Those who have played DOS games long ago may have played this game once. You could be a great fisher in Fishing Mania even if you haven’t ever gone fishing in real life. It was a simple fishing simulation without any stories or flashy effects, but it was so fun, I remember playing it through the night until dawn.

A game for gamers that have those recollections officially launched last 26th. That game is ‘World Fishing Championship’, a Web3 fishing game developed by Wemade Plus. It’s the first fishing game that’s onboarded on Wemade’s global blockchain platform, Wemix Play. There’s a great fishing experience with an additional P2E element. There are many fishing games already, but we had a look at ‘World Fishing Championship’ to see how different the fun is.

※ Blockchain games aren’t allowed in Korea yet, so we played the global version.

I mentioned ‘Fishing Mania’ earlier — the basic play of ‘World Fishing Championship’ is more of an arcade game than a simulation. It’s not a game where you have to research to change the bait or rod according to the environment. ‘World Fishing Championship’ expressed the diverse elements of fishing in a simple but direct format — through fishing mastery.

The combat power of MMORPGs is transitioned to fishing mastery in ‘World Fishing Championship’. That being said, the higher the fishing mastery, players can fish more diverse fish more easily. That way, players have to level up, gain better equipment, and upgrade to raise their fishing masteries. Although I said equipment, it’s not complicated. The alpha and omega of fishing, fishing rods, boats, and Anglers, who is like a companion, is everything.

Among those, the main is the fishing equipment. The fishing equipment is like the main weapons in other games. They have high fishing mastery, and the lure durability changes according to the equipment, so it’s the most important. Obviously, the higher the grade and the higher the enhancement, the mastery and lure durability increase. However, the upgrades aren’t easy.

Better fishing equipment requires more resources, so you should raise your mastery through other elements. This is where boats and Anglers come into effect. Boats are formed of several different parts, and you can raise your fishing mastery by equipping or upgrading them. You can gather the parts through in-game play, and you don’t need to spend as much resources, but it doesn’t raise much fishing mastery. Basically, it’s close to supporting equipment.

The Angler is like a skill. Each Angler has several different attributes, like fishing mastery, skill, and tour special effects. The skills are diverse, such as hail, lightning, and even summoning a whale, so it has a big effect when fighting with fish.

The skills are not all. There’s something as important as skills: the tour special effect, which is like a passive skill. Each Angler has a different tour special effect, like normal damage +30%, pulling damage +30%, etc., so you should combine different anglers according to your playstyle. If you like to pull, you should use an angler that enhances the pull damage. If you like playing stably, you have to use an Angler that enhances normal damage. It’s as if the builds or meta is implemented through Anglers.

How to fish is as simple as the equipment composition. There are many things to consider in general fishing games, like casting, movement of the bob, whether or not to pull, etc., but in ‘World Fishing Championship’, you just need to think about if it’s the fish you want and when it’s efficient to use skills. They solved everything with the reel button.

The fun of pulling is still there, though. The action of strong vibration during casting and using skills consecutively to weaken the fish brings a decent experience in ‘World Fishing Championship’. Additionally, when the fish pops up from the water, you can swipe and touch the reel button when they fall back into the water to deal more damage, which increases the controllability.

However, one thing needs to be clear: it’s ‘not bad’. This could be because its arcade style is too strong. General fishing games change depending on the fish and fishing environment, but it’s not like that in ‘World Fishing Championhip’. All you need is high-grade fishing equipment, so it’s difficult to say that it’s a game that you can enjoy simple ‘fishing’.

‘World Fishing Championship’ included a P2E element to increase the fun. What’s lacking is supported by the P2E element. How you can earn through ‘World Fishing Championship’ is simple. You have to collect Pearls, which is the main token, and stake them. To do so, you have to collect Pearls first.

You can gain Pearls through Pearl Collection or rewards, but obviously, it’s not enough. There’s a limited amount of Pearls you can gain through the Pearl Collection, so if you have collected a certain amount, you need to participate in the championship competition. To participate in competitions, you need Pearls, but if you collect championship points with the fish you fished, you can get in the ranking, and there’s an extra reward given to those who caught big fish. It’s the main content where you can earn Pearls.

If you have collected Pearls through this process, you need to stake them for tokenomics. If you stake them, you can gain CORAL, which is the game token of ‘World Fishing Championship’, as a reward. Since CORAL is the only token tradable through Wemix Play, to make a profit, you must stake them. One thing to consider is that the Pearls used to stake are moved directly to the Dead Wallet, and they can’t be returned to use or unstaked.

It might seem that it wouldn’t matter since Pearls are used only to stake, but there’s more you need to do with Pearls. In ‘World Fishing Championship’, fuel is used up whenever you fish. To play the game more and longer, you need more fuel. You can purchase fuel with your resources, but you can also use Pearls. This is Boosting, and you can use Pearls to increase the max fuel and reduce the recovery time. Also, unlike when you stake Pearls, you can retrieve them.

The CORAL you gain through Pearl staking can be used in two different ways. One is to make a profit — you can deal them through Wemix Play. This is probably the most important way to use it. The second way is to exchange them for Black Pearl. Black Pearl is an advanced resource that can only be gained by exchange with CORAL. They’re used to enhance anglers or roulettes. If you enhance your anglers, you can get higher up in championship competitions, and that leads to gaining more Pearls. It balances tokenomics naturally by having users use the resources in the game.

The Pearl staking method is rather well-designed as users can increase the profitability depending on how much they play. I can give a high score as a P2E game and for the tokenomics. However, as a Web3 game, there are still areas where it lacks. It isn’t really proper as the new Web3 style — it just added a P2E element and made small improvements to an existing game.

As a result, ‘World Fishing Chamiponship’ is a game that enhanced the P2E element rather than going for the fun as a Web3 game. As a P2E game, it’s not bad, but even that should be fun. If it’s not fun, it’s just a mining program that looks like a game. Since its tokenomics is systematic, the devs should focus more on the fun. That would be the secret for the game to survive for a long time.