I loved what I played of Elden Ring. Its unique fantasy world is wonderful to explore, with not one enemy derivative or area overused. The surprises were varied, interesting, and always unexpected, whether they came in the form of entire underground universes complete with stunning night sky vistas, or shambling dragons preventing you from progressing. Like I said, I loved what I played. I just didn’t play a lot.
I explored The Lands Between for about 30 hours, beating some bosses and seeing most areas. But my problems came when something IRL happened. Not a specific something, it was when anything happened, really. The postman killed me once, but most often, it was my daughter.
If you’ve got children, or have ever been around a child for an extended period of time, you’ll know that they don’t tend to sleep very much. So by the time 9pm rolls around, the little one is tucked up in bed and I’ve had my dinner, gaming time can begin. However, I have to be ready to respond to any sound I hear on the baby monitor. Babies don’t sleep well, they’re up and down all night, and that makes playing Elden Ring essentially a non-starter.
I persevered a lot, but the lack of a pause button made progress painfully slow. Two interruptions in a row would result in permanently losing all my runes, thus resetting any progress towards the next level. Eventually there came a point where challenging bosses was like being repeatedly dunked in suffocating treacle, and I’d reached a level where tackling a few giants wouldn't reward me enough runes to instantly level up. My strategies were bust, and I simply needed time to grind in order to progress.
That’s where a pause button would be really very handy, and why I hope the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC adds the feature before thinking about any narrative extensions or monumental boss fights. If I was only allowed to briefly escape to a menu so I could attend to whatever matter was at hand – doorbell ringing, oven timer beeping, phone call incoming, etc. – I could actually play this wonderful game.
The main argument against implementing a pause button in Soulsborne games is that it ruins the immersion. While true, in a real combat situation my lowly Tarnished would not be able to stop time at will in order to run an errand on another plane or eat several wheels of cheese, is it immersive that most of my deaths have not come at the hands of dragons but by postmen and babies? I get the Skyrim-esque cheese-eating thing, I really do, but a pause menu could easily not include the option to fully restore your health willy nilly.
The current item menu, where you equip spells and armour, choose emotes, and can get murked for doing so, can stay exactly the same. But a different pause menu, where you can’t do any of that, where maybe you can choose to save or quit and not much else. Many games do this, and it wouldn’t make Elden Ring any less immersive. Again, I would argue that not dying to postmen and spam callers would make it more immersive.
The other argument against pausing is that it would make the game too easy. I don’t get this one at all, I must say. If we’re separating the menus to a pause menu and a mechanic menu, then the difficulty is identical. If you’re really that bothered about people looking up guides mid-boss fight (which won’t help them in the moment and they’ll probably die anyway), then I think you’ve got bigger problems, namely that you’re spending way too much time caring about how other people play games.
This would also let FromSoftware add an official Photo Mode to the game. There are a host of popular mods that add such a feature into Elden Ring, and with a game that looks this striking, with vistas this unique and enemies this gruesome, it’s not hard to see why. Players would spend hundreds of hours grabbing the perfect shot, myself included. Encouraging the sharing of screenshots on social media is a large part of the marketing strategy for many games. It’s free publicity, and why so many games embargoes allow journalists and influencers to share a screenshot of an unreleased game’s home screen to tease their reviews. It all plays into the hype machine, encouraging others to jump back into the game and experience The Lands Between all over again.
I don’t really care what Shadow of the Erdtree has to offer from a narrative perspective, because I know that I’ll likely never experience it. Whether it’s accessible post-game or mid-game doesn’t matter, as real life will be my Tarnished’s most insurmountable foe. I’ve made my peace with the fact I’ll never finish FromSoftware’s masterpiece. Even if one simple addition would make the world of difference, I don’t expect to see a pause button implemented any time soon. And that’s a real shame.