From Stardew Valley To Destiny 2, Here’s Why We All Love Fishing Minigames

I love fishing.

Sometimes, when I have a tedious task to do, like filing my taxes, I’ll head out to the coast of wherever I happen to be, find a spot devoid of turtles or crabs or aggressive creatures, and just settle in on the shoreline. I can work on my boring task for a bit, then when I hear the tell-tale splishy splash sound of a bite, I’ll quickly go to reel it in and cast another line before continuing my humdrum work. Sometimes, I can catch hundreds of fish this way, and sometimes even reel in a treasure chest or two with goodies.

World of Warcraft’s great, you know?

Both for seasoned fishers in real life and individuals who have never once been out near the water, video game fishing is a wonderful pastime. It seems like every game has a fishing minigame nowadays. They’re in action-y games like The Legend of Zelda and Hades, strategy games like Fire Emblem, RPGs like Persona and Tales, and (of course) sims like Stardew Valley and The Sims. These days, it’s almost weirder if your game doesn’t have some sort of fishing in it.

With great popularity comes great opinions, and as a result, I’ve seen a lot of divisive takes on fishing minigames over the years. What constitutes a good fishing minigame? Are fishing minigames good or even necessary? Should they be deeply involved, or just a little surface-level distraction in a bigger game?

I tossed out some bait, and reeled in responses from dozens of real life fishers, fishing minigame fans, and developers of fishing minigames to get a good sense of what it is that makes fishing minigames special. Here are some of their big fish stories:

Go Fish

To start with, I wanted to hear from people who had actually been fishing: not just once, but regularly enough to really understand what fishing is. Why do people like it? What’s most important to capture about fishing in a video game?

Over and over throughout these interviews, the word “meditative” kept coming up. Fishing is, by and large, a peaceful activity. Stephanie Tinsley Fitzwilliam, PR professional and head of Tinsley PR, explained that aspect very well. She tells me she regularly goes fly fishing in high-elevation alpine rivers, streams, and lakes. For her, fishing is “about being outside and soaking in the quiet atmosphere so that I can recharge from a hectic work week.”

Sometimes, she says, things go wrong. There’s a thunderstorm, or your line gets tangled. So patience is also a key part of fishing. “I don’t suspect those minigames ever show that part of fishing (getting stuck in trees multiple times, spending half your time undoing tangles or bird nests, the long, hot hike from the car to the fishing spot, overcrowded river banks or lakes, loud assholes being obnoxious, hikers throwing sticks for their dogs into the exact spot you are fishing in, etc). 

“But here’s the key and video games are familiar with this feeling: people keep fishing because, just like hitting blackjack in Vegas, getting a fish on your line hits that serotonin in your brain. You always need one more hit, one more bite. 

“…My best days fishing are when I can stand in a place like this for a long period of time and no one bothers me. No cell phone, no one can find me, no one needs me for anything. Those are the most memorable times for me—fish or no fish on the line. Just quiet, and peace, and all things natural.”

Fruity Snacks, a Final Fantasy 14 content creator who specializes in fishing and who fishes in real life, also mentioned that fishing is very calm and meditative for him. But he also added that another key feeling of fishing for him is the balance of calm and tension.

“This calmness is (hopefully) interrupted by the rush of getting a bite, which depending on the fish you’re catching might not be relaxing. While reeling in any fish is still equally requiring focus, it can be disruptive to that calm state you can find yourself in. So being able to learn how to bring yourself back to the calm and meditative state after a rush of adrenaline is incredibly powerful and useful, not just with fishing, but beyond it as well.”

For a third perspective, I enjoyed hearing from May Gardens, a game designer who has a small Steam curator page specifically for games with fishing mechanics that she likes. She’s also a “Saint of the Firmament” for fishing in FF14, and has been out fishing for salmon every year since she was little. She once caught a 30-pound salmon, she says. “Holy moly, that was a big fish.”

Gardens’ outlook on the feel of fishing was interesting to me because of the dramatic contrast to everyone else’s experience, specifically because of her very specific type of fishing. While she, too, mentioned the “romantic meditativeness” of fishing, her specific brand of the hobby is far more intense, and is rarely captured in games:

“My experience lies in ocean fishing, mostly trolling for salmon, but also occasionally jigging for halibut,” she says. “This is pretty far removed from the collective idea of fishing that people seem to have, which I think is much more inspired by freshwater fishing, especially casting / fly fishing. I’ve barely ever cast a line in my life and yet that’s the primary verb of almost every fishing system I’ve ever played. I put my fishing rod in a sort of clamp and then send its line and the tackle attached to it down into the cold depths of the sea using a down-rigger whose strong, braided line is attached to a ten pound lead weight. It’s not quite as romantic, and not what most laypeople would think of when they think of a nice afternoon of fishing. Probably isn’t even what most people who fish think of when they think of fishing either! So it’s no big surprise to me that I’ve never really found a game (mini or otherwise) that represents the kind of fishing I know best. I would really love to try and capture it in a game of my own some day.”

One Fish, Two Fish, Bad Fish, Good Fish

Basically everyone had nice things to say about Stardew Valley’s fishing minigame, which was often held up as a prime example of the format. Other games that I heard multiple folks praise for their fishing included Hades, Final Fantasy 14, and Sea of Thieves. 

Gardens shared some insight as to why Stardew Valley in particular is a shining star of fishing:

“It really gives you a feeling for the give and take, the franticness, and especially, that you can start to learn what fish is on the line well before you’ve gotten it into the boat just from how it acts on the line. In real life, Chinook (King) salmon usually like to run hard and fast the moment they hit the line, whereas Coho (Silver) salmon usually make a break for the surface, leaping out of the water and sometimes spitting the hook right back at your face. I think it’s great when a fishing system is expressive enough for this to shine through, and it can be done in very simple ways as well, like when fish favor certain bait or take certain amounts of time before biting.”

Lots of other games were mentioned by those I spoke to, though. Mouse, a streamer who used to fish with her grandfather, told me all about her love of VRchat, which just got a new fishing world a few months ago, aptly titled “FISH!” FISH! promises over 20,000 unique fish and a “full progression” system, making it arguably less of a minigame within VRChat and more a game in and of itself, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters is why Mouse and so many other people love fishing there, and in VRChat in general:

“In the VRChat world I hang out in, it’s basically the perfect middle-investment task to be doing while you hang out with people. It’s like hanging out fishing in real life, except stuff actually bites. In other games, I think it really just rubs my brain right to have that sweet spot of something I can do while I watch something on my second monitor. Catch the fish, number goes up, log fills out, and it’s all very soothing. There’s something very nice about that repetitive movement—like I said before, it’s almost meditative. It’s a moment of peace in a world where we don’t get many.”

Thorne, known as the Fishing Minigame Guy, appropriately runs a social account: Is There A Fishing Minigame? But contrary to the name, he doesn’t think every single game needs a fishing minigame in it.

“My general rule is [if a game is] quite tense or stressful, a fishing minigame should be used as a moment of relief, like in Hades or Red Dead Redemption 2. But if a game is calm and cozy, a fishing minigame should exist to add a little bit of tension and challenge, such as in Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing. The times there shouldn’t be a fishing minigame, however, are games where there’s no room for a break from the action, or where time away from the main goal or story would break the flow of the game or diminish its impact—if a fishing minigame was in Outer Wilds, for example, the actual gameplay loop would be diminished by it; you’d either have no time to fish or you’d spend *too much time* fishing, both of which would take away from the game and the journey it’s taking you on.

“The reason Sega Bass Fishing still holds up as one of the greatest fishing games of all time, to me, is that it has that sense of tension and the feeling of being rewarded for doing well, but it also adds that realistic element of having to ride your boat around and choose the perfect lure for what you’re trying to catch and the focus on the fish more so than the main character. But, should the fishing game be less focused on simulation and more focused on the fun factor (such as Dredge or Webfishing), the things that make a great fishing minigame are going to be necessary, as an audience for these games is going to be more generalized and so won’t care so much for the technicalities of fishing.”

Not everyone loves Sega Bass Fishing, though. Dr. Anne Ladyem McDivett, an historian, video game scholar, and Twitch streamer who plays fishing games while wearing “goofy grandpa-style pun fishing shirts,” is one of them, and her dislike of it informs her broader feelings on fishing within other, non-fishing games.

“I typically refuse to play ‘realistic’ fishing games because they feel too serious. I don’t like to get too sweaty about how I am doing my fishing, and I do also like having the option to do other things eventually. I think a great comparison here is the fishing in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. There are three ways to fish in that game—you can just go fishing as the protagonists (either spear fishing or just off into the ocean), or you can go to the arcade and play Sega Bass Fishing. I will lose myself for hours playing the first two types. You throw a line out, get a fish, and you keep going. Same with ‘here is a spear, I need to get a fish for my island.’ But then as soon as I go to the arcade and try to play Sega Bass Fishing, everything just feels so much more serious, the huge fish feel like they can be impossible to catch, and the entire experience just felt way more deflating. I caught the fish, but at what cost? It’s me getting frustrated and unhappy, rather than just relaxing and fishing for fun.”

Daphne Sophinos, project lead on rhythm game Beatblock, similarly doesn’t feel that fishing should be too serious. She quietly worked on a fishing minigame for Beatblock as an April Fools’ gag. She took the project seriously: it’s a real feature, but the April Fools of it all is fitting because of Sophinos’ love for the comedic aspects of fishing minigames:

“A really underlooked part of what makes a fishing minigame great is comedy,” she says. “I don’t think fishing in Animal Crossing would be looked at so fondly if you didn’t get a dad joke with every catch. Even if you aren’t explicitly telling jokes, juxtaposition can also be used to great effect, like with the AR Games fishing [on the Nintendo 3DS] letting you catch photorealistic fish models in the same area as a bright cartoony Cheep Cheep from Mario.”

Meanwhile, Fruity Snacks shared a bit of a hot take: she thinks fishing minigames are starting to get a little stale.

“I’m kind of getting a little tired of fishing systems that are just trying to keep a bobber inside of a bar or are just ‘press a button at the right time,’” she says. “I think fishing minigames have sort of stagnated a little bit over the past decade or so when it comes to how you catch fish, and I would love to see more evolution and experimentation in that. We’re starting to see some new fishing ‘mechanics’ come out in [full-fledged] fishing games, yes, but the minigames really could use some evolution I think.”

Stocking the pond

It’s one thing to have opinions about what makes a good fishing minigame from a player perspective. It’s another entirely to turn those opinions into a serviceable minigame. Chris Balser is a systems designer who worked on, among other things, The Elder Scrolls Online. While she didn’t design ESO’s fishing herself, she inherited it in 2014 as a part of taking on all crafting and gathering systems, and expanded it in each new chapter while she was there.

“Our goals for the system were for it to be an interesting, relaxing, chill-out activity for you to do while between other things,” she explains. “It also serves as a collection to complete, for those players who enjoy filling out a stickerbook, and a rock-solid gateway for achievements for players who are focused on that particular sort of collection (and with that, titles and dyes, naturally). It has a number of fun mechanical foibles under the hood I shan’t spoil but a core thing to know about ESO‘s fishing is that every fishing hole has a type, and each type has commonplace fish and rare fish particular to the region you’re fishing in. And, most uniquely, ESO wants you to fish in proximity with other players—fishing an area with others depletes the active fishing site faster but gets you rarer fish.”

Balser tells me that after launch, the team struggled with how to expand the system in future updates. Initially, they stuck to things they’d done before: adding new areas to fish in, or adding more difficult fish, or allowing players to clean certain fish into ingredients for food. But the team wanted to do more. In later updates, they added increasingly complex and quirky fish to catch with their own “tweaks” to the rules, as well as “a very particular kind of fishing dish for the focused fisher that makes you count as multiple fishers for the purpose of fishing for the fish you want to fish when you fish.”

On upcoming indie haunted farming sim Grave Seasons, concept artist Yejin Park says that the best fishing games “have some way for you to survey the fish before you start—different shadows in the water, shape, location, time of day, etc. Satisfying because it gives ‘the fish is real’ energy.” 

Park, producer and lore manager Alanna Smith, and the Grave Seasons team wanted to “do right by fishing,” which Smith notes is an expected feature in farming sims.

“Simple felt better, so we looked back at mini-games from the early 2000s that focused on timing and rhythm rather than more complex input. Nearly every team locked in to get it just right: fish types, bait, season conditions and rarity all working together, alongside finessing the audio-visual feedback so every hit or miss feels satisfying and worth repeating. Our code team even built a debug system to test expected hauls, which we pair with QA to balance the experience. It’s ironically a lot of moving parts to get a little mini-game simple and smooth.”

Maxwell Zierath, director of production at Singularity 6, told me about building the fishing minigame in Palia.

“Because it was our first mini-game, it was a big learning lesson for how to set up scalable systems in Unreal. Authoring fish in Palia was not a pleasant experience; every fish had data in six separate locations that all needed to be cross-checked to make sure it was correct, and all of the fishes’ behaviors were hand authored with no way to provide random directions. Yes—that meant every time a fish moved right, or moved left, or jumped, it’s the designer that created that move. We’ve since refactored the system to be much easier to make fish, though the player experience has remained the same.”

Fortunately, it seems to have worked out. Faye Visintainer is the former community lead for Palia, and she reached out separately to praise the team’s work. Visintainer says she “liked the feeling of ‘tugging’ the fish back and forth to keep it within the catchable safe space—I thought it was straightforward to pick up but challenging to truly master, and it felt like the fish were responsive rather than just tapping a button.” She also appreciated the variety of fish available, their different behaviors, the numerous uses for caught fish, and more.

In the Deep End

And then there’s Corey Willis, former staff systems designer at Bungie, who worked on the fishing minigame for Destiny 2, a game I never would have guessed had a fishing minigame if I didn’t already know. Willis grew up in Florida. He used to go fishing on a pontoon boat with his grandparents, who also happened to have TNN Bass Tournament at their house, which he played in copious amounts. It was good preparation for his eventual work designing Destiny 2’s fishing system. Fishing, for Bungie, was apparently a meme of sorts within the studio for a while before it was pitched for Season of the Deep, which he says was a “now or never” moment for the team. Inspired by the Destiny loot cave and intended to be low-stakes and highly social, the fishing game they set out to make was one that would exist within the framework of what Destiny 2 is: “shooting bad guys with friends, collecting the shiny baubles that appear, rinse and repeat.” 

Willis helpfully gave me a detailed breakdown of four “categories” that, for Willis and his colleagues, form the components of Destiny 2’s fishing design. The first, Preparation, captures the elements of where and how; essentially the locations you fish in and the preparation for doing so (getting a tacklebox together). Performance is the other half of the “how,” and involves setting the hook, and actually catching and reeling the fish in. Payoff, naturally, is what you get from it: either an exciting reward, or perhaps a disappointing one. Finally, there’s the Prestige: how players tell the story of their catch, perhaps by displaying it somewhere.

Willis shared with me an incredibly detailed breakdown of how those four elements came together in Destiny 2’s fishing. I’ll let him tell it, with a little bit of editing just for length:

“As a minigame, and part of a greater whole, the Preparation part of the experience took the form of collecting bait by playing activities and collecting resources, reinforcing the game loop overall. While we still afforded players the opportunity to fish while out of bait, we wanted to make sure we were still incentivizing players to engage with the core loop, rather than just endlessly fishing. This was also important because the quality of the fish was dependent on whether players were using bait or not, so in order to earn the real rewards, players needed to put in the time to collect that resource. Additionally, in order to create more variance in the day-to-day and week-to-week experience of Fishing, we positioned our Fishing holes on a few different Destinations, which affected the available pool of fish, and helped mix things up a bit, while also increasing player agency towards catching a specific fish.

“When it comes to Performance, after a few brainstorms, we ultimately landed on a straightforward timed button press, with incentives for perfect timing, and a quick reward moment which reflected that success or failure. It was important to us that there be not only multiple degrees of success, but also a failure condition, such that players felt like they needed to actually try in order to succeed, and were rewarded for their mastery of the system. This was really a team effort, and I can’t thank them enough for really coming through here to make it shine with the audio, visuals, and the game feel.

“As mentioned previously, I think about half of the Destiny formula is collecting shiny baubles, and we wanted to lean into players’ pre-existing understanding of loot. As such, it was immediately clear that dropping colorful, glowing fish was the only way to go. While there were some hiccups along the way, the process of making these shiny, scaly friends pop out of the world was generally straightforward, though the systems governing the specifics of which fish and how large it was were fairly complex behind the scenes, which isn’t too surprising given that we were basically distributing fish-shaped loot out of a gun-shaped hole. It’s also here where we reinforced the social nature of Destiny 2‘s fishing, and rewarded nearby players with an increased chance to catch high-quality fish whenever a player caught a legendary or exotic fish, which meant that each player was rooting for one another, and got to effectively share in the spoils.

“Finally, we come to the Prestige. As with any game that allows for collection, I’m of the opinion that a vital part of that experience is being able to bask in the glory of your trophies. As such, once the player was packed to the gills with fish, they returned to their very own aquarium, and delivered them in true Destiny fashion, by dunking them into a terminal with a visceral splash, upon which they would be showered with loot, and any new discoveries would populate in the tank. This was another part of the process which was truly a team effort, and there were a few people that really went above and beyond to make this space feel beautiful and alive. This act of turning in the fish also acted as a valuable opportunity to inform players of their progress, and give them an opportunity to jump back into the rest of the game if desired.”

“As with any feature, the most important part of a fishing minigame is that it meets the needs of the larger game that it exists within,” Willis concludes. “This is part of what makes them so diverse, as they should ideally be a product of their environment, and they live within such a vast array of ecosystems. There’s something to be said for meeting the brief for the fantasy (i.e. trying to translate the essence of fishing to your game systems, and deciding how to prioritize them), but as long as you’re creating something that serves the goals for the game overall (be they social, pacing, tonal, etc.), I think that’s the core of what makes a good fishing minigame.”