A Hearing Trait Myth In Project Zomboid

I mentioned hard of hearing is a weird negative trait in my last video but I didn't want to go too deep into it during that video in this video I'll do a bit of a deeper dive into the hearing trades as they do not work quite how you'd imagine there's four states of hearing in the game in hearing normal hearing hard of hearing and death if you've ever played with Keen hearing the benefit is extremely obvious the perception radius around your character becomes massive this means you can spot zombies coming up to bite your booty much earlier than normal the trait doesn't mention any other benefits so here's my Quick Test of how far behind you you can spot zombies and I reloaded the save to show the stark contrast of exactly how far you can see behind yourself then we of course have normal hearing which looks like this and here's my little test for spotting distance behind your character don't worry I'll put them all side by side soon enough next up is hard of hearing the trade in question the tool tip on this one says smaller perception radius and hearing range I'm not going to check how far you can hear individual sounds what I do know from playing with the trait is that many sounds are quieter than normal which does lend itself to increasing the difficulty the real kicker is to reduce perception radius check it out compared to normal hearing that's a big problem right but it's really not when I do my little test to see how far behind the character you can spot zombies it ends up being much farther out than the darkness starts behind the character in fact it appears to be identical to the normal hearing radius that makes the trait a lot less painful as you can still hear the zombies and you can see them at the normal distance finally I get to death and I find yet another surprise the tooltip clearly states you can't hear a sound anyway I do the perception radius contrast test and wait a minute it's larger than the radius when you have hard of hearing I never realized it before but the tooltip doesn't state that it reduces your perception radius that's interesting but it's not very important as a distance you can spot zombies behind yourself is the real danger and yet again this appears to be the same range as normal hearing that changes things the real difficulty of death is purely the lack of sound not any surprise zombies behind yourself as you do see those at normal range the bounce of these traits are out of whack normally you would think hard of a hearing is a huge negative now you can effectively counter it by turning up the volume this is unsettling in a min max perspective if you can't afford a body Keen hearing you might as well take hard of hearing reducing the hearing options from four to three obviously personal opinion comes into play as many would rather not play with a reduced volume on the other hand I got plenty of comments from people explaining the various reasons they use death from those who just wanted to listen to music to the people who are deaf in real life the difficulty of death isn't any different it's always been about not being able to hear an alarm helicopter or other sound that would alert you to danger to be honest the difficulty of either trait hasn't changed as they've been like this for months or years the power of a few words priming your opinion on something is a very strong thing which is probably why the vanilla tool tips are so vague they get people going full Flat Earth on the traits and that has turned into zomboid lore at this point how do you feel about the perception radius being for lack of better words cosmetic I don't know if it changes much for me I already played with hard of hearing on some servers just to make the constant rain quiet down a bit so that I could hear voice chat seriously those tropical storms get way too loud the extra trait points come as a bonus for those interested I did the spotting test at night time and during a tropical storm for the trades there was no noticeable change compared to the daytime tests I'll also say that the reduction of zombie volume is still a major concern as far as survival goes hard of hearing isn't three points like some of the other negative traits work out to be [Music]

Channel: Retanaru

Views: 111,689

Keywords: project zomboid, pz, zomboid, hearing, deaf, hard of hearing, keen hearing, guide, myth, mythbusting

Id: dY0ZRf0yH1o

Length: 3min 41sec (221 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023