Skyrim’s PS5 Version Has Embarrassing Sound Bugs From Days of Yore
Three years ago during the pandemic lockdowns, I wrote about the wretched state of the performance and audio in the PS4 Pro “Upgraded” version of Skyrim. The sound mix had messed up channel placement for all voices in the game, it was missing a number of sounds at the end of multi-part effects like spells and dragon breath, and the general ambient quality of the game’s soundscape was worse than on the Nintendo Switch version.
All of this combined with some other technical and performance issues to push me into playing a different build of the game. Today, I finally checked out the supposedly bespoke PS5 version of Skyrim to see if things were any better. A few improvements were made — but the nightmarish and obvious audio problems are still there, and I think this is just the PS4 build with a PS5 sticker on it.
Skyrim has had so many different releases over the last twelve years since it first launched on hardware two generations behind what we have now. The PS3 version was infamous for various memory bugs that caused the game to slow down the more you played it, eventually crashing once your save file hit a certain size. And now the more “modern” PS4 Pro and PS5 builds have these stupid new audio problems to…
