If you have played Apex Legends recently, you may have been experiencing issues with distorted audio that is making your game sound weird. If this sounds familiar, fear not, you’re not alone. The Apex Legends audio bug is plaguing lots of players, making their gameplay experience less-than-stellar. It can make it difficult to hear enemy footsteps, gunshots, and sometimes any audio at all. Anyone who players shooter games, especially online shooter game, knows that proper audio can be the difference between life and death. So, what’s the big idea? Why is this happening? Is there a fix?
What is the Apex Legends audio bug?
As mentioned above, the Apex Legends audio bug distorts audio and can make it faint or otherwise hard to hear. There are three main types of audio bugs that are being reported. One is audio drops, where the audio seems to be completely nonexistent at random times. However, this seems to be the least-reported issue of the three.
The main issues that players are having with the audio bug are not being able to hear footsteps and audio distortion during gunfire. With the footsteps, they are either so faint that they’re nearly impossible to hear or sometimes you just can’t hear them at all. With the audio distortion, there is a loud static noise that makes it hard to hear where gunshots are coming from. This usually doesn’t happen in isolated fights, but most of the time it seems to occur in large populated areas where lots of people are fighting.
Is there any way to fix the Apex Legends audio bug?
The short answer is no, not really. The only known fix has to do with hard drive performance, according to the developers at Respawn Entertainment. Effectively, anything you can do to speed up your hard drive could help the issue. Respawn has offered a few suggestions to help players struggling with the audio bug. They recommend defragmenting your PC hard drive prior to the game installation, using a fast hard drive to install the game onto, making sure that the hard drive is not being hit by other background processes (like downloading other games), and turning off quad audio. However, these solutions mostly affect PC players and not console players.
Some of these steps can be a little bit complicated, so if you’re not sure what they are, we wouldn’t suggest trying them. However, if you decide that you must, make sure you are doing plenty of research and know what you’re doing. Messing with a hard drive can be dangerous because if you do the wrong thing, you run the risk of losing all your data, game-related or otherwise.
Is a fix for the Apex Legends audio bug coming?
The good news is yes, a fix is coming. Respawn is aware of the Apex Legends audio bugs and has programmers working to fix it. However, the bad news is there doesn’t seem to be any information on when that fix will be released. At the time of writing this article, the Respawn Community Manager posted on Reddit that he cannot give information out on when the next patch will be, but that he will update the community when he can.
In the meantime, however, he did offer a way for players to help programmers who are trying to fix the issue. If possible, he requested that you get video of the audio bug and offer your analysis of why it happened, like if there was a poor performance from server lag, bad frame rate, etc. Additionally, you should include which platform and system you are gaming on. If you are on a PC, you should include what kind of PC you are using and what hard drive you are using. If you are playing on a console, you only need to report which console you are playing on. Once you’ve gathered all of this information, you can go to the EA website and follow the steps for submitting a bug. You can also add your information to the Community Checkin thread on Reddit.
Let’s face it, bugs suck. However, they are part of life and we have to deal with them! Thankfully, Respawn and EA are aware of the Apex Legends audio bugs and are hard at work trying to offer a fix for players.
