Is Fishing Worth It in Nightingale?

Summary

Fishing mechanics in Nightingale's early access are currently lackluster, offering low effort and even lower rewards.
Upgrades for fishing gear in Nightingale are underwhelming, with little motivation for players to invest in improving their gear.
While future updates may bring more variety to fishing, Nightingale needs to address the issue of fishing rewards to make it more engaging.

General game optimization/stability and more story content are already expected to come in future updates leading up to Nightingale’s full release and beyond, but there are inevitably a few rough edges to the game’s early access. If there’s one particular feature in Nightingale’s early access that needs some more attention, it’s arguably the fishing mechanics.

Nightingale has a fairly polished early access period with a surprising amount of depth in most elements of the game, which makes the game’s current fishing mechanics stand out like a sore thumb. While fishing is bound to become more worthwhile as content like additional resources and crafting recipes are added to the game over time, these kinds of minor additions might not be enough to redeem Nightingale’s fishing mechanics from its current state.

Why Nightingale’s Fishing Mechanics Deserve An Update

Fishing in Nightingale’s Early Access Is Low Effort, Even Lower Reward

Players can gain access to fishing gear and begin to fish in Nightingale relatively early in the game. It also doesn’t take much investment in the proper gear required, as at the moment, players only need a fishing rod and a suitable body of water, which the latter can seemingly be found in any of the available Realm Biome combinations in Nightingale.

There are plenty of gear upgrades and Realm Cards in Nightingale that players can utilize to improve certain aspects of fishing, like improving the rarity of rewards from fishing and making the fishing rod more stamina-efficient. However, these arguably aren’t worth the investment for now, since a basic fishing rod can seemingly catch any and every fishing resource anyway.

Speaking of, the resources that players can earn from fishing in Nightingale are quite underwhelming. As of Nightingale’s early access so far, there are only a handful of fish and miscellaneous resources for players to obtain from fishing. While a couple of these items are requirements for crafting recipes, beyond this there isn’t much to motivate players to fish.

Aside from when players need to complete one of the mentioned crafting recipes, the main appeal of fishing is that it can be a shortcut to farming Nightingale’s Essence currency or food ingredients. Although, even on a low-difficulty realm, farming the unique creatures that are marked by a wolf icon on the map can be a much more efficient source of Essence as well as other high-tier crafting materials.

Essence is used for purchasing from traders, crafting, and repairing gear in Nightingale. Anything can be dismantled and turned into the lowest tier of Essence, while the higher tiers of Essence can be obtained from completing puzzles and other challenges.

How Nightingale Can Improve Its Fishing Mechanics Throughout Early Access

Ultimately, it makes sense that Nightingale doesn’t go all-in on making fishing a central, recurring part of progression. At the same time though, this shouldn’t mean that Nightingale should neglect its fishing mechanics and leave it in its current state.

As more Realm Biome combinations become available in future updates for Nightingale, there is likely to be a larger variety of resources and rewards from fishing in these diverse environments. While this alone could be an upgrade to the game's fishing mechanics, there’s still one major hurdle that Nightingale needs to address before this, which is how underwhelming the upgraded fishing gear can be.

Nightingale could do a better job of encouraging players to invest in upgrades for their fishing gear. Again, there’s not much of a reason for players to invest in better fishing gear beyond earning their first crude fishing pole, since this can catch anything and everything. Consequently, there arguably needs to be higher quality rewards for players who invest the materials into upgrading their gear, even if it means making the starting fishing gear less effective.

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