I'm sure there are some people who have the same issue as me, as I found it on different forums and threads over the internet.
Nevertheless I will describe the issue here again and then provide a workaround and a theory what the underlying problem is.
The Problem:
If you use a Bluetooth Headset for gaming on PC (as I do) and you start the game, at first everything is fine.
But as soon as you click on "Start Game" after loading something all the Audio is gone. Not only the game audio, but everything else that might be playing as well.
The usual Workaround
In your Windows system settings go to Hardware & Sound - Devices and disable your headset for hands free communication. This works but has the side effect, that you cannot use the microphone of your headset anymore.
Therefore I don't recommend doing this.
Your Headset usually registers two devices. I have a JBL Quantum whatever. It shows as one Stereo Output and one Hands Free Audio device. It should be similar for your devices.
Instead of going into the rather unknown hardware menu you can simply disable the Hands Free Audio Device in the audio devices menu (how to get there is described below). This has the same effect.
The lesser known Workaround
Plug in a second microphone. You don't need to actually use a real microphone, but just plug in an audio jack into your microphone plug. Windows will say that a microphone is detected and show it in your audio devices. Go to the sound device management window. You can reach it like this:
- right click on the speaker symbol in your taskbar
- click sound settings
- click sound system settings to the top right.
You will see a list of your audio devices capable of playing sound. Click on the tab with the recording devices and find the "device" which is connected to your microphone jack.
Set this device as the default communications device.
Voilá, your ingame sound should now work as expected and you can use the microphone with other apps like discord. Only the ingame chat won't work.
One thing that I was not able to test out yet, but maybe someone else could do that and tell us if it works, is the combination of this workaround with a troubleshooting tip from the Sea of Thieves support site Chat Troubleshooting
After you successfully configured a microphone jack as the default communication device. you can set Sea of Thieves used audio devices by doing the following.
- start the game and minimize it
- right click the speaker symbol in your taskbar
- click sound settings
- click app and device settings
- set the default devices of Sea of Thieves to whatever you want to use for microphone and playback
As I said, I hadn't have time to test this properly, but I suspect you can use the ingame chat now as well.
The Cause of the Problem
This section is only for those who are interested (the game devs I hope), so no hard feelings if you don't want to read it.
I think the root cause of the problem is the XBox Game Bar. This is for multiple reasons.
- The sound always stops playing at the same point in the loading process. It is sometimes during the period where the game shows Loading Supplies in the loading screen. I suspect this is the time the game connects to the XBox services, which I also think are used for having ingame voice chat. It would be great if the devs could give some info on this.
- It is not only the game sound that is gone, but all the other apps (e.g. YouTube running in the browser) stop playing sound as well, which for me indicates some system level access, which Sea of Thieves should not have.
- If you have applied the aforementioned workaround, open the XBox Game Bar (win + g by default) and in the audio settings switch to Speech. The sound will be gone again. Go back to Mix and Sound plays.
- As this error is rather widespread and already years old by now, I'd guess it is not a problem with drivers, OS, or specific Hardware. It would either have been fixed by now or the root cause would be known.
What I think happens
When the game loads, it connects to the XBox services to use them for the ingame voice chat. During this process the XBox services check the default communication devices microphone. If this microphone is part of a device which has playback capability the XBox services decide that now would be a good time to play all audio streams without exception over this device. I have two reasons for thinking this.
- If the device which is configured as the default communictation device in the microphone section has no playback capabilities, this does not happen. Hence the Audio Jack workaround.
- If you switch your playback device in the XBox Game Bar to the same device (The Hands Free Audio device in my case) you can then hear all of the missing audio again. But because the hands free communication audio channels are optimized for speech, they usually have an abysmal sound quality for everything else.
All of this is speculation on my side. I would love to hear from the game devs. Maybe they could bring some light into this.
Sadly I could not reach the XBox support, because they're out of office until tomorrow (I live in Central Europe) and I could not for the life of me find a ticket system where I could upload a bug report.
Thanks for reading all of this. And if this is a duplicate thread, please add a search function to these forums (or at least hide it less well).
