 100% sure. I've never played Animal Crossing, but I've seen um it. But like in my experience, the lowest the lowest engagement end is click on the water, wait for the bobber to move, click on

the bobber,
get the fish. That's Minecraft. And wow,
from a game design or from the basics of initiate, initiate task, wait certain amount of time, re uh pull random spin, receive prize. Right.
And one of the reasons when I said like fishing can be easy to build.
Yes.
Like
Oh yeah, that's right. Um, Zach is right. Pokemon is also initiate fishing weight. So initiate fishing weight is the simplest version and that's Pokemon,
right?
All the way up to
Final Fantasy 14 probably has the most complicated fishing system of any non dedicated fishing game I've ever seen. Um,
I've never fished an FF14. Will, can you give me the 30 second build montage?
Sure. Fish have one of three different bite strengths. Care about um care about

bait. There is a t they all bite in a bite window based on how long the hook has been in the water. You have different skills that will either cause you to catch a specific fish, eliminate fish from the pool, um catch multiple fish with one pull of the hook, catch uh bigger fish, um that will uh moves that will allow you to use a fish as bait for the next fish. These are all like there's a whole skill set for Fisher and there's also a rod fishing and a spear fishing set. There's an entirely separate different spear fishing miniame which is much simpler. It's like the fish move back and forth and you have to spear the one you want. Sort of a fish shadows swim and then get them. But
so significantly more complex.
But even with everything you described as a system designer
Yes.

You know what I'm hearing is there's a lot of setup.
Mhm. Hey, I've equivalently I've equipped this the you know hit this setting or this like there's a couple of settings and whether you're sliding a thing in like an inventory checking click you know check boxes whatever that's a designable thing that once designed can be repeated over and over and over again and even though the player has lots of complexity in as a system designer I'm used to building complexity like that's not hard,
right?
That just takes a little bit of time. And after that, we're starting to access pools. Hey, you know, with this and this set, this, you know, spreadsheet of fish are available. I'm going to put percent catches. You know, you can start, it just becomes a numbers thing.
Yep.
And therefore expanding the system. Hey, this patch we just introduced 20 new

fish,
right?
Like it's a low lift. It's a little bit of art
and you know a couple of names, a couple of database and like these systems are very comparatively easy to design. Almost nobody cares about the balance. It's not like hey will I've just added 15 new spells in across 11 different classes.
Right. We in fact anticipate the fish ended uh at the end of each expansion. the legendary fish which we just got in the 7.55 to be incredibly difficult time consuming uh specific conditions right cuz I also forgot to mention weather the previous weather to this weather so it can either be just the weather or this weather and the weather before it the time of day um and those are the other those are the other
and again all systems
yeah correct they're all just
these are all just modifiers that say which table am I pointing at?

Correct. Because um ultimately for a Final Fantasy 14 fish, you need a piece of artwork. Actually, two pieces of artwork. One for the fish, one for the fish printed on can uh on uh a canvas. There's a Japanese art of covering a fish in ink and then painting it on a canvas. Uh you can display them in your home. It's a thing, but there is one for every fish in the game, including the bucket, which is just a circle. That's kind of funny. There's a fishable bucket. Um, uh, and then a blurb and then just an entry in the database. Um, most fish don't have 3D models. Some few fish do. Uh, they can be put in an aquarium, but they have a very static limited 3D model um that only needs to be compatible with a specific space. It doesn't appear in the wild anywhere. So, it is incredibly low lift compared to adding a new job, adding a new zone, adding a new mob, boss, dungeon,

whatever. It's very low lift.
Yeah.
And even on the art, my guess is because they've done a lot of fish at this point, it's not taking an artist longer than an hour to draw
Yeah. a fish
the asset needed for it.
Yeah. It's Yeah, it's relatively low poly, too. Um, I do think that uh and and it's important to note that that is not a bad thing because it doesn't feel cheap to the player, right? Because for the player,
well, it it is it is the maze that takes a minute to design that takes five minutes to solve, right? Yes, you can set up a set of conditions and you know, first you have to catch four of this fish and then two of that fish and then you can only use this third fish as bait. Great. And once you do, every other fisherman in the zone is debuffed for 43 minutes. Like, no, there's Yeah,
right. That's easy, right? Overcoming those difficulties is the interesting treadmill using the tool set that's presented to the fisher, right? Like you

could have a design meeting and design all of the fishing mechanics for like an entire expansion and the fisherman will still be happy, right? Because we still got to go do it, right? So, it's a very loweffort way to or low investment way to treadmill a group of players. And boy, does that group of players love that treadmill. Like, you ever seen a dog running on a slack mill? Fishers are like that. They're like, "Oh my god, there there are groups of people who are working across language barriers when the new patch drops to figure out how to catch the fish." Uh people are using like Google Translate to talk between the Japanese player base and the American player base and the European player base and like it's wild, right? But again,
so I believe you
super low lift.
Yeah.
Yeah. Um, but yeah, like as I said, all of that it is it is definitely a system that on

cost of implementation versus payout for the right kind of game and for at least a midsize game plus um is one of the easier systems you're going to make.
Yeah. And it it does. So, and for that ease of system, you get something that treadmills a group of players,
right? Something that reuses an existing asset, the zone, right? If you've made a natural organic zone, it has something you can fish into. Now, sometimes you have to like bend and stretch a little. 14. You can fish into uh toxic waste, uh lava, the vacuum of space, clouds, and also water. Um,
those all sound interesting.
They are. You need different bait obviously for all of them. And yeah, but
but again, it's also the the thing you can just carry a fishing pole in your inventory and whip out while you're

waiting whether you're into it a lot or not. And the other one that we actually found, I think after we put it into EQ, and one of the reasons we kind of kept expanding on it was in addition to being the, "Hey, cool. I'm pulling out a fishing rod while I'm waiting for somebody to show up. It's a really good opportunity to stop and look around some of these beautiful environments that people don't always stop and look around in. And you can put them on, you know, scenic vistas or, you know, down by the ocean. I mean, I still remember in EverQuest fishing and just like looking around at the world we made with the, you know, the moving clouds and the sky and the time of day and just all of it going on. you know, some NLES running far in the background and just being immensely impressed that we'd kind of built a semi-living world and watching it move,
right? So,
it was neat
and and the time of day require and like all of those things can be used to sculpt specific experiences that you want the player to have, right? Like in the in

the 14 case, right? So, say I have a fish that only shows up starting at 6 a.m.,
right? That's sunrise in 14. So, if I have a fish and all of the easy ways to cast for that fish face east and it starts at 6:00 a.m., all of those fishers are going to watch the sunrise in the game, which you might not notice otherwise if you're busy running around in a dungeon, right? It's a it's um it's a moment of serenity in the middle of this like big chaotic game about saving the world.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I just that's an interesting thing.
Yeah. Um the [laughter] the kind of the interesting one to me uh in addition is um is No Man's Skies Fishing.
They
I have I know nothing about No Man's Sky Fishing. It's kind of the same as 14 except it like the really weird part is because

it's No Man's Sky, they just were like surprise there's a complete fully fleshed out fishing system that we just yeated into the game, right? And so because it's not backstopped at all, like because it hasn't been there since the beginning, it does feel a little weird cuz there are like all these other systems and it kind of gets pasted on top. But I also think that that's a weakness of No Man's Sky as a whole is that every time they have an update, there's a cool new system, but it's usually a cool new system that's just slapped on top of another system and eventually you get like this big papermâché ball of system.
That's one of the hard parts. Like I think it took EverQuest probably four or five expansions before the trade skills really got interesting because they had been kind of put in at the end but that meant they weren't really balanced into the economy and therefore they because of that they couldn't make meaningful super meaningful gear and others that it took us a lot that as we did expansions and brought in other things that we

started adjusting the trade skills to incorporate in more of that or something like UO or WOW that built them in from the beginning to be part of that. It's hard to add a system on later that fully integrates into every system before.
Yeah.
Because if it's perfectly balanced, it meant those systems before were missing a thing because that later system coming in wasn't there,
right? Unless
to lock in with them,
right? Unless you like remove things from other areas. You're like, you used to get this component from mining, but you don't get it from mining anymore. Now you get it from fishing. And that makes people who were big into mining resent fishing, which is dangerous. Don't do that. Right.
One of the best uses I think I've seen for that is you put some of the stuff in stores and you give players lots of warning. Hey, they used to carry fish oil so and so and so and so in stores, but in 3 months with the launch of the new so and so and the fishing expansion, that will no longer be the case.
Yeah. You're going to have to go fish.
Will now be player obtainable.
Yeah.

Go get your own fish. Dang it. Um, the other thing, by the way, that is very interesting and I think does appeal to some people and is a part of the reason that fishing works so well, um, is something that we kind of touched on before, but you probably mentioned explicitly, which is fishing in every game is super RNG heavy.
Every game.
RNG, random numbers.
Yeah. Um, you cast your line with a bait in in into a pond and you do not know what you are going to get
when you you you might have narrowed it down. Time of day, weather, bait, bite, whatever. Or [snorts] you might have no idea whatsoever and just yeet, right?
Yep.
And
so, and in which case, fishing is like a box of chocolates.
Yeah. You do never know what you're going to get. But please don't fish up a fish flavored box of chocolates or a

chocolate flavored fish. Both of those sound not appealing. Um
unless you're fishing in a chocolate lake.
Yeah, sure. Right. Yeah. Okay. Warframe is a little different. Warframes fishing is you know exactly what you're going to get. Uh assuming that you assuming that you have all of the necessary tools and can highlight stuff and all of that. You don't know which ones are going to show up. They might show up, they might not even with bait. But yes, the in Warframe, the RNG is how many of what show up, not what at the point of cast because Warframe uses spear fishing and actually does 3D models for every fish that you see before you cast.
Mhm.
Cuz they decided to do it that way and it works really well for them. So more power to them. But um
and that's why I was using the actual like slot machine pull when I was talking about fishing earlier is
that's also always been a thing with

certain styles of fishing systems is
at a certain point you're basically you're casting into the spreadsheet to see you know based on these conditions what set of things are currently pullable
right and so it's all about like risk management and it does do some of that like dopamine hit thing Right? When you get the desired result out of a luck based thing, that is something that gives many, not all, many people the good the good brain chemical hit of yes, I got the thing or I top decked lightning helix or I, you know, rolled the 99 on the purple piece of gear that I needed or the mount finally dropped or whatever, right? And MMOs are chocked to the gills with that stuff. intended. Um,
I built the fishing table, I think, in the original EverQuest that had junk items in it. Some of some of which were really fun to pull.
Why would you Why would you Oh god, why?

Please tell me that the junk items were all in the first level table and there wasn't a chance to pull junk and then the junk was on a different table.
I don't actually remember. It's been so long. And again, it was just because fish were so uninteresting as a base thing. they were food. So adding a little bit of fun variability of an occasional old boot or other things.
Yeah.
Was actually
part of the gag and part of the fun.
Yeah. One of the interesting things too that some MMOs have done this. I I saw it in WoW. I've also seen it in Hypixel Sky Block, which is a Minecraft MMO I used to play before it got hella pay to win. Um, sometimes you fish up encounters, like you just cast a line and you're fishing somewhere and then all of a sudden there's an enemy and now you must defend yourself, right? That only works in places where you can fish as a non-fisherman class. Um, because fishermen can't really defend themselves. Kind of a problem. But um

the uh
I just looked it up cuz the web remembers better than I do. Rusty dagger, single standable, single sandal.
Uhhuh.
Both which which were non-stackable
and fish scales which could be used as a component for the water breathing spell.
Nonstackable junk.
Oh yeah,
you monster. that just
I'm sure they added lots of better stuff later, but I was just like that that was in the original original
Yeah.
like base game.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You could sell them though. Like
Yeah. Uh I'm just stuck on non-stackable junk drops. But like in WoW, um, one of the ways that they've made fishing indispensable is for other trade crafts, you need a lure to catch a

particular beast with particular drops. And the lure that you need needs a fish. And so even though fishing is sort of like a it's it's one of the universal trade skills, everyone can fish in addition to their other two trade skills. Um I think it's a it's an interesting way to like add some amount of it in even though most of it is like fish up an encounter or fish for its own sake. It's a lot of fish for its own sake which I think is okay too. Like
and that is probably a big distinction. There are games with fishing for fun and there are games with fishing that are an integral part of the game. Still both as mini games.
Yeah.
A majority of the games that put in fishing do it kind of for fun. Very few gate things behind it. Um unless you're like those are usually the MMOs or the

weird thing like Hades doing it atypically,
right? And and sometimes gating behind it is um there's like 100% reward or like a completion for like catching every fish or whatever, but there isn't like you can get the story end of the game. You can get to a completion without bothering with it, right? cuz and we've seen some people chime in in chat that like not everyone cares for fishing either because of the uh the amount of RNG that goes into what you catch which can be frustrating because especially or because of the amount of time. The reason the RNG can be frustrating is that it almost by definition must be real pure RNG as opposed to fake or weighted RNG. by that idea
of mechanic RNG.
Right? So, uh in some cases, say I am trying to get uh the the mcguffin, the mcguffin, I need it. I need the mcguffin

to drop from this dungeon. The game can silently in the background, if the mcguffin is a rare or specific thing, the game can silently in the background assign to my character a number of times I've run the dungeon. And after so many times, it says, "All right, kid. you've done it. Good job. Here's your mcguffin. Right. Um, that's more difficult to do with fish because uh, it doesn't know what you're trying to catch usually speaking, right? There are many things you could be trying to catch and generally speaking, pity timers aren't associated with fishing. So, it's like entirely possible that you never get the thing you are looking for. That is the problem with RNG. It approaches infinitely unlikely. It is still possible,
right?
Right.
But most compensate for that because most of the stuff you get is used then for other compon.
Yeah.
Short of the achievement hunting, the fish you get are either used as components or sold. They're not.

But yeah, so I but it's just it has made its way to a surprising number of games.
Yeah. And as people, as I've seen from chat, that are both very interested and very uninterested in this miniame aspect of that game.
Yeah.
Which is good also because I I've played lots of games where I have no interest in mining or blacksmithing or any number of other things, but I still enjoy the fruits of what those create. And it gives the people who do them a sense of fulfillment because they are doing the thing that is needed by others.
Yeah. I also think that like it's a lower conceptual lift for players than some other trade skills might be, right? So, so like
because the essence of fishing is actually
put bait on hook, put hook in water,

move bait around enticingly, wait for fish, right? That is actually the essence of fishing as opposed to lots of people think that blacksmithing is just like pounding in one place with a hammer until you get a magical thing, right? There's not a inherent conceptual understanding of other trade crafts that
you do actually have in fishing
and that's why I think fishing is so atypical. As I said, fishing is one of the gathering parts. It's not the building part. Like the smithing part is the building part, right? fishing is aligned with the mining or the chopping down trees or the gathering herbs
part.
Yeah.
But it's just it behaves differently than almost always than all the rest of those.
That's true. I've also seen enough videos of people bringing down trees on top of houses to suggest the same problem would exist with being a lumberjack or perhaps in mining. Uh though, you know, those aren't as readily apparent. Um
that's why they don't let kids use pickaxes. But Jeff, the the the children, they

they they yearn for the minds,
but they're minors, so they can't be minors,
right? Um it does, Evan, it it does require knowledge, especially IRL. But conceptually, the core idea of fishing is more aligned with most people's initial concept of fishing than many other similar skills. Right? So, for instance,
your basic person could probably go attempt fishing. Your basic other person could probably not go attempt chopping down a tree. Actually, excuse me. The gathering parts they could, but everybody thinks they could put something on a hook and throw it in the water, but they go look at a whole bunch of plants. They don't know which one to pull up, which is the valuable herb.
Yeah. or they don't look at a mountain to go, "Oh, look at the way that the, you know, quartz is um scaling here." That means that there's most likely gold

inside of that based, you know, there are certain amounts of knowledge that you need for other things.
Yeah.
That people people don't know they don't have it for fishing. They know they don't have it for those other things,
right? Yeah. So there's less of a like um
it's like everybody thinks they could be a game designer or an influencer.
Yeah.
But people also don't have that same thing where they're like, "Oh yeah, I could be a piano virtuoso."
Yeah.
Look at somebody do that. They're like, "That took a lot of practice,
right?" And people are like,
they don't look at an actor and necessarily think, "Wow, that took 30 years to be able of practice to be able to deliver that line."
Yeah.
So nonchalantly and perfectly that it felt like part of the scene.
Yeah. Also, Grass is very right. Catching any fish is not that hard. Catching a specific fish is hard. Um, yeah, I agree that
lake dynamite fish.
No, no, no, not nor lake shotgun fish. We're not secondhand lions fishing here.

Um, I had another thought and it was good and now it's gone.
Yep.
How much more do we have to say about fishing? How much more do you want to say, Jeff? I I do think one of the other things um that we didn't touch on um
in in sort of there's sort of two two last aspects and then we can we can wrap this up because I know
Oh, we don't I was just curious again fishing is not my forte.
Yeah.
Like I've built fishing but I've never been the hardcore fisher person and I know you have. That's why I was like I'm curious you know. So, so the the the two remaining ones are
okay
community and verimilitude.
Community is a very interesting one. So, one of the things we've been talking about is kind of the solo experience of fishing, right? Because you can go fishing by yourself.
Yeah. Okay. Um, however, the way some games have done fishing, ESO does this, Elder Scrolls Online and 14 both do this, there is an amount of

understanding that is required that is greater than one person will likely attain by themselves, which is a way to weld the community together by making it so that like
I see more people talking during like difficult big fish windows about oh my gosh it slipped again and you know someone in shout chat will be like don't worry you've got it where the rest of the time the shout chat is talking about something I can't talk about because of terms of service it's shout chat use your imagination right like um it's a very wholesome experience people have built third party tools to like like a like a spreadsheet right it's a big old spreadsheet and it says here are all of the fish that are up right now all across the entire video game and here's how you can like do this And there's all of these different parts that you can um that rely on people doing this together in a way that I I think is broader than a lot of other

endeavors, right? So like if you're if you're tackling a raid, right, the group tackling that raid is probably like maybe a guide maker and like your raid team,
but fishing is so big that like everyone's contributed something to the data, especially because it's RNG,
right? So like
we kind of have to walk it in when we don't know what things are. And the community that arises out of that is incredibly powerful and very cool. Um, and I like that a lot. And similarly, there are like fishing derbies. It's like a fishing derby thing that happens um where uh experienced fishers will go and help newer fishers during the derby where they'll be like, "All right, this is the bait you want to use and this is how you catch this fish that you're looking for. This maybe
and here's an old sock."
Yeah. Right.
Oh, sorry. I was think for a moment I thought you said fishing derby instead of derby and
No. No. Um so I think that that is that is a really big component of it that you get in a way that you don't get from any

other trade skill, right? Craft, gather, it doesn't matter. Um, and then the other one, and I really like this one a lot.
Okay.
Fish are weird, y'all. Like, if you think about it, if you think about it, right? Fish are weird, right? You've got like, yeah, there's salmon and tuna and cod and halibit. And then you start getting into like flounder or lion fish or, you know, angler fish or like a shark, right? Fish are weird. And so one of the kind of interesting things that's happened is Yeah. orfish, catfish, blobfish, sunfish, right? Yeah. These are Yeah, fish are super alien. So, it's a really great opportunity to have real [snorts] fish or analoges to real fish in the game. Um, 14's done this. I know a couple of others have done this. And one of the coolest things actually that

I think has arisen out of this, and I thought this was really, really cool, there was a fishing meetup at the aquarium in Anaheim during the Final Fantasy 14 FanFest.
Oh, wow.
And I'm guessing for the actual FF14. Yeah. Yeah. For the people who enjoyed fishing, one of the people who leads the fishing community online also likes studying fish in real life. And so people were learning about real fish by going to the aquarium and having this tour like because they got interest out of the game, right? And because it's that low conceptual lift,
right? there is a um there is a draw to learn more, right? It's not unapproachably difficult, right? If you're like, "All right, kids. So, you're going TO LEARN ABOUT MINING AND METAL energy and today we're going to learn how to take a sample, a core sample, and you no, but you can go to an

aquarium, be like, I saw that fish in a video game, and that's nice, right?" And and those things, I think, are unique to fishing and one of the things that I really like about it. So,
you just reminded me, by the way, of one extra cautionary story I'm going to throw in for developers listening to this.
Um, I've been talking about how easy fishing is to build. The thing though that fishing also does because and Will's examples just reminded me of this um is that you do stop to look around the environment but it does get people stopping in specific spots of the environment and it means you have to be more careful with your environment design not both just then but later. I remember probably like 11 or 12 years ago will I was playing the D&D MMO. Was it Never Winter? What was
Never Winter Nights? Never Winter on
It wasn't Never Winter Nights. It was the console one about a decade plus ago. Might have been Neverwinter. I feel like

Never Winter Nights was the name of the older one, the non MMO.
Yeah, Never.
There was D and D online. There there's a bunch. Anyway, you go. I
It was actually I played both D and D online and Neverwinter. I think it was Neverwinter um online. But anyway, um I was doing one of their holiday events and I was joining a fishing community. There were holes in the ice. We were out in this like
frozen over ice area and there are lots of people out fishing. It was a timed holiday event and some fun things. And they recycled their yearly holiday events as a lot of groups do. It's like, hey, holiday fishing is back. And that year I could go catch in because I was playing at that point. And they also put in I think it was some sort of like slog tobogen sled runs
at a different part of the environment and they put sound effects on them a starting horn sloshing but they didn't think of how far the sound spread. And that year for all the fishermen, as opposed to this peaceful out on the lake

fishing, every like 2 minutes you'd hear the horn be like as it started and the whoosh and things go around and just the sound design for it was awful because they'd kind of forgotten or they didn't think about how far it spread. And it was an environmental thing that conflicted with another that specifically interfered with part of the peace and serenity style thing that you often establish with fishing. And it was annoying enough that I think when I saw them at PAX that year, I actually went up and was chatting with the producer like, "Oh yeah, I play so I'm like, "Hey, have you guys know about this?" And I get to see the producers's eyes like clock for a second and be like, "F somebody, you know, junior designer Bob probably did that when they were setting that up and they're like, I'm going to pass that back to the team." But it was kind of that cumulative thing in a living game where you're adding things as you add components to it. It's also one of those like, hey, cool. You know, we now have,00 fishing spots or

whatever, you know, in Final Fantasy, and if we're adding new systems that go into the environment, have we considered does that interact with any of those 1100 fishing spots or, you know, 3,000 foraging spot? when you start layering the mechanics on top of each other in kind of living worlds, that can also be your downfall because you're having to maintain all of those as good spots, good locations.
One of the big struggles that happens with um 14 is that on occasion um rare world bosses, call them hunt marks, will spawn on top of fishing poles. So that that does lead to but hunt marks have been a longstanding tradition of being in the way in Final Fantasy. Um uh there is an established system for getting people to come uh
help um
like kill them, right? But like it does it does still happen even in in XA and MMOs.

Oh yeah. And it's just it's another layer of complexity that you're adding in as a developer,
especially for persistent long-term games where you're trying to find ways to continue to re use environments that you've built.
Yeah. Previously,
it feels like the the there's the devil is always in the details, right? The devil like for instance, how long it takes to catch a fish
is a thing that's going to vary immensely from game to game, right? Because if it's too long,
then people will wonder if they're not going to get a bite at all
or if like and what happens if there aren't any fish that are going to bite? Do you does your character automatically pull the rod up? Do you just leave it in the water forever? Like what what does that do? What does that look like?
Well, those are also answer. Again, that's part of the system's design.
And you know, you can build towards certain ways. You can build the antif frustrations like you cast your line in 5 seconds later you just reel it back in and two or three times you're like oh yeah this just means there's no fish and

you know from then on. It's kind of like the invisible wall at the end of the street you know you bounce into you're like oh I can't go that way. Okay.
Yeah.
And you walk away and it doesn't actually bother you past a certain point because that's part of the language of the game,
right? Yeah. I just didn't want to I I I wanted to note that like there is there's a a variety of fine-tuning. It's not just like press button receive fish levels of press button receive fishing system design
though it can be and that's one of the interesting things about these games is we've seen all levels of implementation.
Yeah, absolutely. From
you know every group of designers tackles it a different way.
Yep. Absolutely. Well chat I think that wraps our discussion on fishing. Uh do do you have a particular fishing miniame that you love and that we missed? Uh, are you now inspired to go catch all the fish in your favorite MMO? Uh, let us know in the comments. Uh, we'll be back on Friday with another Games for Breakfast. We'll certainly have a lot to

talk about uh then, as well as we'll be back next week with another design club and we'll let you know what that one's going to be on as soon as we know, which will be soon.
Right. Um, thumbn thumb thumbnails go up a couple days early on YouTube if you want to click to kind of like get your reminder of the spot.
Yep. Um, you could check out all my gorgeous thumbnails for Design Club because I actually have a lot of fun doing them. Actually, Will, are you guys talking about War Spectre this Friday or did you do it last Friday?
I think we talked about it the two Fridays ago
right before. Yeah, he he retired which
these events all blur together.
Yo, time time is a soup. No, uh I I don't actually know what we're talking about this uh this week. I've been focused on last week's news cuz I'm still befuddled. Maybe we'll talk about this at some point by The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time remakes decision to put loading screens in their game on purpose. And
I can recognize that it's an idea, but

marketing it as a selling point is like
I would have to know more to see why they think it's a selling point.
Yeah, exactly. So, I'm I'm I'm still scratching my head over that. All right, we'll be back Friday or next week. Until then, next time when uh whenever whenever I see you all next, please take care of yourselves. Please take care of each other. And we'll see you all then. Say bye to the people, Jeff.
Bye to the people, Jeff. Thanks everybody. Have a great week. [music]