Pause

The expansion of the pause feature is the single greatest advancement in home entertainment.  For most of human civilization, home entertainment (what there was) had the ability to be paused.  For adults, media was pretty much limited to books. Books can be set down at any point you wish. This ability has only been enhanced with the bookmark.

But in the 20th century, home media entertain exploded. TV and video games came into being. But they had a serious drawback at the beginning. Shows ran at a set time. If you wanted to watch it, you had to work your schedule around it. If something happened during that time (phone rang, kids needing something, house exploded) you were out of luck.

Then we got the VHS and things could be recorded and watched on your schedule. The DVR expanded this functionality to being able to pause live TV.  Your entertainment schedule was no longer controlled by network executives. The compulsion to ignore real life in favor of your time sensitive entertainment vanishes. You can now enjoy both.

Early video games had no pause or save features. But it did not take them long to be added. Nowadays, single player games are great for people with short bits of entertainment time. Load up a game, play for a bit. Something comes up, pause and go deal with it come back, or save and come back the next time you have some time.

MMO’s, however, are stuck in the dark ages. As a multiplayer game they have no pause feature. Your play time is controlled by others you wish to play with. That’s fine for group content. Just like playing in an adult sports league, you play based on the events schedule. That is the only way to work with a bunch of others.

Much of modern MMO’s are done solo. Leveling can be done in a group, but it isn’t usually. but there is no pause feature. Something happens in real life, your character dies (or you’re a jackass and ignore it in order to keep playing).

Why can’t you pause an MMO? An NPC is locked to you once you start attacking anyways. Why not have MMO’s allow you to hit pause, freezing your character and the monsters your attacking in a mini-instance. That way, when the phone rings, you can answer it, or you can get your kid a drink. Or answer the door.

STO took the first step with this. You can pause if you are on a map solo. But the timer is only like 30sec. And it really wasn’t put in there for convenience of life, it was put in to give you time to order your bridge offices around.

Now, you’d say a pause feature wouldn’t work in a group. But it could. In the middle of a raid, spill your Mountain Dew, hit pause. The fight freezes. No one can do anything but use the chat feature. The rest of the group would need the ability to override the pause, but that’s just a detail.

I see a pause feature as the next major core addition to MMO’s. Hardcore players will bitch and whine about it. But they do that about everything. For majority of players who game for fun when they have time, once pause is in, it will be something they can’t believe they lived without. Like the pause button on a DVR.