As a reminder, what I’m looking for while reviewing is in a previous blog post, which you can find here: https://annatheannoying.wordpress.com/2021/12/30/gone-fishing-reviewing/
Rating
It hits all of my requirements. The rare fish camera shifting issue is a minor annoyance, but the thing that made it lose half a star for me is due to non-fishing things about the game itself (admittedly, some of the problems are mostly because I had the misfortune of being on a low-population server): the difficulty making money via the trading post, corruption events downgrading crafting stations in towns, and the unpredictable raid boss that is Amazon Games (more detail in the summary at the bottom).
Actual game overview
New World is an MMORPG with Dark Souls-style combat, released by Amazon Games. I paid A$56.95 for it on Steam (IsThereAnyDeal link, though it doesn’t seem to have any info). It has no ongoing subscription, but you are able to buy skins in the in-game store. The game has a pretty heavy focus on crafting skills, but at the time of writing (version 1.1.1 – I started this post nearly a month ago), the crafting aspect of the game has become very grind-heavy. (There are many complaints about the game in its current state, but I want to focus on the fishing.)
Disclaimer: I only made it to level 38 (60 is max level), and my fishing level is 63 (200 is max level). I have done most of the fishing quest line, but I died too many times trying to hand in the latest quest as it’s in one of the higher level zones. I could probably make a run for it, but don’t have the time for it right now.
Fishing mechanics – 5/5
Casting
To begin fishing, once you are near an area where you can fish, and you have a rod equipped, press F3 to pull out your fishing rod. Using the cursor, aim and hold down left-mouse. A bar appears with a marker moving up and then down. How close the marker is to the top of the bar when you release the left-mouse button determines how far you cast your line. The further you cast your line, the less tension you have when reeling. The deeper the water is where your cast lands, the shorter the bite time is (deep has the shortest, very shallow has the longest).
The marker only goes up and then down once. If you don’t release before it hits the bottom, it’ll cast with the shortest distance.
Hooking
Once you get a bite, the fishing indicator shakes and you’ll see a warning saying, “Get ready!”. The indicator will turn green and the circle will begin ticking down. You need to left click before the circle ticks all the way around. If you click too early, or too late, you’ll miss the fish.
Reeling
The indicator will change to show two things: the circle around the edge shows how far away the fish is from you. The centre section shows the tension indicator. Clicking and holding the left-mouse button reels the fish in, but also increases your tension. Releasing the button makes the fish swim further away, but reduces the tension. Once the distance has been reduced to 0m, you’ve caught the fish.
If the distance gets too high, the fish will swim away. If the tension gets too high, your line snaps and the fish escapes.
I don’t know if this is actually part of the mechanic, but I’ve found that the more difficult the reel stage is, the rarer the fish caught.
Consumables
You can add bait to your cast, which can do things like increase the chances of catching larger / rarer fish, but it’s optional. There are different types of bait for freshwater versus saltwater fishing, but I haven’t managed to work out how to tell which water sources are fresh or salt, other than looking it up online. (https://newworldfishingguide.com says lakes, ponds, rivers and streams are freshwater; oceans and swamps are saltwater.)
Bait can be found by picking up flint, harvesting in bushes, cooking, and salvaging certain fish. Or you can buy it from the trading post.
I really like that bait is optional in this game, as I’m not a fan of managing bait.
Fishing spots
There are many fishing spots scattered around the world. There are three categories: broad (30 fish), rare (20 fish) and secret (10 fish). Each spot has a minimum fishing level required in order to see it. The spot is active when there are fish visbily jumping out of the pool. Once the pool has been exhausted, the water will bubble, but no fish will jump out. Landing your cast in the pool will increase your chance of getting a rare fish, and the bite time is also very short, regardless of how deep the water is.
Travel
Getting to different areas can be pretty fast, assuming you’re willing to farm azoth, as this allows you to travel to towns and fast travel points from any other town / fast travel point. While levelling, you have azoth coming out of your ears, but I’ve heard that once you hit max level, it’s quite a grind to farm azoth.
Otherwise, there are no mounts or automated travel, so you’ll have to run. There is an auto-run toggle, but that’s not much consolation when the world is quite large.
That being said, unless you are after specific fish, there are plenty of beautiful places to fish in the early zones.
Time-To-Fish – 5/5
It took me 7 minutes and 51 seconds from my character entering the world to being able to cast my first line. That being said, I’m pretty rubbish at Dark Souls-like combat.
Being able to fish requires creating your character[1] and getting through the tutorial that introduces the controls, and also sets the scene for the story (yes, there’s a story, but I have no idea what it is – who reads the lore?!). Then you need to pick up some flint and green wood, craft a harvesting sickle at the fireplace, harvest some fibre from nearby hemp plants, and use green wood and fibre to craft a fishing rod. Press F3 (the default hotkey) near a water source, and you can fish!
Or if you have a friend on the server already, they can trade you a fishing rod, and you can fish once you make it through the tutorial and walk to the nearest water source.
[1] Character creation can take a while, as there are so many customisation options. Also, names seem to be unique across all servers, i.e. if someone has taken the name Qirjntgnsk, then nobody else can use that name on any other server. So it may take a while to create your character and choose their name.
Multitaskability – 4/5
I found it quite difficult to hear the sound of the “hook” sound over the sound of whatever video I was watching in the background. While you can reel while only half-paying attention, I have lost a few difficult fish due to letting the tension get too high.
That being said, I watched most of season one of Squid Game while fishing, and I don’t know Korean, so I had to focus on the subtitles. However, I wasn’t too worried about missing fish.
Your fishing rod loses durability as you fish. After a long fishing session, you’ll need to either repair it, or replace the broken one with a new one. Repairing is pretty simple, as long as you have gold and repair parts (which you get from salvaging weapons and armour) in your inventory. You can simply right click on the rod and select the repair option without having to be in a town.
Inventory in New World is done by weight, with your character having a maximum weight they can carry before becoming encumbered. Fish and bait tend to be quite light, and I’ve never hit my weight limit (351.8) while fishing (1-2 hour sessions). However, you should avoid salvaging fish (or the junk items you can fish up), as the salvaged materials tend to weigh more than the original items (because New World physics seems to follow different rules?). This means inventory management isn’t really an issue while fishing.
One thing that pisses me off about the reeling stage is that when you catch an uncommon or rarer fish, your character holds it up, proudly. However, this shifts the position of your cursor, so you need shift your camera back around to the water, and aim your cast again. Frustrating when you just want to watch something on your second monitor. You can click to end the animation early, but it still shifts your camera.
Time management – 5/5
There are no “end of day” mechanic in the game, though you may want to return to town every now and again to check for new town board quests, craft things, and empty your inventory contents into your storage.
Otherwise, feel free to just relax and fish your worries away.
Excitement – 5/5
I do like that there’s a chance, albeit really small, of catching legendary fish in every water source. But much more likely is the possiblity of catching a treasure chest. Some people on reddit were saying they hated treasure chests as they were full of junk, but as someone levelling jewelcrafting, it was exciting to get one.
I also like that none of the fish are really considered “junk” as you can at least get fish fillets from the lower tier ones which can be used as an ingredient in cooking. Unlike some other games where certain fish cause an “urgh, not another one of these” reaction, I didn’t get that feeling in New World.
Levelling fishing is a huge grind. Levelling in general is a huge grind in this game. However, it’s pretty exciting when you’re exploring and you come across a fishing hotspot that you may not have seen before because your fishing level was too low.
Usefulness 5/5?
Fish are used in both cooking and arcana recipes (confusingly, the tooltip mentions alchemy, but the crafting skill is called arcana in the game).
Large and medium salmon, tadpoles, fish oil fish fillets, and firm fish fillets ocassionally turn up in town board quests. Some cooking bundles require fish.
As I mentioned nearlier, you can also fish up treasure chests, which contain ingots and gems that can be used in jewelcrafting.
I can’t speak to how much money you can make with fishing, as my server has a low popuation, so that might be why nothing sells for very much.
Ambience – 5/5
Poor balance and design issues aside, New World is a beautiful game. This makes fishing quite relaxing and pleasasnt. The music and sound effects are really nice, and the world itself is really pretty. The water looks so inviting, and the the earlier zones are nice and green.
The only mechanic in the game that negatively affects fishing is the appearance of corrupted portals. I haven’t noticed them as much in the lower level zones, but in the higher level zones, there seem to be quite a few of them.
It’s not a big deal, as you can just move out of the portal zone, though you can still see black smoke from the portal.
Also, if you’re not the kind of person who likes reading global / area chat with randoms, I suggest going into your chat settings and disabling all the chat types. Not only do you get your typical gold selling spam, the fact that there’s a global chat channel will mean that trolls will make their voices heard.
Summary
New World fishing hits all my main requirements, and as a fishing game, I love it. There are some minor annoyances about the fishing experience, but that’s about it.
However, I can’t bring myself to recommend this game to somoene without pointing out the reasons why I am going to uninstall it after I post this review. I definitely don’t recommend this game in its current state if you’re looking for an MMO to play and you don’t care about fishing.
Design decisions / “game still in beta”
The game has quite a lot of game-breaking bugs. To name a few that have happened recently: a bug that allowed players to duplicate items, bug that gave players 300,000 gold (and a mod’s response is “Congratulations!”?!)
To address the item duping bug, AGS disabled trading completely. Bad luck if you had items on the trading post up for sale. Not to mention the trading post UI is rubbish and very confusing.
The “game is still in beta” comment comes up quite often on the New World subreddit. When you have issues like not being able to appeal your ban through the automated system, because the automated system requires your server to have a name longer than 3 characters. Servers the Amazon themselves named. It really makes you feel that the game was rushed to release.
So far, fishing hasn’t been impacted, other than the inability to sell / trade. As there are no vendor NPCs in the game, the only way to get rid of items is to hand them in for quests, sell / trade them to other players, use them in crafting or dump them on the ground. My town storage is starting to fill up, and although I said inventory management isn’t an issue, that’s assuming you get the chance to offload stuff on the trading post at the end of a fishing session. A part of me really struggles to just dump my items on the ground. Must be that RPG hoarding gene.
Corruption events
As I haven’t hit max level, and have spent a lot of time fishing, I’m not too familiar with how thes work. But from what I understand, towns have a chance to be attacked by corrupted. These events will be marked on the map, and players can band together to defend from the attack. At least on my low population server, it’s quite difficult to repel these attacks, and they result in parts of the town being destroyed, e.g. the kitchen might get downgraded from tier 5 to tier 4.
The governor of each town can only upgrade one section of the town per day.
What ends up happening is that towns will slowly build up, only to lose that progress when a corruption event hits.
I think the overall idea behind the mechanic is to discourage having large mega-towns that all players congregate in, and it makes the world feel a bit more dynamic. However, on a low-population server, some towns just end up dead, as nobody can be bothered putting in the effort to build them up as they never get defended.
I found it frustrating that in my home town (Windsward), the Arcane Repository was only tier 2, which limited what I could craft there. We didn’t have a town with both a tier 5 Kitchen and a tier 5 Arcane Repository.
Why I’m uninstalling
For the most part, I can continue fishing happily in the game despite the reasons I mentioned above, but I have this sense of impending doom that AGS will suddenly pull the rug out from underneath us and make fishing terrible. The game just feels so unstable right now – not in the sense that the servers are unstable, but in the sense that they’re chopping and changing things trying to fix issues with the game.
I think I’ll revisit this game some time in the future, but for now, I need to free up the hard drive space in order to try other non-fishing fishing games (the game currently eats up 42GB of hard drive space). If none of the above things bother you, then I do recommend this as a relaxing fishing game.
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