While Starfield might be a very fun game, it is not without its problems. It’s tough to get a game of this scale out the door without some bugs in the mix, and the audio cutting-out bug that some players are getting is frustrating for all concerned.
How to fix the Starfield audio cutout bug
If you have been enjoying the silence of space only to realize that things are a little too quiet, that’s an audio bug. If you suddenly hear garbled audio or perhaps no sound effects, then you are also suffering from a pretty common bug in Bethesda’s Creation engine. There are a couple of solutions that you can try, depending on your platform.
Fixing the audio bug on console
If you are playing on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, then you are looking at a hard reset. Just save the game, then exit out of the application. Shut it down fully, and do not use quick resume. Why? Because quick resume will just pause your current game state, and what we are looking to do here is force the engine to go through a full restart, reload, and rebuild of the game state. This should fix the audio bug, and you will be back in business.
Fixing the audio bug on PC
While the audio bug on PC can be fixed in the same way, we can potentially do a little more to stop it from happening at all. Consoles are wonderful, but the closed-system nature means we are at the mercy of the developers. On PC, we have the joy of being at the mercy of all kinds of things.
- Some players have reported issues with VSync, so try turning that off if you have it on.
- Check your audio drivers. Go to the Device Manager in the Control Panel and make sure your audio drivers are up to date.
- Check your GPU drivers. Bethesda kinda did Nvida folks out there dirty, so make sure you are fully up to date.
- People who might be cutting it close on their system requirements have seen smoother sailing if they lower their graphics settings a little bit.
And that’s really it. Hopefully, this is something that get addressed by Bethesda soon via a lovely patch or hotfix. Frankly, it’s a pretty common bug in many games. I still remember it absolutely plaguing the launch of Battlefield 4 back in the day.
