Tarkov is a game based entirely around sound, right? Well here is some of my casual observations from the last couple of weeks playing (solo) with my sound on mute.
First off, what exactly was I playing with no audio? To answer that, I was primarily splitting my time between scav runs (Interchange) and pistol/mosin PMC runs (Shoreline)
I noticed a significant increase not only in my survival amount, but also in how often I was either successful in a fight, or at least held me own pretty successfully.
I noticed that on my shoreline runs, I didnt concern myself with any footsteps I heard inside the resort. I primarily ran in, looted what I wanted, and ran out. My gear consisted mainly of a higher end pistol with an mbss/scav backpack or a mosin. Typically, I saw that my inadvertant "aggression" by entirely ignoring the presence of another player led me to either stumbling upon or straight up ambushing another PMC and (usually) killing them. What I seemed to be observing was players primarily relying on the sound of footsteps to make their tactical decisions, usually leading them to sit frozen in a disadvantageous position. While I dont have any hard data to support this argument, I primarily killed players level 20-40 in medium/high end gear, but never late game gear.
Similarly, on my scav runs on interchange, I run around blissfully ignorant of anyone around me. I have accidentally stumbled upon and killed Killa four or five times out of the last dozen raids or so, but havent nearly ended up killing the same amount of players that I encountered on shoreline. However, I did notice that when engaged by enemy players, and relying only upon sight to continue to fight them, I remained much more mobile and aggressive with engaging them, which more often than not would end in a kill due to catching them in an inopportune placement.
I havent really kept a log on raids, but think I will do so in the future to gather some concrete data to share. Primarily, I've noticed that
1)When I am deaf, I play far more aggressively and move a lot more, which has led to me catching players out.
2)When I can't hear/am ignorant to my surroundings, I have an extremely decreased level of stress. To the point where there is almost no anxiety associated with the raid at all.
3) when deaf, I adapt my playstyle to stick more to edges/walls, clear corners more, and value vision more when playing with sound.
Don't get me wrong, I like to believe that I am by no means a bad player when I play normally, but this recent trend of playing with external music/no game audio has really had an interesting, posivite effect on my gameplay.
What are your thoughts on playing deaf?
