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.
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.
That's not tension, that's edging. You can complain about it all you like, but fundamentally you're ignoring the design issue here when it looks like the real answer is that it just isn't for you. The issue of accessibility is difficult because -- however much some advocates like to frame it in an abstract, deductive fashion about tailoring one's experience -- the reality of a lot of the "inaccessible" elements of games is that players, when given the opportunity, have a high propensity to "optimize the fun out of the game," i.e. to do what is less fun because it is simply better strategically for the goal of "winning the game," which is typically something you kind of gravitate towards when you play a game. There are some design features that are just bullshit and should be gotten rid of, like "mash the x button to escape" or whatever (and I think some Souls grabs actually have that and I won't defend that shit), but many of the practices that have survived to this day have reasons beyond inertia and gatekeeping for their existence, and calling for their removal with no interest in either what those reasons might be or what could be a genuine replacement is just masturbation.
On the plus side, you can pause Sekiro, so maybe you can give that one a shot. "Doesn't that demonstrate that you should be able to pause in all of them?" Probably, yeah, at least if you're in "offline mode".