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.
in that case they can implement a pause screen that's only a pause screen, not allowing the user to do anything but unpause 😐
it's understandable if you're using a game engine that doesn't support it (e.g. your own engine), but I can't think of it as anything other than a design flaw
The basic feature required is to support multiple game states, there's no reason not to have that apart from incompetence.
I'm pretty certain that the Prepare To Die edition of DS1 had seperate pause and inventory buttons, so I don't see why other games wouldn't be able to do it.
That's not the case. You can't pause just as in the remake
Someone elsewhere mentioned that at least one of the games has a mod to add it in, so I must have used that.