Bethesda promises to fix Skyrim Special Edition bugs and audio glitches

Bethesda's remastered version of its beloved 2011 RPG Skyrim is out now, featuring a major visual makeover, mod support for Xbox One and PS4, and more. However, fans didn't take long after its 28 October launch to notice a litany of audio bugs affecting the game .

In response, Bethesda's global community lead, Matt Grandstaff, said that the company is currently working on a fix for the audio issues. "We're currently testing a fix and hope to have an update out next week," Grandstaff wrote.

Reddit user LasurArkinshare wrote that the audio in Skyrim's PC and Xbox One versions seemed to be greatly compressed compared to the original.

"I launched the Special Edition last night and began playing, but something about the audio seemed... off to me. I couldn't tell whether or not it was a placebo effect since I was going out of my way to analyse everything that could possibly have changed in the SE, but I couldn't help but notice that the audio seemed... muddier. Less crisp."

After comparing the audio between the original release and Skyrim: Special Edition, LasurArkinshare found that the audio files in the remastered version were in a different format and seemed much more compressed.

"The vanilla game has sound assets (other than music and voiceover) in uncompressed .wav format," LasurArkinshare continued. "The Special Edition has the sound assets all in (very aggressively compressed) .xwm format, which is a compressed sound format designed for games. This isn't so bad, necessarily - it's possible to compress audio to .xwm without significant quality degradation unless you crank the compression way up to insane levels."

However, the user said that the audio on the PS4 version is superior than the original 2011 game.

"The voiceover and music audio in the PS4 version of the Special Edition is astronomically higher quality than even the original PC release of Skyrim, to the point where it almost seems like Bethesda intended to push out higher quality audio for the Special Edition but didn't include those files in the PC/Xbox One versions, possibly by mistake or as an oversight," the user wrote.

Skyrim: Special Edition is available now for PS4, Xbox One and PC.