Please add fighting the fish for fishing

[InternalSun]

The Minecraft style fishing mechanic is good as a temporary measure, but I think having a Rust (Project Zomboid, Twilight Princess, etc..) style mechanic of having to fight the fish would add more immersion and make the experience more enjoyable. It would also make capturing the rarer fish feel more rewarding.

[Hanril]

I think the Twilight Princess system was ported to Abiotic Factor and it was pretty fun. I'm ok with more systems, but there will be so much whining ang crying, like with trees and berry bushes.

[Kulze]

Fair, a minigame is definitely good.
I like the Project Zomboid one the best plainly spoken. Simple and needs you to use materials repeatedly if you're not good at it, but is lenient.

Also... which type of fighting? Should it be boxing? Wrestling? Western style shoot-off? I'm open for ideas! 

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums!

10 hours ago, InternalSun said:

The Minecraft style fishing mechanic is good as a temporary measure, but I think having a Rust (Project Zomboid, Twilight Princess, etc..) style mechanic of having to fight the fish would add more immersion and make the experience more enjoyable.

Having an explanation of what this is supposed to look like in Vintage Story would help tremendously. Rust, Project Zomboid, and Twilight Princess might be fairly popular game titles, but that doesn't mean that everyone is familiar with their mechanics(I for one am not).

[Kulze]

As a overview for different fishing mechanics. In general all of them demand a bit or more player attention, patience and/or skill in some form or another.

One of the most known ones likely is 'Stardew Valley' and 'Palworld', that style does the following:
- You throw out the line
- You wait a moment for a fish to 'bite'.
- A small cylinder appears with a fish depiction and a bar inside, your task is to keep the fish symbol over the bar
- With a click you raise the bar, without it falls down gradually. The fish moves more or less erratically depending on difficulty.

Minecraft:
- You throw the line
- You wait for 'bubbles' to appear after a few seconds (which can feel like ages)
- Those bubbles come closer, and when they reach your bobber the bobber gets pulled underwater. At this moment you click to successfully catch whatever you reel in.

Project Zomboid:
- You search for 'bubbles' (active zones) and throw out your line there
- You now get a half-rounded bar depicting 'line tension'. Left is loose, right is under force.
- When a fish bites - depicted by movement of the bobber - a minigame starts where you have to reel the fish in without getting into 'yellow' or 'red' line tension, or it is damage or even snaps, loosing the fish and the line.

Rust/Abiotic Factor/Twilight Princess:
- Throw out the line
- When you get a bite the bobber moves in a direction.
- You have to counter the direction in which the bobber moves by inputing the direction.
- When the fish calms down you can reel it it, if you reel during tension too long your line snaps instead.

My personal take is that a good starting point would be the simplistic Minecraft direction here, though the strain-mechanic of Project Zomboid is a good expansion for that ultimately, leading to a small minigame which costs a bit of time but is not too significant while also giving the process a more active component overall.
The bubbles would provide a more lenient timeframe to take action compared to now, or something similar happening, like the bobber taking some mild dips first before ultimately be submerged fully from a bite. And the minigame would then counter te reduction in difficulty from that through a more active element which is based on a player-skill basis.

[InternalSun]

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Welcome to the forums!

Having an explanation of what this is supposed to look like in Vintage Story would help tremendously. Rust, Project Zomboid, and Twilight Princess might be fairly popular game titles, but that doesn't mean that everyone is familiar with their mechanics(I for one am not).

For me the Rust/Abiotic Factor mechanic is the most fun. In Rust when you hook, the fish will then start pulling the line away from the player, and also to the left and right. Your goal is to reel the fish close enough for it to be considered a "catch". The trouble comes when reeling while the fish is pulling, this puts strain on the line, and after 5 seconds or so while reeling during tension, you will hear the reeling sound get higher in pitch and eventually snap the line.

With easier fish, you can usually reel them completely in before the line snaps without much trouble, but with more difficult catches you need to time things more intentionally

You can wait for the fish to rest between bursts of pulling the line, then reel it in.

With even more difficult fish though, you do not make enough progress from reeling in-between its natural states of pulling and resting to stop it from swimming away. To counter this, whenever the fish is pulling either to the left or right, you let off reeling and "fight" the fish by pulling the rod in the opposite direction the fish is swimming in. This slowly builds up an invisible "exhaust" meter on the fish, which means while its exhaust meter is higher than its base state it has to rest more often, giving you more opportunities to reel. The exhaust meter will slowly go back down during a catch, but the fish must rest for a while before the meter starts dropping more dramatically.

This makes fishing feel like a back-and-forth game between the fish and the player, and the ways a fish will fight is pretty unique between each fish, so much so that in Rust you can usually identify the fish based on how its fighting your line. This is a very immersive experience.

Project Zomboid just has a rudimentary tension system, you have to put tension to real in the fish but too much tension will snap the line. It's quite simple, and therefore a lot less interesting than Rust's, but its still more engaging than Minecrafts. In Zomboid's case, it falls short because the fish behavior doesn't really change between fish too much, and you can usually get away with mindlessly putting as much tension on the line without it ever snapping because it's very forgiving.

A more arcade-y example would be Sega Bass Fishing. It's similar in a way but the segments in wish you have to exhaust the fish are more like QTE's rather than a dynamic system

Edited Monday at 11:47 PM by InternalSun
Corrections and clarifications

[LadyWYT]

Interesting. I wonder if this isn't planned already, just unimplemented, since left-clicking with the rod while the line is cast will snap the line with a cracking sound effect.  Either way, that does sound like a system that would be pretty fun to play with.