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.
More often than not is a design choice. Dark Souls does it to increase tension: you can’t pause to consider your options, you have to do it, and do it fast. It gives an even greater importance to your quick item slots since rummaging through your inventory for an item, while possible, can be cumbersome and kill you.
you would be surprised how hard a pause feature can be to implement.
counterpoint: not being able to pause creates tension and puts pressure on the player. that wii U zombie game didn’t pause while you were digging around in your inventory and that game would be way less interesting if it did. i probably wouldn’t even remember it exists.
if you don’t like that tension and pressure that’s fine but there’s no shortage of games that don’t restrict you like that and no-pause is a legitimate design tool.
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?
a self-imposed limitation is not at all the same as an external restriction.
It’s either a self imposed limitation for some users and inclusivity by default, or a design-imposed limitation and exclusivity by default. Considering I spend so much of my time arguing and fighting against against exclusion and for inclusion in every other part of life, I see no reason why games shouldn’t get the same treatment.
I see no reason why games shouldn’t get the same treatment.
tests of skill and ability are inherently ableist. There are plenty of games that allow pausing, they’re the majority, even. Let people have some that don’t for artistic or ludic purposes.
I find hero shooters visually overstimulating and can’t play them. I could try to get those to stop being made or i can go play any of the thousands of other games that aren’t like that and let people who want and like them to have their fun too. I don’t like visual design of anime fighters, but there are plenty of fighters that aren’t like that i can go play. I don’t like to keep playing a game when i know i lost for 25 minutes because it’s depression triggering but other people like league of dota for some reason.
I and people who need to pause at all times are not under-served minorities.
tests of skill and ability are inherently ableist. There are plenty of games that allow pausing, they’re the majority, even. Let people have some that don’t for artistic or ludic purposes.
“Let us have a little ableism, as a treat.”
The thing is, it doesn’t need to be either/or.
I could try to get those to stop being made or i can go play any of the thousands of other games that aren’t like that
Or devs could do the same thing they’ve been doing for decades with difficulty levels. Before the start of a game, let users choose the difficulty levels and that could include whether or not they can pause the game. Users who wish to can then pause. This can be locked into the entirety of that playthrough. Problem solved.
Games almost never have to actually choose between ableism and the dev’s vision for difficulty or pacing or whatever the fuck. Just give people the option. Hell, it would encourage people like me who struggle with difficult games to experience the game the way I am able, then try it again with higher difficulty (without being able to pause) rather than simply never being able to experience the game in the first place.
Given the reasons you listed why you can’t play certain games, wouldn’t you appreciate it if devs made the game in such a way where you could still choose to play it in the way you can, and let others play it as is? Obviously this isn’t possible in all cases, and some while possible might require such a huge revamp of the game that it would effectively be a different game. This is not the case for simply being able to pause the game.
This isn’t a lot to ask of devs for large masses of people who live lives where they will have to step away from a game without notice but would also like to not be punished by the game for doing so or outright unable to play it because of that life.
i have enough games to play, i’m not put out by design features i don’t like or render a minority of games inaccessible to me.
a fuckload of books and movies don’t hold my attention, should everything be re-edited to suit my neurology?
you can’t have challenges for everyone without being somewhat exclusionary some of the time, and that’s fine as long as it’s optional recreation and there’s a wealth of other equivalent things we can do for fun.
the large masses of people who have to be able to pause at the drop of a hat are the default. offline singleplayer with no pausing is a rare aberration. You might as well ask for the spiciest food to cease to exist, to accommodate normal people, as though the vast majority of food is not spicy at all.
You sound like one of those chud gamers who thinks making games more inclusive for other people detracts from the purity of the game. It’s ablebist bullshit.
a fuckload of books and movies don’t hold my attention, should everything be re-edited to suit my neurology?
“There’s a fuckload of places around the city that are wheelchair-accessible, should every public building be re-engineered to suit me just because I’m in a wheelchair?” A book or movie “not holding your attention” is a completely different thing than if a book or a movie didn’t allow you to set it down or walk away from it. If a movie forced the people who wanted to watch it to do so entirely on the terms of the producer, like say, not letting people fast-forward through a scene with intense flashing lights, then yes, that’s ableist and that movie should be criticized for being ableist and a version of it should be made so people with epilepsy could watch it.
You might as well ask for the spiciest food to cease to exist, to accommodate normal people, as though the vast majority of food is not spicy at all.
This is such a bullshit analogy that totally misrepresents what we’re saying. (“We” being those of us who think games should not be ableist). We’re not asking for spicy food to “not exist” in that we’re not asking for your precious games who don’t want people to be able to pause them to “not exist.” They can exist just fine, as I described above, it doesn’t have to be either/or, so you should stop pretending like it does. Just as a spicy food dish and a mild version of it can exist simultaneously. In fact it’s funny that you’d even use that as an analogy since every restaurant I’ve ever been to gives its customers the option to order a hot or mild version of whatever spicy dishes it has on the menu.
I disagree on Souls games, it makes them harder.
It’s not necessarily because it makes them harder that it’s a good choice, it’s because it makes the challenges more certain/unavoidable/unrelenting. Each encounter has a specific pace that can’t be interrupted for you to wrap your head around it and come up with strategies or whatever. You’ve just gotta take it as it comes.
It works well because there are plenty of safe areas where the game may as well be paused anyway. And 99% of the time no new enemies are going to arrive once you’ve killed the ones around you so if you’re not in combat it’s, again, effectively paused anyway.
That’s a bad thing.
Star Craft even supports pausing in multiplayer games.
This is one of the few things I hate in Baldur’s Gate 3. Sure, the game is round based, but I still can’t pause cutscenes. So if my mother barges in while I’m getting it on with Astarion I loose valuable dialogue.
Among online games Starcraft has an advantage that it is strictly 1v1 as far as I know. I have never played it because just hearing about APM gives me carpal tunnel syndrome. FIFA despite being a complete shit game allows pausing in online matches too. Not sure what it is like in fighting games.
Starcraft can be 2v2 or 3v3 or even 4v4, though that is far, far less common for more serious competitive players, as it’s way too easy to just focus fire one opponent as a group and then move onto the next once they’re destroyed.
