Fishing in Monster Hunter Wilds is pretty simple: find a body of water, cast your line, wait for a fish to bite, and then reel them in. The closer you cast your line towards a fish (too close will scare them off), the better your chances are at catching them.

However, as pointed out by u/bAss-ackward, if you’ve been playing with ray-tracing, you might have noticed that it’s a lot harder to fish, as the reflections completely obscure what’s under the water. So, the better your game looks, the harder it is to catch a meal. And as one fan points out, it feels out of place anyway.

Fishing in the forest near the Wudwud hideout was already hard to track the fish as is, I imagine this would amke it way harder.

“Wilds’ water doesn’t need expansive reflections. Its bodies of water have such high levels of turbidity and sediment that reflections don’t even make sense msot of the time,” u/Haru17 explained. “With the exception of that little oasis and plenty in the forest (but even in places like that the game is clearly emphasizing the water’s transparency).”

Lowering The RTX Quality Doesn’t Seem To Help

u/bAss_ackward also explained in the comments that it “Doesn’t seem to matter which RTX quality you set it to – you just can’t see the fish,” and that “at the highest setting the water becomes extremely blurry so it is even more distracting to look at.” If you want to fish, and pinpoint where the little critters are in the water, your best bet is turning off ray-tracing completely.

But others suggest that you simply turn RTX off for good, fishing or not, because it’s “downright broken.” u/KallaFotter, who has a new RTX 5090 card, claims that it “fu**s up lighting” and doesn’t do anything notable “besides lowering framerate”. Wilds has been plagued with performance issues on PC since launch, so it’s hardly surprising that ray-tracing has been causing problems.