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Skyrim’s Sound Is Still Broken on PS5, and I Can’t Handle It
How much could this possibly cost to fix?
This was a great week for Bethesda fans. The rumored Oblivion remake launched across all platforms, and while it inherited a lot of the technical weirdness of the original game due to its hybrid engine approach, it’s still an awesome thing.
I’ve been playing it and enjoying it on both the PC and PS5, and it got me thinking about one of my biggest weird frustrations in all of gaming: Skyrim’s janky audio presentation on Sony’s last two consoles.
The PS4 and PS5 versions of Skyrim both have some super obvious issues with their sound that have never been addressed. These problems show up as soon as a couple of minutes into the game. The PS4 version is where the broken audio first emerged, and the game’s big PS5 re-release in 2021 did nothing to clean it up or fix it any way. Nor did any patch released in the last four years.
Do these issues ruin Bethesda’s most popular game on Sony’s most popular platforms? For me they absolutely do! It’s doubly frustrating because they’re so obvious that they could be caught in roughly three seconds of testing, and because they don’t appear in any of the other builds of the game. The Xbox, PC, and Switch builds — whether you look at their early versions, the Special…
