When I started playing Fallout 3 I could not hear much sound, except for a few ambient noises. When I passed the "birth" part of the game, my screen locked on to the father NPC as it normally would and he started to talk, but I could not hear his voice. I had my sound coming out of the two speakers on my monitor, my other speakers were turned off. So I turned up my speakers and could hear him again.

Trouble is I don't want to play with my speakers on, and when I don't, I can't hear ANYTHING that I'm not looking at (This includes NPCs behind me, which makes it troublesome to hear dialogue without corkscrewing my head every sentence).

Is there a way to change my sound settings? So far I've only seen volume settings. I think the term I am looking for is 'stereo' settings, as my game seems to utilize all my speakers (when turned on), making it 7.1 surrond sound.

I had this same problem with Bioshock, except for the fact that I could hear ALL sounds with only my monitor speakers on (although I still had to turn to hear people clearly. Why doesn't Fallout 3 have these options? Does it, and I'm not seeing it? If there aren't any, is there a place on my computer where I can reconfigure the sound? (I've tried switching between Mono, Stereo, 5.1, 7.1, etc in my audio manager, doesn't work). Is there a mod I can download? Anything? Please help, I want to play this game properly..