Deathloop is out now, and after being critically acclaimed with rave reviews declaring it a game of the year contender, fans are finally able to get their hands on it themselves. However, a few have run into an issue where they can’t hear Julianna audio when she messages Colt via the radio. Turns out you might have your DualSense controller speaker turned off and didn’t update the audio settings in the game itself.
The issue came to my attention when Forbes’ Paul Tassi mentioned not being able to hear Julianna’s audio during gameplay. A number of people replied telling him that her audio was supposed to be coming out of the DualSense speaker to make it sound like she was speaking to the player via a radio. Tassi had his DualSense speaker audio turned off in his PS5 settings.
Lmao oh my god she’s supposed to be talking to me through the PS5 controller speaker, but I turned that off because it was annoying me in other games
— Paul Tassi (@PaulTassi) September 14, 2021
A number of other players reported either running into the same issue, or mentioned that they’ve turned their DualSense speaker off as well. Deathloop doesn’t seem to give you any notification that the controller speaker is off, and it doesn’t output Julianna’s voice lines through the normal audio channels automatically if it is. There’s a toggle in the game’s Audio menu (under settings) to disable the DualSense speaker audio, and if you don’t, you’ll simply get odd gaps of silence between Colt’s voice lines (and her subtitles, if you have those enabled).
If you play using a headset, however, and have the DualSense speaker turned off, it will output all audio to the headset, so this issue only impacts players who use either TV speakers or some kind of sound system. This also affects live streams of Deathloop. If a stream only takes the audio from the HDMI stream, it won’t transmit Julianna’s voice unless you manually toggle the setting in the Audio options, as shown in the Eurogamer live stream of the early hours of the game.
If your DualSense speaker is disabled, you’ll either want to also disable the feature in Deathloop’s menu, or reenable the speaker via your PS5 to get the full Julianna radio dialog. While some see it as a gimmick, others like the level of immersion it adds, being like a radio in the player’s hands. We praised the banter between Colt and Julianna as one of the many amazing things about Deathloop, and to not hear one half of those conversations would be a shame. However you choose to fix the issue, make sure you are getting her dialog to come through.
Deathloop is available now on PS5 and PC.
