In Defence Of The Pause Button
A not-insignificant amount of people believe, wholeheartedly, that Elden Ring does not need a pause button, because the game is not designed to have one if it doesn’t have one in the first place. “The game ain’t for you if you need to mod in an entire pause button,” one insightful Elden Ring player yelled into the ether. “And if you desperately need to pause, just quit out. Ain’t that hard imo.”
Of course, there are also ways to pause Elden Ring aside from just implementing the pause button, a manoeuvre that lets you pause a game in just one second. The same player has suggested several alternatives: you can, for instance, fast travel to the bonfire (the quintessential FromSoftware save point), which will take you more than one second—or use the game’s equivalent of Dark Souls’ homeward bone to return to the last bonfire, which will also take you more than one second—never mind the fact that there isn’t actually one such item in the game. Because “pausing would trivialize the majority of the game and take away a lot of the challenge that comes to them”, I guess you can also just grab your nearest sledgehammer and smash your computer in if all else fails, just in case your favourite FromSoftware game still refuses to pause, like an eternal march across the infinity of the universe. It wasn’t part of the developer’s vision that I could stop to go to the bathroom, I guess.
Related: Elden Ring Is The Most Approachable FromSoftware Game Yet
But the inability to pause Elden Ring isn’t what makes the game difficult; it’s what makes the game unapproachable. Several players have pointed out that if you’re a functioning human being who needs to tend to the occasional urgent matters—take a dump, tend to your crying cat, reply a
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