Hearing impaired Killers need help too!

Killers are not allowed to hear. But, I can see a visual vignette as the chase music starts.

So assuming the TR visual will be something like a heart icon that appears and grows more pronounced/brighter/beats faster the more intense the TR is, what would be the difference for showing the killer an icon of a set of footprints representing the sound of steps, or an icon of a face for injured survivor sounds.

In reality, I think certain killers are simply not meant to be able to hear this stuff while in their powers. Look at Plague or Dredge. The background noise while in their powers is so loud that it drowns out all but the closest and loudest sounds from survivors. Audio is almost used as a balancing tool in some cases.

Since when have Terror Radiuses ever been directional?

They change as the Killer gets closer or further away. Ergo, by listening to how they change, you can tell the direction a Killer must be.

its just spine chill. if you used current spine chill. the way it works is that the meter fills itself the closer the killer is. If its stealth killer. the perk is highlight fully but does not show proximity. If its 1-1, then its definitely going to weaken stealth killers so I am not entirely sure how those killers will be compensated. In general, you will see survivor hold-W before chases and staying away from the killer before the chase begins. I do not think people realize how impactful... that change is.

a lot of survivor do not really how TR works and visual indicator could be massively improve their performance. scary.

Mind leaving some explanation to go with your linkdrop?

I hope it's not something as incredibly stupid as "this person plays muted therefore nobody ACTUALLY needs hearing even if they're not a strong Nurse main playing this one match".

Ah, yeah, Killers having stupidly loud chase music is... interesting. Spirit gets slapped with it too, and her whole THING is sound.

And I swear Wesker is trying to cause hearing damage.

That's proximity, not direction.

Possibly, if the map geography is telling enough. Oftentimes it isn't. And regardless of a given player's intuition, a terror radius is not inherently directional.

I once suggested a perk that allows killers to directionally hear a survivors heart beat within 16m. Originally this was my response for allowing killers to have something that counters the newly buffed Lucky Break at the time, but it turns out LB wasn't as popular as I had figured it would be. I mean, it removes survivors scratch marks, noises, and blood trails, which lead me to believe that killers only had direct sight of the survivors to rely on, and rightfully so, but it's honestly odd that more survivors didn't take up using that perk tbh.

Here's the Perk Description I made:

Pulsating Fear:

Your senses are finely tuned to the hearts of your fearful prey.

When chasing a survivor, their heartbeat becomes directionally audible to you within 8/12/16 meters. This effect lasts for 6 seconds after the chase is broken.

Of course... in the original post I made for it, this got lambasted by survivor mains as it was "un-counterable" perk that gives away survivor positions within an area that is far to generous, most saying that it should only affect 4-6 meters at most. I however saw it as being generous by reducing it to 16 meters, since that is the entire size of the shack + 4 meters if you are standing in the center of it, so... idk. I just like the idea of perks countering perks, like how Iron Will used to counter Stridor, or Autodidact/Inner Healing counters Sloppy Butcher, and at the time thought to myself: "If the survivors have a perk that removes all traditional tracking, then it should be ok to introduce another way of tracking them right?"

While this wouldn't help with hearing impaired killers, It could easily be adjusted to showing the survivors hearts within 16m, or even showing a pulsating directional indicator when in that range, to even providing Vibration feedback on controllers as well. Idk... Just something that the devs would have to do to enhance accessability.

Anyway everyone, please let me know your thoughts, especially considering the current state of the game.

And here's a link to the Original post, incase anyone is interested:

Sounds coming from a survivor are precise, where as terror radius is omnidirectional, you mostly don't know where the killer is coming from except for when you have game knowledge you assume where he is coming from depending on where you are and the kind of loop you are in.

While I would LOVE for killers to have more accessibility I just can't see a feasible way to give it to them for chase mechanics without it basically showing where a survivor is on the other side of the wall, one thing (that I think DBD Mobile does) is gen progress for the killer without having to directly look, that's always something that can be looked into.

"Maybe the direction they came from". That's the issue, footsteps come from the survivors feet, showing you where the footsteps are on the other side of the wall is precise information, it is their exact location.

Unimpaired people don't hear the precise direction of the footsteps and stuff because of built in sound of killer powers, chase music and ambient sounds like the fire barrels (always made me mistake them for survivor footsteps).

Giving a semi precise directional visual indicator wouldn't only help hearing impaired people but also the ones that don't need it and "buff" them in an unfair way.

They would need to blurr or fade the indicator in some way in relation to the in-game soundscape and it's volume.

Like you said, when the chase music intensifies or the killer makes use of their power it would need to become way less precise and blurry or something in that line.

But i don't think it would be a solution that hearing impaired people would be satisfied with.

But i also can't come up with a form to this indicator that wouldn't be either uselessly imprecise or brokenly unfair.

Sacrifice SFX has entered the chat.

(To clarify, I agree with your overall point.)

In my experience noises for killer really only makes any difference only once a match, so i can kinda get why they havent bothered

Yeah it would need to be tailored in accordance with the in-game soundscape.

I don't even know if in your scenario the survivor would even make an audible sound and much less if the killer would be able to hear it over everything else, their own footsteps included.

It would need a live emulating code that compares sound sources and their volume and emulate what an unimpaired person MIGHT hear and create a similar visualization.

And even then it wouldn't be a real substitute because how would it work to show something is behind you and be vague enough to represent the miniscule nature of the sound that might be heard.

It seems like such a complicated issue for such minority that, afaik, doesn't have such an accessability feature in any first person game like a shooter were directional sound awareness is truly necessary. I just can't see bhvr being the first to make such an effort.

Hmmm, maybe your colour blindless is more acute or something? I (as far as I'm aware) am not colour blind, and can absolutely see a difference in Scratch mark colours.

For what it's worth, I think people should be able to choose their own scratch mark colour / map dependant coloured scratch marks.

Default is red

Deuteranope is a light orange/brown

Protanope is a pinkish-red

Tritanope is a more vibrant red

But the auditory clues tell you the same information. That is the point. If i hear a survivor on the other side of the wall, i heard them, i know they are there. If someone is hearing impaired, why should they play at that disadvantage?

Yea that's evident, even though you can't hear it, doesn't mean the sound isn't playing, if you turned the chase music off, the steps would be playing, but the game can't determine what your brain heard, so you may have heard that grunt, or grass move etc, or you may not have, but that audio is ALWAYS there, so you would always be getting info from the visual indicators.

I literally am struggling to see how people aren't understanding this, if a survivor behind a pillar presses w, the audio plays, but it doesn't mean you heard it or recognised it as a survivor movement, the game however knows what that is, it knows it's a sound a survivor would make, and would just ping the "visual indicator" showing you that a survivor was there.

But that doesn't factor in ambient sounds.

And also, what keeps unimpaired players from using this as an additional advantage?

If i use a killer with loud ambient voice or am standing right next to a fire barrel then i won't hear breathing or food steps, but with your solution it would show an indicator either way since the sounds played and SHOULD BE audible even when they aren't for unimpaired people because they were masked/overshadowed by ambient noise.

My problem with using stuff like chase music to make things hard to hear is the same as my problem with trying to use darkness to make things difficult to see, or having no crosshair available.

You're giving a huge advantage to people willing to use external software, which isn't available at all for console players, and isn't practically bannable either.

Everyone already knows about NVIDIA filters for visuals. But Windows itself has a volume normalization option that makes footsteps and the like much easier to hear, and lowers the volume of the chase music. If you're truly sweaty, you can even use an equalizer and tune it to boost those sounds even further or use a compressor (the only ppl ive ever heard of doing this are spirit mains though.) All of this is super common in other FPS games like PUBG.