How to Fix Audio Issues in The Witcher 3 on Xbox Series X / S
I was recently playing The Witcher 3 on Xbox Series S, when, during a mission, the sound stopped working for character dialogue and sound FX. I pressed jump and he was mute. I talked to NPCs and they were silent. I was worried I would spend the rest of my days in a subtitled Witcher world…
I searched Reddit and tried a few other suggested fixes to no avail.
Then, I tried this, and it fixed the sound:
- In Xbox Home, switch to a different player profile other than the one that you have been playing The Witcher 3 with. (If you do not have another profile, create one).
- Load The Witcher 3 using the new profile. The game will return to the beginning and show you title screens etc. again
- Start a new game in this profile. Play for a short while so that you hear some of the dialogue / sound FX that were missing before, then exit back to the home screen.
- Restart the console, and switch back to your original profile.
- Start The Witcher 3. This time, unusually, you should see some of the title screens before getting back to your original game.
- Play. The sound will hopefully now work again.
How it works (my hypothesis)
I tried this method because I wanted the game to reset some of its settings (for sound) that it stores on the console. By starting a new game in a new profile, the original (working) sound settings seem to be restored to the game’s settings file. Then when you relaunch your game, it looks at this (universal) restored settings file and the sound works again. This method may need to be repeated multiple times during play, should the sound vanish again.
For some reason, at some points in the game, this settings file is somehow changed (or simply no longer referenced) so that sound volume effectively becomes ‘0’, even if the audio controls show that all sounds are on. In my case, this happened during the quest ‘Mysterious Tracks’.
By going through the steps above, the original settings are restored – making the sound work. This fix uses another gamer profile when completing the instructions so that there is no risk of your saved games being affected.