Wizard101's Fishing: The Missing Pieces

When Wizard101 first released fishing, I was extremely excited. And I demonstrated that by publishing three large guides involving fishing, and have taken and interest ever since. However, their wording upon release had me wondering what they left out of this update that might one day be a part of our fishing experience.

Qualifying the Images

Just how accurate are all of these doodles? Aren't they just random images to look cool in a given space? As easy as they might be to dismiss, it's important that we take into account what we've learned from them so far.

Let's first consider this fishing doodle with both the male and female wizards. They're both fishing, and the male wizard is pulling a chest out of the water - we know that this is possible based on experience. But there's one with even more compelling evidence - the female "tower" image.

She's looking down into the water, where we see four fish. These are the Codfather, Grape Jellyfish, Doodlefish, and Tongue Fish. (For a full list of fish, click HERE.)

In another guide, the Epic Fishing Hunting post (HERE), I talk about the doodles on the aquarium interface, all of which we saw before they were known fish, and one of which is confirmed by Wizard101 Senior Software Engineer Gary Smith to exist but not be in-game yet.

If that doesn't tell us that the doodles are accurate, I'm not sure what does. These are most certainly something from which we can draw knowledge, perhaps even some we don't already have, and I intend to back it up with the way the update notes read - a proven sign of things to come.

One Fish, Two Fish

If you look on the right, male "tower" image, you see that he's dropped a line into the water with four lures. One could argue that each lure looks a little different and perhaps represents a different rank of lure, but that could just be me. What I see is a panel not with different species like the female one, but with different sizes. The first two are just normal fish. Perhaps some combination of Small Fry, Keeper, and Whopper.

Then there are two others. One of the most noticeable differences is their "evil" eyes. If they were simply larger fish, they'd have the regular eyes, right? This large, purple fish and the green one below it must be something we've not seen. Perhaps, if the lure theory is correct, they'll be introduced with rank three and four lures and fish.

Hints in the Update Notes

One phrase that immediately stuck out to me in the notes was, "There's more than just fish in the lakes and rivers of the Spiral..." I took this immediately, especially in combination with the male fishing image, to mean that there's be some sort of creatures we encounter outside of fish.

Maybe it'll be some huge fish, and maybe something we don't know so much about, as represented by the large green beast we see only a mouth for at the bottom. Most people believe the phrase is referring to chests, but it sounds a little bit more ominous to me than that. 

The Final Clue

The doodles aren't quite finished giving us information. There was one in particular that stood out, and that's the longer one with a male character collecting some sort of potion and a very suspicious eye-plant-deal peeking at the curious wizard.

This, to me, has nothing to do with fishing. Why would the wizard be collecting an elixir, and why would some strange beast be in the pond? Well, I've only seen some weird water in a few places, and the first one that comes to mind is Avalon. You've got purple water in The Wyrd, the Lake Shore, etc. 

What if, when fishing expands to the next few worlds (see some of my predictions and interesting trends HERE), there are strange beasts in these tainted waters? Suppose that the wizard isn't collecting any fluid, but is instead using an elixir to purify the pond, hence why the purple is changing to blue. That's why we see the fading purple and suspicious creature.

The final question I'd have is this - will we ever interact with these creatures? Will it be possible to catch them before using the purifying elixir? Or will interaction with these unknown beats have some effect that we'd all rather avoid? What do you think?

Thanks for reading and see you in the Spiral!