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.
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.