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No audio

WARDOGS has no sound at all

Published Updated Data as of Season 1 · 10 Sept 2026

This one is on your machine

Your Windows output device is set to a format the game cannot handle. Drop it to 24-bit, 44.1 kHz.

What you see

The game runs normally but produces no sound at all, whatever you change in the in-game audio settings.

Also reported as: no sound · audio not working · no audio · sound not working · surround sound not working · no rear speakers

Fixes, in the order worth trying

Work top to bottom and stop when the game launches. Each step is labelled with how much evidence sits behind it, so you can skip the guesses if the first ones work.

  1. 01 Set your output device to 24-bit, 44.1 kHz

    Confirmed

    Windows Sound → your device → Properties → Advanced → Default Format. Very high bit-depth and sample-rate devices, 384 kHz in particular, break game audio outright.

  2. 02 Check the game is pointed at the right device

    Reported

    If you changed headsets while the game was running, it may still be sending audio to the old one.

  3. 03 On a USB DAC, rule out spatial audio as well as the sample rate

    Reported

    A DAC that is selected in the game's own audio settings and still produces nothing is the hardware-specific version of this, and it is the one with no confirmed single fix. Set 24-bit, 44.1 kHz first, since that is the fault this page exists for. If it changes nothing, turn Windows spatial audio off for the device — Sonic or Atmos, under the device's Properties — and restart the game: players on that setup report working through both before getting sound back.

Did this fix it for you?

Notes from other players who hit this code. Say what worked, what did not, and which region you are in — a fix that only works in one place is worth knowing about. Best-rated first, and there is no time limit: an answer from the first beta is still an answer.

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This catches people with good audio hardware, which is the counter-intuitive part. A DAC or interface configured at a very high sample rate is exactly the setup that fails, while cheap headsets running at 44.1 kHz work fine.

Separate from silence, a lot of players describe the audio as muffled or underwater rather than absent, along with footsteps that are far too quiet to place. That is a known complaint about the current mix rather than a fault on your machine, and no settings change fixes it.

Surround speakers: the rear channels do not arrive

Separate again, and not fixable at your end. WARDOGS offers no multichannel output option — no Dolby 5.1, 7.1 or Atmos setting in its audio menu — and players running speaker setups report the game never using the rear pair whatever they change, in Windows or in game. A request thread for proper surround support has been open since 22 August with no answer from Bulkhead.

If you have sound but it is coming out flat and front-heavy on a system that does surround properly everywhere else, that is this, and there is nothing on your machine to correct. Stereo headphones lose nothing by comparison, which is worth knowing before you spend an evening on Windows spatial settings.

Source

WARDOGS Discord, #beta-fixes ↗

If that did not do it