All of a sudden when playing through the WC3 Reforged campaigns all voiced dialog went completely mute. The subtitles will show what is said, all music and environmental sounds work, even some unit toggle sounds (although these seem to be quieter and hit-or-miss), but I cannot hear any voices in the in-game cutscenes or during scripted events within missions.
Things I’ve tried: I’ve toggled on and off various audio options, I’ve saved and reloaded, tried different campaigns. I’ve attempted to “Scan and Repair” the installation, and I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled - twice, once to C: and a second time to a different disk entirely, the first time with the save files/config intact in Documents/Warcraft III, the second time with the Documents/Warcraft III folder deleted.
None of these work to bring back the audio to dialog.
This all started happening on the first mission of the Path of the Damned Undead campaign. I’m running 2.0.0.22389 x86_64 on Windows 11.
How can I fix this?
EDIT: I was able to fix it somehow.
I had the game running. Throughout my previous troubleshooting I was using headphones connected to the 3.5mm out from my monitor, which was receiving audio via hdmi out from my nvidia gpu. I noticed that when I unplugged my headphones and plugged them into the audio-in on my PC (routed to the audio header on the aurous b650m motherboard), then alt+tabbed and switched to the headphones audio device in the Windows tray, I had no sound from WC3 at all, despite sound working from other applications like VLC. I quit and restarted the WC3 application, loaded into a game, and the campaign dialog was audible once again.
I do now know how this fixed anything. This also seems to be an outstanding issue with no root cause analysis:
https://www.reddit.com/r/warcraft3/comments/f6v58w/in_campaign_the_dialouge_just_stopped_music_and/
It appears to predate Reforged:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WC3/comments/9ucb1z/wc3_no_voices_during_ingame_cutscenes/
What is going on here, has anyone else encountered this? Is it a bug?