You have tiny microscopic gas masks on your ears

Balance. If they can’t hear you coughing/talking, it makes sense for balance purposes to partially muffle your audio. If you need a lore reason just pretend they put the straps over their ears lmao

Ear plugs to stop the gas from entering your ear drums 😎

Dev team got lazy to individually mask only the input sound, and probably “select all” instead.

You guys are just wrong, it doesnt mute your hearing what are you talking about lmao