Introduction
Hello everyone, it is I once more Dracula; enter freely of your own will and leave some of the happiness you bring in the replies. Today I will be proposing some significant changes to fishing that, in my opinion, would vastly improve the fishing gameplay experience. Whether or not you personally believe a change is needed, one can’t deny the value of some of the items obtained from fishing, nor how long it takes to obtain them and how boring and monotonous the process can become. In my opinion there shouldn’t be a part of this game so boring you have to tab out and do something else or literally risk being banned because you decided to use an auto-fishing macro to tolerate it.
Despite it’s importance for making progressing through the story easier with regen meals or making it easier to obtain rare drops with luck potions, it seems like fishing is the most underdeveloped part of the core gameplay experience, desperately in need of a major overhaul. Fair warning, you’ve got some paragraphs to read, though you could be lazy and look at the diagrams to get the basic premise but miss out on those juicy deets. Anyways, enough yapping, on to the suggestion! AKA more yapping, lol.
New Fishing Minigame
What I want to design is a minigame in which the player is actively engaged and entertained, something with a significant enough challenge to warrant satisfying and large rewards that make the player feel like it was time well spent. In other words, I want to make the fishing feel like an actual game and not just Roblox RNG grinding simulator #412,345. My initial idea for this was an arcade game of sorts, in this case, a top-to-bottom vertical scroller “shooter” (if you can call it that with no shooting). The scale and complexity of this minigame would warrant it frankly being a major portion of an update following full release, which I am aware lessens the likelihood of it being added.
In this minigame, you’ll have to suspend your disbelief a bit when fishing in a shallow pond as the player will control their hook with WASD as it descends deeper and deeper into the abyss. As the player descends, the amounts and total value of things they can fish will grow, the water becomes darker, and the player will face more numerous and dangerous hazards that can damage the player’s hook or mess up their run if they don’t respond quickly and correctly, which I will go into detail on in the next section. This minigame allows the player to catch many fish or items in one go with enough time, skill, and luck, which while not realistic could be very satisfying!
As the player’s hook descends, fish will swim around, moving left or right with slight variations in movement to keep the experience fresh, and chests or crates containing items such as armor, apparel, weapons, and scrolls as well as chests or crates containing reagents and catalysts slowly drift upwards from the bottom. Touching any of these will immediately hook onto them and pull them up instantly, ending the minigame. Because of this behavior, even the rewards in this minigame can serve as a hazard to an inattentive player, and can lead to intense situations deeper down when paired with some hazards.
The system behind the items and fish the player can fish up goes as follows. As the depth the player reaches grows, the total value of what they fish up will as well. This total value can cause the player to catch multiple fish or items to match that value in one go, compensating the player properly for spending a long time in the minigame. As stated in the diagram below, item chance would add some sort of multiplier to the quantity of things caught, while rarity chance affects, well, the average rarity of those items and fish of course.
There would be to some degree an element of randomness to the things that spawn in the minigame, represented to the player by the size of the things they fish up. The larger something is, the higher the total value for that object is relative to the current depth, with sunken items having a unique appearance and arcane or legendary fish having unique colors and particles. When you fish up a sunken item you only get that sunken item, however arcane and legendary fish will likely come with a few more fish if the total value of the catch is high enough.
The sunken pity system will have to be altered to instead count either the total number of objects encountered while in the minigame or the total depth traveled. The visuals of the minigame could change depending on where you’re fishing too for different fishing environments. Also the luck potion effect the player has when they first start the minigame is still applied even if the effect ends before the minigame does.
Different fishing rods have different appearances with the hook, serving as cool cosmetics for the minigame. Unique fishing rods obtained as drops from any number of methods could have some pretty sick appearances too such as glowing effects if possible in the minigame or even a smaller or larger hitbox as part of its mechanics!
At the bottom of the sea floor lies a selection of 3 massive rewards, though actually reaching there is an immense challenge worthy of a title and/or badge, on par with reaching the epicenter solo! Though in this case it’s more a challenge of endurance and skill than endurance and luck. As stated in the diagram, you can expect to reach the sea floor with an unenchanted wooden rod with its 1x lure speed after 2 hours straight. When the player reaches there of course no more hazards will spawn and the player is no longer forced to move downwards, allowing them to take their time choosing a reward. Because of how time consuming fishing can become with this new minigame, passive energy loss is disabled while fishing and the player cannot be inflicted with water poisoning, struck by lightning or magic rain, or be swept away by waves.
The dark sea and further ranges of the dark sea have a gradually increasing multiplier added to the value of things you fish up, but also a multiplier to the intensity and frequency of hazards, the same logic applying while inside or near dangerous weather events such as hurricanes. There’d also be a very tiny bonus to the total value for fish drops exclusively during rain or thunderstorms without an increase in hazards because that’s some cool vibes. Lastly for main mechanics, if the player should lose the minigame to a hazard or cancel the minigame early they will still be rewarded with fish, items, or reagents/catalysts but at half the value it would have been if they had simply fished something up successfully, forcing the player to consider tactical retreats if their hook’s durability gets too low during a hazard that disables spawning.
Side Note: Forgot to add it to the crudely made diagram but you’d be able to hold a key to end the minigame early in case you’re being attacked while fishing. Also disregard the “small fish” and “regular fish” text, that’s meant to say “low value fish” and “medium value fish”.
Hazards
To spice up the minigame and introduce some real challenges and risks, I present to you hazards! Their danger level ranges from mildly annoying to being able to actually get you killed outside the minigame, with some even being exclusive to the dark sea! To start off, the more dangerous a hazard is, the further down you’ll be encountering it, with the particularly dangerous or obstructive hazards temporarily disabling spawning but adding on to the total value of what you fish up for the current round on the plus side. Here is my current list of hazard ideas:
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Currents: Simple water currents that move left, right, or at diagonals that push the player’s hook around, growing stronger at deeper depths. The pushing effect can be resisted with a higher rod strength stat.
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Gas Vents: Cracked rocks that can periodically push the player’s hook back upwards with intense vertical streams and bubbles, undoing some progress and potentially knocking the player into another hazard or making them accidentally hook something. It can also be resisted with the fishing rod’s strength stat.
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Rock Passages: Various rock formations that disable all spawning while active to prevent the player from being forced to hook something on accident, starting out fairly wide and easy to navigate practically not even looking like a passage but becoming increasingly more winding and narrow the deeper down they appear.
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Hydrothermal Vent: The advanced version of water spouts found deeper down that not only push harder but will also deal damage to the player’s hook due to the extreme heat. The pushing effect can of course be reduced by the fishing rod’s strength stat.
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Cold Thermocline: A layer of water exclusive to cold bodies of water where the player’s hook has reduced movement speed though the rate of descent remains the same. Passing through this layer can significantly increase the catch value for that run and other hazards can show up at the same time.
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Hot Thermocline: A layer of water exclusive to warm bodies of water where large portions of the water can grow very hot, dealing small amounts of damage while passing through. Will also significantly increase the catch value for the run and allow other hazards to appear at the same time.
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Warped Waters: Dark sea exclusive hazard where a region will distort the player’s screen and inverts controls. The fishing rod’s strength stat lessens the screen warping effect. Increases catch value a lot and other hazards can spawn here, except for rock passages because that’d be actually evil.
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Sea Quakes: This hazard will shake the screen as pieces of rock begin to tumble down from above slowly, forcing the player to dodge, the speed and size of the rocks increasing at greater depths. This hazard disables spawning while active.
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Sea Monster Encounter: When the player reaches a far enough depth sea monsters can begin to appear rarely, slowly chasing the player’s hook for a while before fading away. Getting caught instantly pulls the player out of the minigame and spawns an aggro sea monster. This hazard could even spawn fishing-exclusive side bosses under the right conditions if such a thing were added. Could also play adrenaline inducing music to make the player freak out because that’s fun.
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Errant Magic: Dark sea exclusive hazard where an arrow pointing in the path of the hazard appears and a sound cue plays before a blast of magic of a random base element shoots through the water quickly. This hazard appears fairly frequently especially at further dark sea ranges.
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Ominous Presence: Very rare dark sea exclusive hazard when at very deep depths and the most dangerous hazard of them all. I suppose it could also appear within the war seas but it’d have to be much more rare. The player’s screen will grow much darker, spawns will stop, and the player will hear ominous deep whooshing sounds approaching. Afterwards a unique pitch-black deep sea monster that is unspeakably mutated will spawn and begin throwing out attacks with brief indicators for the area the attack will land, turning the minigame into a straight up Undertale/Deltarune battle. If the player survives the encounter their hook will sink a massive distance down, potentially shooting them straight to the sea floor. Oh and also, it won’t allow you to run away by breaking your hold to end run indicator, and failing this minigame is highly ill advised, have fun!
Conclusion
With this new arcadey minigame being added, Arcane Odyssey will gain a whole new layer of depth and a new gameplay loop players can dedicate themselves to getting better at and obtaining better gear for. This new minigame would significantly increase how fun and rewarding fishing can be for players, but of course, it is quite a dramatic shift and a lot of work to develop, which may make it unlikely to be added without a lot of support so be sure to pitch in your vote if you like this idea!
New unique enchantments and fishing rods can be added with unique abilities and alterations to the minigame itself, like a ghostly fishing rod dropped by a ghost boss that has an active ability that lets you phase through hazards or an enchantment that lessens the frequency of hazards or increases the speed of the whole minigame. I think this is super cool and adds tons more content possibilities down the line!
Regardless of how it might actually be implemented, I hope you all see it in a fair and reasonable light and have enjoyed my little long-winded suggestion with goofy illustrations, which actually this is the first time I’m making some for a suggestion and the first time I’ve drawn in any form in a long time, so that was interesting and kinda difficult. Anyways, give me a vote if you like the idea, and also lastly, I highly recommend you check out this suggestion as well! It has some ideas that could integrate well with this one and would overall just make the sea feel more fun and alive and would be great for a fishing/professions and ocean exploration overhaul update!
Addendum: Feel free to drop some ideas of your own for unique bosses you can pull up in different regions of the world from the sea monster encounters, hazards that could be added to this, or unique fishing rods players can get! Would love to hear some fun ideas.
