Nothing frustrates me more than not being able to pause for no seemingly good reason. I’m playing Wild Hearts right now and even though I never play online I cannot pause for some reason. To simulate pausing, I can turn off the xbox and the quick resume feature makes it look like the game was paused when I turn the console back on.
Other games guilty of this are Fromsoft games: Dark Souls, Elden Ring and so on.
Obviously all of these games have an online component. Not allowing pausing when this component is activated makes sense. But if I am playing completely online why cannot I pause? In Soulslike the worst exploit I can think of is switching equipment on the fly but is that really that bad? When stuff comes up in the middle crucial moments it frustrates me a lot.
If there was a pause button and you wanted the tension, all you would have to do is simply not press pause.
Whether not having a pause is justified or not, you surely must know this isn’t a good response, right? “Just play wildly suboptimally for dramatic effect” is not viable game design.
So not building in a pause button automatically makes gameplay wildly suboptimal?
Optimization only happens within constraints. How the game is built represents the constraints.
But in a game where you can pause, making a rule of not pausing would put you at a drastically lower “power level” than someone who pauses.
I’m afraid you’ve moved the goalposts or something. I don’t really care about optimization. Games should be accessible. Not having a pause button means I can’t play the game at all. Optimization doesn’t come into it. The person I responded to argued that having a pause button makes games less tense. I understand that because being able to pause the game gives the player a breather. But just because there’s a pause button doesn’t mean the player has to press it. If they want the tension, they can simply choose not to press it. It’s not up to me, the end user, to solve the problem beyond demanding accessibility.