Over the past few weeks here on MMORPG, we’ve had a few debates about the current sizing of multiplayer games and MMORPGs. Is there not enough immersive interaction? Should multiplayer games cater to solo players? Is forced multiplayer in an inherently multiplayer game bad, actually?
With Webfishing, I think we’ve hit peak multiplayer game—because it can be any or all of those. Or none.
The concept of Webfishing is perfectly simple. A good chunk of Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s playerbase loves fishing, and the team at lamedeveloper, which is just one developer named West, essentially distilled that experience into a single multiplayer game. It was originally made in eight days for a game jam by West, and the Steam version is a far more fleshed-out version of it, with additional graphics, design, and sounds by other artists.
In its current iteration, its gameplay is fairly straightforward. To start up, you can either join an online lobby or invite your friends to one—or play by yourself, if you’d like. You grab worms, grab your rod, and fish; when a fish bites, you hold the mouse, and mash your mouse button past a few blockers on occasion. When you sell fish, you get money, and your money lets you do other things. The game keeps your progress client-side, too, so joining another lobby won’t ruin your save.
And while it’s perfectly acceptable to go around fishing by yourself, the game feels a little bit lonelier for it. As it is, the island is already small enough, and it feels smaller without others hunting down fish. It reminded me of certain recent chats here on MMORPG about how, while solo games are cool, often a game just feels different when there are others around. Alive, even!
Plenty of players have also pointed out that this is a great game for the modern style of online socialization: just chatting with friends on a Discord server. It’s a relatively mindless, straightforward game, and any distractions from chatter aren’t mind-encompassing, like an FPS game or MMORPG would be.
Throughout Webfishing, there are also little sandbox-like things to do, but none of it feels urgent, even when you’re among friends. There are little treasures around the island, you can test your RNG for completionism in the game’s journal, play scratch-off lottery cards, or just pick up a guitar and play games. (I’m also trying to figure out what to do with haunted bones.) Therefore, you can really just tab out to rant about something, or if you’re bored in a conversation, you can zone out with a few good catch attempts.
With all these factors together, when the game clicks with friends in the lobby, it really clicks, and the results are always delightful. The best example I can give is when I caught a whale—like, a literal whale, that was so big that my character could barely move—it caught everyone’s collective attention, because it literally occupied the entire screen, as shown here:
We had to all stop to stare in awe and chatter and shout about it—a whale! Nobody else had caught one! Why is it so big! And then we all went back to catching gigantic ocean stuff. (And the next day, I caught one that was even bigger, and we all started shouting again.)
Basically, it feels like Webfishing taps into a much-desired middle ground that a lot of online games aren’t offering: a place to just be without urgency, and things to do without pressure. I don't feel like I have to do dailies, or join a roleplay, or scramble for a world boss. I can just fish.
Yoko Taro may be onto something: Maybe fishing really is just peak gaming.
