This interview has been edited for clarity. Light spoilers for Endwalker ahead.
Kaile Hultner: How long have you been playing Final Fantasy XIV? How did you get attracted to fishing?
FruitySnacks: Oh, I’m trying to remember when I started playing. It’s been a while. It was like November of 2014, I think.
KH: So right around the time that Heavensward came out, roughly.
FS: Yes, yes. Yeah. I got to witness the glory that was the Heavensward menu. I was literally looking at it today thinking, “Damn, that was one of the best ones they put out.” I started because a friend of mine was playing. And I had just finished crunching on this big long project, and I had some downtime. She was like, “Come try Final Fantasy XIV.” And so I bought the basic pack, which at the time was just A Realm Reborn and Heavensward and 30 days of free time, effectively what the free trial is now. And I started playing it for a little bit. I’ve always liked MMOs so I knew I was going to enjoy it, but I didn’t realize how much I was going to enjoy it; I basically have not had more than like a six-month break at a time since starting. So yeah, I’ve probably played for the better part of seven years, I guess. Something like that.
Fishing in video games has always been fun. I’ve always liked those a little bit. With FFXIV, they take fishing to the next level. It’s almost a simulator to a degree. It used to be a lot more simulator-ish? But they’ve they’ve since toned it back a little bit and smoothed it out, so it’s not as super-esoteric.
But I got started doing that after I finished the story, kind of like what you’re doing. And at the time, there were like two parts of fishing. There was fishing, and then there was big fishing, which is where you work to complete the collection log, basically, of which even in that there’s technically two layers to it. But big fishing is catching all the big fish. Those are the ones that have green backgrounds whenever you catch them, compared to the gray ones. And this one little, like, Lalafell in Gridania was teaching somebody else how to fish out in public. And I was like, “Oh, I’ve kind of wanted to learn how to do this, and if there’s a chance to fish, I might as well,” so I caught the big fish in the little pond in Gridania – it’s the one right next to the Adder’s Nest.
And I was like, “Oh, well, that was easy. Let’s just go do all the cities.” And I think within a couple of days, I had finished all of the cities. And then it just was like, “Alright, let’s do the region.” And it just kept going until patch 5.2 I think was when the first Ishgardian Rankings came out for Disciples of Hand and Disciples of Land, for the Ishgardian Restoration. And I started fishing and I was like, “I’ll just fish after work for a few hours and see what I get.” And ended up at, like, eighth place after the first day. And I was like, “Oh, okay, well, this is easy too, might as well just keep going.” I ended up in first place after three days and then held it for the next seven.
KH: That is pretty incredible.
FS: And then after that, I was just like, “Well, okay, might as well keep going.” Within a few months, I finished catching all the big fish. And I finished the collection log a few months after that, because at the time in 5.2 there was only [the Grandmaster Caster achievement], which is [where you catch] all of the big fish in A Realm Reborn and Heavensward and Stormblood. There’s 204 [fish to catch for the achievement]. So I caught all 204 of those, but still at the time, there was like 800 more fish to catch. That took a few extra months. And then it just kind of kept going. Eventually, I started making guides for for my little YouTube channel, and that’s been that’s been going on for a year and a half now. I think; I lost track. And then there’s the FishCord. And like there’s just so much to do with fishing that it in itself could be a game.
KH: What caused you to start making guides? What was the impetus there?
FS: So in the FishCord, we were getting a lot of questions about like, hey, what’s the best way to catch X fish? And when there’s 1000+ fish in the game, there’s a lot of questions like that. And then there’s a lot of repetition. There’s a lot of like, how do you catch Ruby Dragon, what’s the best way to cast catch Ruby Dragon – which it’s considered like the hardest fish in the game to catch. How does the Stethocanthas work? How do I catch this fish? How do I catch that fish? It’s just like, alright, well, I know how to make guides, I do education for a living, I know how to put this together, I can edit a video, and I really enjoy fishing. Why don’t I just do this? And so I made a mockup of a style for it, and shared it with the FishCord. And they’re like, “Yeah, this is great.” I just started pumping out guides, just going back and re-catching all these fish and recording it this time, and then converting it into a video.
KH: Were there guides like this out there prior to you starting this?
FS: So there were “guides,” where it’s basically somebody going, “Here I am catching this fish, here’s what I’m doing.” And it was just like a straight recording. It wasn’t really designed to be a how-to guide. It didn’t have what the audience needed to understand what they were doing, to understand what [the guide-makers] were saying. And the other types of guides out there were basically like, “Here’s a video of me fishing something.” Not really showing the skill, not narrating, not making any comments or annotations or anything.
And so I was like, “Well, I’m gonna write out all these texts guides anyways like we’ve been writing.” If somebody asked, “How do you catch Ruby Dragon?” at one point, we could just copy-and-paste in a guide. Well, why don’t we just convert this into a video so that you get the text guide, and you get the visuals of it too. You actually see it being done, and you have the text. And so that’s how I got started making it in that style. And the style that you’re actually watching right now on the Aetherolectric Guitarfish is actually the third version of that production theme. If you go back to like pre-Endwalker stuff, like seven months ago, you’ll actually see it was different, it was blue, and it was just kind of like generic slideshow looking. And I didn’t really like that; as weird as it sounds, I really wanted to make a narrative for these guys. And so I switched over to this book theme, thinking that well, you know, a lot of this is text. Why don’t I just design a theme as if this was a real book? That’s where that production style came from.
KH: You mentioned you do education for a living.
FS: Yeah, I actually just finished [a master’s degree in Instructional Design] in March. I actually started this before I got the Master’s, and I had already been working as an instructional designer when I started.
KH: So, going through academia and then also doing this, how did they inform each other?
FS: I’ve been writing guides for probably decades now, even before I went into into “the business,” if you will. I’d been writing tutorials and articles, because I’ve always wanted to make sure that people understood things and didn’t feel like they were alienated. So I had a lot of that type of experience already. But with my experience at work, I brought over less of the educational part of it, because I already knew the structure of the guide, but I did bring up how to streamline the process of making it; what to focus on in each of those little text blurbs that come up. Like, what do I need to say, and when? How can I template this? I’ve timed it. At the start, there was a four hour turnaround, basically. I’ve been able to shorten that entire process through making templates, getting better at it, better software, better hardware, and I’ve been able to bring that down to an hour, like an hour, hour-fifteen or so if I really needed to. So within an hour or so depending on the involvement of the fish, I can usually have a guide out if needed.
Which came in handy during Endwalker‘s launch. I think I launched like 20 videos in three weeks.
KH: So now you’ve been playing this game for about seven years; you’ve been making these guides for about a year and a half or so. Now comes the aquarium. Why an aquarium, and why in the format that y’all came up with?
FS: So I think with with fishing, kind of something that you highlighted earlier, is there’s a lot. There is currently 1343 fish in the fishing log alone.
KH: And these are different fish.
FS: Yeah, all uniquely named fish. The sad part is that I can probably name all of them. Which I feel like when I say that, it’s like one of the guys who can name the first three generations of Pokémon. It’s kind of the same thing in a way where you’re just going out and catching all of them – gotta catch ‘em all! But I think there’s a lot with fishing. And there’s a big stigma around fishing being not great? There’s a lot of people who just straight up don’t level Fisher because they think it’s hard or complex or boring or something like that. And so before the aquarium even started it’s always been like, I want to show people that fishing isn’t that bad, it really isn’t as bad as you think.
And I’ve done a lot of research in trying to figure out like, you know, like why do people think that? Why do they think it’s it’s so bad and rough? If you look at the history of fishing you can see why it has the reputation it has now despite not necessarily reflecting it in the present. So I’ve really always just wanted to kind of make fishing visible to people. And so like, the very first apartment I bought in-game, I had two Tier 4 tanks, which is the largest size fish tank, stacked on top of each other in the corner with as many fish I could fit into them. And then, when I was able to buy a small house, that increased to six fish tanks. And then I got a medium house and that went up to eight. I always maxed out the fish tanks every time with the biggest size and always built this big aquarium-type-thing in my house. It was the next logical step that I’d find a way to break the the fish tank barrier, because there is a limit on the number that you can place in a house.
Apartments can only have four of any size aquariums even if it’s just Tier 1s, like the small little goldfish bowls. Or if it’s up to like the Tier 4 tanks, which is what we use. Doesn’t matter, you can only have four tank entities in an apartment all the way up to ten in a large house. Well, even at ten fish tanks, you’re not going to have enough to show all 163 species of aquarium fish, I think there is now? It wasn’t going to happen. And so one day, at the beginning of April, I was in the FishCord in the Crystal DC chat, and basically was like, “You know, guys, if one was so inclined, you could use [Free Company] rooms to make an aquarium.” Each room would be an individual environment, per fish, because the private rooms count as apartments, not as a house. So you can have up to four fish tanks in every private room, you can have up to 512 private rooms per FC house regardless of size, which means you can have 2048 fish tanks in a single house, should you need it.
KH: I mean, that’s good for expandability. So like, in the event that aquarium fish get added, you can just make another private room.
FS: Yeah. The hardest hurdle of that though, is – originally when we started off, it was like, yeah, we’ll just make alts and people will join the FC, then they’ll buy the room. We learned that in order to buy a private room, you need to be Level 50 in any job, and be a second lieutenant in one of the Grand Companies.
KH: So, a little bit more complex than than just buying a house and getting some rooms. [Laughing]
FS: Yeah. I was kind of hesitant to lead this project at the start because it was I knew it was going to be like a big undertaking to do this. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to deal with that right now. Like I didn’t want to deal with managing people on the Internet and like have it become a responsibility. And before before I can even say that, people were like, “Too late. We’re already making alts. Sorry, this is happening.” The joke is basically I got bullied into this. [Laughing] Into leading this team!
It ended up being like 20+ people making alts, because at launch, we had 22 rooms. And due to the immediate response of the aquarium – I tweeted it out like the morning of May 1, which was when we launched, and basically said, “Have you ever seen a house with 21 rooms filled with every aquarium fish?” And I just kind of teased this whole thing out because we were planning on launching two weeks later, on like [May] 14th or so. And so I made this tweet, and it started doing numbers. People were going, “This is nuts. Give me the address.” And I’m like, alright, fine, the address will come later. And so five hours later, I’m like, “Guys, we have to launch today. This is too good a bit of momentum to pass up.”
I checked everyone’s room, everything was green, it was green across the board. I had very specific things that needed to be in a room for me to say it’s good to go. It had to have the four fish tanks. It had to be in the base template of like, if you notice, every room with the exception of the touch tank room is basically the same room, detailed differently, and that was one of those, like, kind of pipeline things where I was like, “Alright, we’re going to be getting people who don’t necessarily know how to do housing well, or who are going to be on ps4, who might not know how to flip things, we can’t do anything super crazy.”
So I put together a basic template of here’s what this room’ll look like, this is fine. If you can match this as close as you can, good enough; then detail it to whatever like region it is like La Noscea, or Othard, or Thavnair. And people were like, “Yeah, okay,” and somebody else made a little step by step guide on what you need. And we had I think 21 rooms, 84 Tier 4 fish tanks, which requires a lot of poetic tomestone materials.
I don’t know how many it was, it was a few thousand poetics were spent, just making fish tanks. We sped through all that. And so I had to make sure, like, everyone had the fish tanks, they had all the fish, and then they had a message book that said, “Here are the fish that you see.” And the name of their room was like “Fish of Blank,” whatever region. We were green across the board that morning and were going to spend the next two weeks kind of just polishing, but we said, “Nah, we’re doing this now. We’re going now.” I recorded the trailer video that midday after lunch, we had edited within an hour, and uploaded it by four o’clock that afternoon. And we probably saw, I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t have a thousand people in the first 12 hours.
KH: Which is incredible, because the process of world travel is kind of convoluted. But people were going from one world in the data center to another just to visit your aquarium.
FS: We had people making alts from other DCs coming over. Like, it got to the point where people were like, “Oh, I can’t come and visit.” I’m like, you know, actually, you just need to make a Conjurer and then just run here and you’ll be fine. Like, you can do it at Level 1. I put that tweet out and people were like, “okay, cool.” In the first week, I think we had like five tweets actually break over 1000 likes, with combined impressions over a million. I think we all kind of looked at this, and we were just kind of— you know how at the end of The Avengers they’re all sitting at that shwarma place? That was basically us the next day, minus the shwarma. Like, we’re just kind of sitting there going, what did we— what just happened? And it was ridiculous, the outpouring.
Fun fact, message books have a limit.
KH: Not a thing you would normally find out.
FS: Not a thing that you would normally find out in like, two hours of [the Aquarium] being open.
KH: You’re testing the limits of Yoshida’s game.
FS: Yeah, and I think if we hadn’t done the private rooms, we would not have had the turnout that we had, because of the limits; we would have hit population cap within an hour. It would have been really bad. Because we distributed everybody throughout all the rooms, we could support more people in our venue than anybody else could, because they weren’t all technically in the same instance, which wasn’t an intended side effect of the design, but it worked out.
KH: That’s one way around the problem of room capacity. That makes it a lot easier for people to enjoy the thing as well.
FS: We might have – and I don’t have evidence to support this because I don’t have the back end numbers. But I know for a fact that if you looked at the world population lists under Player Search, and you searched for zones, we had one of the largest amounts of people in just the Lavender Beds. There was a disproportionate amount of people in the Lavender Beds, because they were all at the house. And if you were transferring from one server to the next within a DC, so like, if you’re coming from anywhere in Crystal on to Marlboro, it actually took longer than usual to get in. Because there was so many people coming in that night. We might have spiked the queue a couple of times. It was extremely overwhelming. So we managed to pull through and everyone liked it. And I think that was great. But yeah, it was overwhelming to say the least of what happened.
KH: I want to talk about the specifics of the aquarium in a second. But before I do, I do want to ask: why do you think the aquarium concept was so popular? You could have done this with a museum concept where you displayed artifacts and such. Why the aquarium?
FS: In retrospect, I think the success came from a combination of a lot of things. Like, everyone loves aquariums, it’s hard to hate an aquarium. And especially within Crystal like, when there’s a venue, it’s a wedding chapel, a bar/tavern/cafe, or a club. Like that’s it, there really isn’t anything else. I know there’s at least one hair salon. But like, those are all massively outweighing any of the other smaller niche things. And so you add that in, and then you add in the headline of “every single fish in a single house.” People are like, “Hold on a second. How does that work?” So now there’s that curiosity, of Hold on. We had people think that we glitched the house. People thought that we were in a large house, and we’re in a small house.
KH: Yeah, it genuinely surprised me. When I walked in I was like, “Oh, this is tiny. How does this work?”
FS: It’s a small house. Which actually might be changing, we do have a good number of bids on a large house during this next lotto period. We might actually be in a completely new location, which we weren’t planning on doing, and I’ve been hesitant to do it, because of the popularity. It’s, you know, Ward 16, Block 59 on Marlboro in the Lavender Beds. I have had to say that so many times. It’s committed to my memory now. I was hesitant to move, but this is our best opportunity to. One of the staff members is basically Tataru when it comes to finances. And I think we’re at 21 bids, I believe, on a large house. And we have like two or three more bids’ worth of Gil that we plan to use. We’re aiming for like a 50% chance with the plot.
[Editor’s note: The Eorzean Aquarium is still at Plot 59, Ward 16, Lavender Beds, on the Malboro server.]
But anyways, I think yeah, people don’t hate aquariums, it’s it’s kind of got that little bit of like a clickbait vibe of like, “How did they manage to get all those fish in there?” And on top of that, it’s different. It’s new. It is not the first aquarium, because there are other aquarium-type buildings. I would have considered my personal house to be an aquarium, it’s something that you can list as a tag, and you’ll see that all over. But it’s the first time that, for one, every fish has been on display. And two, it is the first one that I’m aware of that has the same structure as a real aquarium.
KH: How important was it to get the regional aesthetic markers in the rooms?
FS: Extremely. Probably after I said, “Hey, you can use FC rooms to bypass the tank limit,” I literally think the next thing I said was “and each room could be its own biome, effectively.” And that was one of the core concepts when I was designing out which fish was going to go where, because like, there is no list of fish in order of their aquarium placement; I had to make it. So I’m sitting there with Final Fantasy on one screen and Google sheets on the other, can’t even copy and paste, I had to type out all 163 fish into a spreadsheet, list their size, because there’s three different sizes: small, medium, and large, and that has points associated with it. And then I had to go through and curate all of these fish, figure out how we want to separate them, And then I had to condense them down into these rooms so that we didn’t have like, one room that was like, the Fish of the Ruby Sea, but there’s only one fish in the room.
I think initially, when I did the thing, I was like, “Oh, it’ll only take us 17 rooms,” and it ended up being 22. Because with moving stuff around and organizing it, I really wanted to make sure that everything had a regional biome, it was in order of appearance in the game. So that’s why we start with all the starter regions like La Noscea, Gridania and Thanalan, and then we move into Coerthas and so on.
And so that was really important to me, but it’s to make sure that everything felt like you were in that area, and to really make it an immersive in that sense? Which, based on what other people are saying, like, I think we hit that. I didn’t tell any other room designers, like, “This is what you have to do.” It was, “Alright, you have to use this base template. And you have to have these six things or whatever in your room, all set up. But how you decorate it is fine as long as it’s within the region.” That was another very critical part of it: giving all the volunteers here just like their creative freedom to do whatever they want. I think someone was like, you know, these are all deep sea ocean fish. Why don’t we do something based on Sastasha? And so they made a jail, kind of like Sastasha. That was extremely important. And like that will never change. The immersion part of it will never ever not be a core pillar of this aquarium.
KH: Have you seen more interest in the fishing job?
FS: Yes. We’ve gotten people who have come back to the game because they saw the aquarium. They were like, “I’ve been taking a break, but I saw this, I’m going to come back and finish.” We’ve had people go, “I had no idea these fish are even here.” And then we’d be like, “You know, they’re really easy to get, here’s how you do it.” And they’ll be like, “Oh, okay.” And then I think at one point, one guy came back and he was like, “Here, let me give this to you.” And he had caught like, five other fish. “I want to donate these aquarium fish back to you.” I’m like, “Yeah, sure.” Because they saw this, and they were like, “Oh, there’s this fish. This looks cool. I didn’t know this existed. How can I get them?” Like, it’s really easy. Here’s what you do. Take this bait. Just go, and if you see three exclamation points over your head, hit the hook button. That’s it. You’re good.
And so yeah, there has been a lot more people coming back in, seeing the aquarium and going, “Oh, maybe fishing really isn’t that bad? This is kind of cool. Maybe I want to explore this more.” Some of the events that we’re currently planning, basically we’re going to do everything we can to teach people how to get higher points in ocean fishing, and to get them the shark mount that they need and show that it’s really not that bad.
KH: I’m watching the the Shark Mount-a-Palooza ad, and it’s – you’ve faithfully recreated the Endwalker scene where Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus are talking about the shark running at you? And that’s incredible, I love it.
FS: That was a spur of the moment idea. Originally I was going to do another thing, just like – I don’t know if you watched the Endwalker livestreams, but when they announced the pre-order mount, they did hella marketing. Like bold text, drum-and-bass trailer thing, and I was just gonna do that; It’s just an event, it wasn’t going to need to be a big thing here. And like, the night before I was going to announce it, I was like, “Oh, wait, hold on a second. I could do this.” So I got somebody else from the staff to basically sit in the exact same spot as that shark is but on their shark mount; I just took a bunch of footage from different angles that kind of mimic what was in that cutscene. And then I recorded the cutscene with green screen on, and then one without it. And then through the magic of editing, and like more specifically, very quickly learning how to edit green screens, I was able to throw that together, and I think it came out a lot better than I was expecting.
KH: Genuinely, that is fantastic.
FS: I really, I was like, hold on. Everyone makes a meme about like, “Wow, sugoi!” when Hythlodaeus says it, I’m like, “Oh, he’s talking about a shark at that time. Oh, I’d be dumb if I didn’t try this.”
KH: Honestly, that’s beautiful. A+, 10 out of 10. No notes.
FS: I didn’t even know what cutscene it was 24 hours before that launch. I was asking everybody, which cutscene is this from? And they’re like, why do you need to know that? I’m like, I’m doing something dumb; just tell me the answer.
KH: And you know what, I think it paid off. I think that’s genuinely one of the most creative in-game event ad* (*not made by Final Fantasy’s production team) thing that I’ve seen. And the fact that you learned how to green screen edit in an hour is wild to me.
FS: I’m not really like a perfectionist, but I always do try to one-up myself every time I do something. I’m like, “Okay, how can I one-up the aquarium announcement trailer?” which was based off of Akademia Anyder’s opening. It’s when I start thinking about, like, exporting models and like recreating them in like, Unreal Engine, that’s like when I’ve told the staff like, tell me to stop. Say it’s not worth it. You’re done. Just don’t worry about it.
KH: Like, how far will you go for a joke versus how far should you go for a joke?
FS: Yeah. Like, is it worth the time?
KH: For sure. You’ve created this place that is reminiscent of the real world, and you’ve done it without really any of the hype surrounding fads like Web3, the Metaverse, and so on. Do you consider the Aquarium to be an example of emergent gameplay, or an example of what a “metaverse” could really do?
FS: I don’t… I don’t really know… if I can answer that well. I think the aquarium and other things – I’m not talking about just the aquarium, but just Final Fantasy XIV in general. One of the big things that Yoshi P has said is like, a pillar of the design of XIV is letting players be able to express themselves and represent themselves. And I think XIV does that really well. And I think the players really have embraced that. I think the aquarium, and I’m hoping future museums like I swear, if there aren’t future museum-type things that are being made right now, I will go out and make them myself. But, I mean, you laugh, but we’ve already started considering, like, if they don’t make NA-to-EU DC travel a thing, we’ve already been thinking about doing this all over again, on another data center, another region.
KH: Okay, that actually took away one of my smaller questions, which was, “Are you going to expand? Is this going to be in other parts of the world?”
FS: So expansion on this aquarium, yes that will 100 percent be happening. If we stay in the small house, there are three exhibits that I already have planned out in my head that I would like to make, that aren’t just like “The Fish of Garlemald,” which will probably be added in 6.2. Or like “The Fish of Labyrinthos,” or something. Like, our next exhibit will be purely about sharks and kind of like the food chain of sharks. It’s gonna be a little bit different than the touch tank that we have right now, which is very much like – the goal for that was to, you know, create an interactive place. The shark exhibit is going to be more of a pseudo-educational thing, because that’s something that I really want to start doing and trying to use this as a platform for. But like, it is a goal of mine, that within this year, we will have the ability to host lectures at the aquarium in-game to talk about or talk with real-life marine biologists or ocean conservationists or something like that. I know like, there is at least one marine biologist that the team has reached out to who was really excited for this and will be interested in talking—in-game!—about real life fish.
But to go back to your first question it’s like, I think the aquarium in my mind, to kind of toot the team’s horn, really embodies letting people express themselves however they want in this game. I think the aquarium, and the systems that are in Final Fantasy XIV, as imperfect as they are, really shows like how great of a game it is, how great of a community it is, to be able to get enough people together to be able to even do this and have such a turnout. A thousand people in the first 12 hours, I think only one other house has ever achieved. I don’t know what the records are, but if we didn’t break them, I’m pretty confident we’re close. Like we’re probably in the top three at least.
And I think all of that is just because this game and this community really fosters that type of gameplay; of letting people like go and make their own stuff. And being able to say like, alright, you gotta be a little creative with it. Like we had to figure out using the FC rooms. That’s not what they’re supposed to be used for. But we said screw it, we’re gonna do it anyways. And I think that I think that says a lot about the game more than just the aquarium itself. I think that is a really big thing. And I don’t know if that really answered your question. But like the aquarium and the theater groups, and like there’s people who – there’s pure Bard troupes who just travel between servers and do concerts. I think those are the people that are like, when I show people this video game, I’m going to show them that first. I’m not going to show them the raids right away. I’m going to say like, “This is what people do in this game. You can just come and have fun and do whatever you want.” And I know that I’m not stretching the truth there.
Heck, there’s even a pizza delivery service. I think it’s on Aether, and you can pay like 50k or something and get like a bunch of pizzas delivered to whoever you want. God, yeah, no, some of the more like non-casino, non-club, non-café venues are pretty wild.
The other one that stands out just because it’s a joke between me and my other friend. There is a place called Catgirl Hooters. And they lean into, like, they know damn well what they’re doing. And they just lean right into it. And they just go over the top gussied up and just make fun of themselves doing it. And it’s great. I love it – never been there, but I love it. I would give them money secure so they can keep doing it. Those types of things that I think really are the gems in the massive crown that is Final Fantasy XIV.
But to your other smaller question about the expansion? Yeah, we’re thinking of like new exhibits, new programs like we talked about, like lectures. We’re going to do a rotating print room because there’s 1,343 fish in the game, not including all the diadem fish. We can’t represent them all in the aquarium, but we can put them all on fishprints. so we’re going to have a room solely devoted to that. We’re not going to show all 1,300 of them, but what we’ll do is, it’s going to be rotating, so like every few months we’ll basically redecorate the entire room. We’ll do what we did with the individual biomes but with fishprints. It’ll be like carnivorous fish, or deep sea fish, or eldritch abomination fish, since Ultima Thule decided to introduce that to us.
I would also like to start doing stuff with like, fish lore, because that is, in fact, a thing. There’s a lot that you can actually learn about side game stories, and regions, just from reading the Fish Log. You can learn about, like, the Sharlayan Forum by reading certain fish logs. Even before 6.0 came out. These were, like, Heavensward fish. And then I’m waiting to see where DC travel lands. That’s a while out and I’m not going to even commit to it right now or at all, but basically, if Square Enix comes out and says, “We cannot do EU and NA,” then I’ll start considering, like, “Alright, what’s the possibility of getting an EU Aquarium spun up.” I think that there’s a lot that we can do, and it’s just a matter of doing it now.
KH: Absolutely. My last question: What’s up with PogShark?
FS: [Laughs] There have been so many little things that came up in the launch that we never would have anticipated. PogShark was one of those things where somebody was like, “Oh yeah, I really like the PogShark,” and the entire team was like, “…What? What are you talking about?” PogShark’s official name is “Funnel Shark,” and it’s caught from ocean fishing, and somebody visiting its room put “PogShark!” in the guestbook, and somebody else read it and was like, “Oh, that’s perfect,” and it just stuck. And then the streamer Shenpai, she came in one morning after launch while she was on stream, and she went to that room and was like showing it off. She stopped mid-sentence when she saw the PogShark and just yelled, “POG!” That was the final nail in the coffin, and now the Funnel Shark is officially PogShark.
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