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.
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.
“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.
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.
people are literally in here complaining about games that don’t allow pausing, saying that they should all allow it with no exceptions regardless of artistic intent or ludic effect.
this thread would not have happened if “they can exist just fine” was the premise.
ableism is inherent to challenging participants on the basis of ability. a challenge for some will be impossible for others, and some people will be unable no matter how easy the easy mode is or how low you put the basketball hoop. We have to reckon with that, inventing wheelchair basketball, or having a lower hoop for kids, or games that have no time pressure, but we don’t get rid of the NBA because I can’t dunk and we shouldn’t force every game to have pausing just because somebody might need to walk away.