You Won’t Be Able To Pause Elden Ring
Elden Ring looks to be a return to form for the SoulsBorne genre, for better and worse.
The genre brings a hell of a lot of satisfaction with it, offering an unmatched euphoria when you finally topple the boss you’ve been stuck on - but as a result, the games end up, more often than not, as pretty inaccessible.
And it looks like one feature is coming to Elden Ring that threatens to leave you on the edge, even during your downtime.
Why Won't Elden Ring Let You Pause The Game?
As discovered by a user on Reddit, it looks as though Elden Ring won’t give you the chance to properly pause your game - and as a game in a genre that’s pretty stressful as it is, this could be a big problem.
"I thought the inventory screen paused the game like in Sekiro", says Agitated_Illustrator in the EldenRing subreddit, "but the character keeps moving in the background so it appears we can’t pause the game."
This may not be a huge surprise for a lot of Souls fans as previous games in the series have employed this feature - but it’s one that a lot of fans have wanted to be done away with. Its existence is thought to accommodate for a smooth experience when playing online, and it’s the reason that players believe that Sekiro was able to offer a genuine pause feature, with it being an exclusively single-player game.
But, this reveal has brought about a question that some SoulsBorne fans have wondered for some time now.
Would SoulsBorne Games Be Better With A Pause Feature?
It’s a debate that’s as rife as ever now - would the SoulsBorne genre be better off with the option to pause the game itself? Well, it depends on who you ask.
A large portion of the genre’s fans are pretty intense about how the games should be played - and they’d assert that a pause function would give players an out of the game, when realistically, they should be dealing with the stresses of the title as they come.
But this only adds to the sheer inaccessibility of something like Elden Ring - the lack of a pause function might give the gameplay added intensity and stakes, but that’s exactly what some fans want less of. You can’t have it both ways, sadly, so it looks like Elden Ring has opted to make the game feel more isolating and stressful.
The SoulsBorne genre might be the only one that deploys stress deliberately to the glee of its fans - making it a very curious case indeed. Wherever you stand in the pause function debate, it looks like Elden Ring will be inheriting the pause function from Dark Souls - presumably to the delight of long-time fans.
