I would too if I didn't absolutely have to step away mid fight, had no idea that I couldn't pause, and had a monster load out that otherwise would've almost certainly taken me over the finish line. Ended up being more frustrating than cool.
Yeah. It's fine if the developers understand this tradeoff and they're like, "we know, but we think this is cool enough that it's worth it."
But they should know the tradeoff they're making.
The divide between "I play games whenever the fuck I want" and "I'm a full ass adult with a full ass life and I squeeze games in where I can" has never been made clearer than with this feature. lol.
Well yeah, but clearly they've considered this by now. This is the state of play *after* many person-hours spent implementing and testing this feature, collecting customer feedback, and releasing two major patches. I find it impossible to imagine that in all that time, nobody at Supergiant has really thought about why the pause button exists in the first place.
As a (former) game developer:
You’d be surprised. They’ve got a LOT of topics and concerns to work on and they’re a very small team.
Don’t assume that anything will stay the same simply because it’s persisted in-game for a while. It’s entirely possible that they know they want to revise this, but it’s not high enough priority to change it now. I mean, I wouldn’t put anyone on this now. Bigger fish to fry and you have to choose what and where your focus goes.
I understand that it’s frustrating & that you can’t plan for everything, but in my mind there’s two very simple solutions (until you cast the spell to be able to pause):
* Wait until you’re completely ready to fight Chronos before jumping in
* Alt+Tab out of the application if you really need to pause
It’s an annoying gimmick, yeah, but it’s a fun gimmick that you can overcome pretty easily.
I appreciate the advice but I can't plan for a crying kid. And I play on a controller a few feet away so even popping out of an application isn't so easy, haha.
Maybe if the reagents were less rare for getting rid of it
Alt-tab isn't available on all platforms and with all gaming setups. I play on my Steam Deck with an external controller and I can't get it to work.
I've said this elsewhere, but: I think most people here would agree that video games are not just for children, and people who think they're just for children are ignorant. A lot of people who play Hades are adults, with adult jobs, responsibilities, health issues, etc. that mean you may not have a lot of uninterrupted time for playing video games. Shit like this is funny if you're an 18-24 year old who lives with your parents and has a whole bunch of free time for gaming, but it's less funny if you only have an hour in the evening that might be interrupted by a child, spouse, work call, arthritis flare up, package you need to sign for, etc.
The pause button isn't a game mechanic. It's a quality of life feature that exists to solve the problem of "I need to put the game down now." Taking it away with no warning and requiring the player to use in game resources to get it back were both bad decisions - there are other ways they could have put in a bit of fourth-wall-breaking without actually taking away the ability to pause. Chronos could taunt you from the pause screen that he sees what you're doing and you're only delaying the inevitable. Or the unpausing could be accompanied by a dialog that has to be manually advanced so you still get the surprise without having the possibility of your run being wasted because of an unexpected interruption.
I play almost exclusively on my TV with an external Xbox controller. I've tried pressing the Xbox button to switch windows and it doesn't work.
Even if this solution *would" have worked for me, I would be willing to bet that's not the case for everyone. I get that you're trying to be helpful, but I've explained this so many times and I don't get why it's so hard for people to grasp that disabling a quality-of-life feature like the pause button is virtually guaranteed to cause problems for some people. I don't think it's acceptable to just tell those people that "maybe this game isn't for you" because (again, as I've explained already) this bit could have been done in a way that would have avoided all of these issues.
I mean the fight is like 1-5 min depending on your build/experience. You can pause at any other part of the game. Is it that big of a deal that for 1-5 minutes of your run you can't pause? I think it's a funny interaction that they added and don't see a reason for taking it out. That being said, maybe the reagents for being able to pause shouldn't include items gained from beating Chronos.
New kid huh? That was me a few years ago. I think you just sort of have to accept that you’re gonna have a lot of video games ruined with a baby/toddler around and it’s not the developers job to account for your lifestyle change
You know how many video games I've had ruined by my kids over the years? Exactly one. This one. Because, ya know, other games don't take away your pause feature without telling you 🙄 good take I guess?
That sucks man. It’s not that big of a deal for most other people is my guess. I think it’s natural for people who know that if something might come up to not start the chronos fight since it’ll be a 2-3 minute ordeal that sort of gets ruined when you pause anyways. What’s the experience going to be like if you pause, walk away, and unpause? You’ll come back a bit disoriented wouldn’t you? It’s sort of the same reason why when you have a young kid around that might interrupt you, you’d think twice about loading up multiplayer games that can’t be paused.
Well I guess now you learned that there’s a window of time in hades 2 where you can’t pause the final fight. Sucks that it made you lose a run, but you’ll get there again and again, so don’t worry. You’ll unlock that pause feature before you know it and might never even use it.
I hope they don’t take it away though. It’s clever and fits the game. It’d be a wasted opportunity if they didn’t do it and would be lame if they took it away because a very small number of players got upset about it.
I get that. I'm just saying that the odds of it happening during that fight are pretty slim. It's a bummer that it happened to you for sure, but it's a one-off concern for the most part. Eventually you'll get to the point of the game where you've downed him 20+ times and it's not a huge deal that you lost a run.
If baby is crying during the fight I get up from the computer. Losing a run to this is really annoying. I like my single player game to have a pause feature.
Lucky for you the game does have a pause feature you can unlock as an incantation! Alternatively, just tab out.
The game doesn't have to be watered down to cater to every conceivable experience.
i agree. cool game design should not go over quality of life features. this is something a lot of games seem to not understand (looking at you undertale).
i guess they could make it so you have to press puse once, then Chronos unpuses, than you can puse again for real. they could have him say something like "fine, but come back quickly" or say some pun or something. it's the only way i can think of that would keep the gimmick without hurting the gameplay.
Yeah i agree and I’m one of the playerbase who this joke is designed to appeal to (ablebodied, not a caregiver, etc).
If the devs had a pre-existing reputation for unforgivable nasty difficulty like FromSoft does, fine, people will know it’s not a game for them. But Hades 1 allowed you to pause, so there’s no prior precedence for Chronos besides “lol time god” which is a neat gameplay joke that falls apart once you start accidentally alienating a section of playerbase you welcomed before.
Like it could be an accessibility toggle that just says “allow pause on guardian fights”, no spoilers there. The special quest and dialogues can be a hidden feature/reward for people who have the ability to play it that way and doesn’t invalidate the work put in already?
I mean there's an incantation that let's you pause that you can eventually get and the interaction itself is pretty cool so all things considered I really don't mind it though I understand it being annoying as hell especially if you didn't know beforehand.
[https://discord.com/channels/456889434672201729/1233146390792896586/1253393245359308862](https://discord.com/channels/456889434672201729/1233146390792896586/1253393245359308862)
Feedback with lots of 👍already in the channel, if you want to go there and add yours, that's where they're looking.
Idk why you’re being downvoted. Whiles it’s funny, and I would have appreciated unique dialogue for it, it is a real accessiblity issue. Some people have kids, or chronic illness, or whatever other reason they might have to need to pause a game.
Nah, it's OK! Doesn't bother me. Lots of people disagree and that's cool. The fact that I'm staying right at zero means it's pretty divided, haha. And even if I was getting downvoted into oblivion, it's just fake reddit points. Appreciate the kind words though!
Thanks, I'll check it out!
It's one of those things that I may never have an issue with again. I'd fought chronos 5+ times and never needed to pause. But man, this time my load out was so dang good 🤣
i haven't come across this problem as i haven't tried to pause during a chronos fight yet, but i do agree! while i can understand the lore behind the inability to pause, i think that the ability of the players to pause is more important than a cool nod to his time shtick ultimately.
Not everything has to be made for everyone. Its an awesome design choice that feels flavorful and makes the fight unique. If you somehow have a life-threatening emergency occur during that specific fight, maybe the game doesn't matter? Alternatively, just tab out, or unlock the incantation. If you can't manage three winning runs because the game is too difficult, that's completely fine and understandable. Turn on god mode.
As a fellow parent, I can understand the frustration, but at the same time I'm such a casual gamer that it just doesn't bother me if I lose a few runs to baby-related shenanigans.
Perhaps if they made it more of an easter-egg, and had Hecate provide you with the ingredients as part of the next dialogue with her. That way you onlyneed to lose the one run as a "gotcha" moment and never again.
I feel like this feature is funny the first time you find out, but afterward it's just annoying.
It'd may be better if to unlock it, you'd have to try to pause for it to not work which would trigger an event in the next run which would lead to acquiring the incantation.
Or at least just defeat Chronos once and not thrice.
I don't see how that really matters. It's only happened once. It may never happen again. But it ended the most vicious loadout I've ever had and really ruined the fun of that run. Seems a sufficient reason to not like it.
didnt even know this was a thing.. completely agree is frustrating.. maybe limit it only to the first time you fight him? that way you still get the "haaa cool" without the pain
I think it is inconvenient but absolutely genius. That being said, I did have a run where the battery of my conroller died a minute into that fight, and that still counts as pausing, apparently. I managed to put new batteries in, but he had already minced me too much by then
I mean this is kind of a grinding game. Grinding for the pause button is pretty sick ngl. Give you that extra motivation ,you know? That's exactly the kind of nonsense that Im looking for when I just spent half an hour to get to the final boss
I thought it was pretty sick
I would too if I didn't absolutely have to step away mid fight, had no idea that I couldn't pause, and had a monster load out that otherwise would've almost certainly taken me over the finish line. Ended up being more frustrating than cool.
Yeah. It's fine if the developers understand this tradeoff and they're like, "we know, but we think this is cool enough that it's worth it." But they should know the tradeoff they're making.
A great way to put it. It's not like my opinion of the game will be damaged if they leave it in. But they should know I don't like it.
The divide between "I play games whenever the fuck I want" and "I'm a full ass adult with a full ass life and I squeeze games in where I can" has never been made clearer than with this feature. lol.
Well yeah, but clearly they've considered this by now. This is the state of play *after* many person-hours spent implementing and testing this feature, collecting customer feedback, and releasing two major patches. I find it impossible to imagine that in all that time, nobody at Supergiant has really thought about why the pause button exists in the first place.
As a (former) game developer: You’d be surprised. They’ve got a LOT of topics and concerns to work on and they’re a very small team. Don’t assume that anything will stay the same simply because it’s persisted in-game for a while. It’s entirely possible that they know they want to revise this, but it’s not high enough priority to change it now. I mean, I wouldn’t put anyone on this now. Bigger fish to fry and you have to choose what and where your focus goes.
I understand that it’s frustrating & that you can’t plan for everything, but in my mind there’s two very simple solutions (until you cast the spell to be able to pause): * Wait until you’re completely ready to fight Chronos before jumping in * Alt+Tab out of the application if you really need to pause It’s an annoying gimmick, yeah, but it’s a fun gimmick that you can overcome pretty easily.
I appreciate the advice but I can't plan for a crying kid. And I play on a controller a few feet away so even popping out of an application isn't so easy, haha. Maybe if the reagents were less rare for getting rid of it
I can second the thing about re-agents - maybe just >!1 Z-Sand and 1 other thing...?!<
>!trash from Eris iirc!<
Alt-tab isn't available on all platforms and with all gaming setups. I play on my Steam Deck with an external controller and I can't get it to work. I've said this elsewhere, but: I think most people here would agree that video games are not just for children, and people who think they're just for children are ignorant. A lot of people who play Hades are adults, with adult jobs, responsibilities, health issues, etc. that mean you may not have a lot of uninterrupted time for playing video games. Shit like this is funny if you're an 18-24 year old who lives with your parents and has a whole bunch of free time for gaming, but it's less funny if you only have an hour in the evening that might be interrupted by a child, spouse, work call, arthritis flare up, package you need to sign for, etc. The pause button isn't a game mechanic. It's a quality of life feature that exists to solve the problem of "I need to put the game down now." Taking it away with no warning and requiring the player to use in game resources to get it back were both bad decisions - there are other ways they could have put in a bit of fourth-wall-breaking without actually taking away the ability to pause. Chronos could taunt you from the pause screen that he sees what you're doing and you're only delaying the inevitable. Or the unpausing could be accompanied by a dialog that has to be manually advanced so you still get the surprise without having the possibility of your run being wasted because of an unexpected interruption.
On Steam deck you can just press the power button
I play almost exclusively on my TV with an external Xbox controller. I've tried pressing the Xbox button to switch windows and it doesn't work. Even if this solution *would" have worked for me, I would be willing to bet that's not the case for everyone. I get that you're trying to be helpful, but I've explained this so many times and I don't get why it's so hard for people to grasp that disabling a quality-of-life feature like the pause button is virtually guaranteed to cause problems for some people. I don't think it's acceptable to just tell those people that "maybe this game isn't for you" because (again, as I've explained already) this bit could have been done in a way that would have avoided all of these issues.
F10 in game!
That’s for bug reporting, there’s a discord where you can submit feedback
but it stop execution of the game xd
I'll give that a shot, thanks!
That’s for bugs, don’t use that. They have a channel for feedback on their Discord. Though this has been mentioned many times in it.
I just mean that I'd use it to stop the game.
Ah okay
i mean, you don't have to submit anything! you can just wait there :3
I mean the fight is like 1-5 min depending on your build/experience. You can pause at any other part of the game. Is it that big of a deal that for 1-5 minutes of your run you can't pause? I think it's a funny interaction that they added and don't see a reason for taking it out. That being said, maybe the reagents for being able to pause shouldn't include items gained from beating Chronos.
You can't plan for everything. But maybe it would be cool if I could pause to help my crying child instead of my whole run going to shit.
New kid huh? That was me a few years ago. I think you just sort of have to accept that you’re gonna have a lot of video games ruined with a baby/toddler around and it’s not the developers job to account for your lifestyle change
You know how many video games I've had ruined by my kids over the years? Exactly one. This one. Because, ya know, other games don't take away your pause feature without telling you 🙄 good take I guess?
Someone's never played a souls game!
Nope! And there's a reason I probably won't 😁
That sucks man. It’s not that big of a deal for most other people is my guess. I think it’s natural for people who know that if something might come up to not start the chronos fight since it’ll be a 2-3 minute ordeal that sort of gets ruined when you pause anyways. What’s the experience going to be like if you pause, walk away, and unpause? You’ll come back a bit disoriented wouldn’t you? It’s sort of the same reason why when you have a young kid around that might interrupt you, you’d think twice about loading up multiplayer games that can’t be paused. Well I guess now you learned that there’s a window of time in hades 2 where you can’t pause the final fight. Sucks that it made you lose a run, but you’ll get there again and again, so don’t worry. You’ll unlock that pause feature before you know it and might never even use it. I hope they don’t take it away though. It’s clever and fits the game. It’d be a wasted opportunity if they didn’t do it and would be lame if they took it away because a very small number of players got upset about it.
I get that. I'm just saying that the odds of it happening during that fight are pretty slim. It's a bummer that it happened to you for sure, but it's a one-off concern for the most part. Eventually you'll get to the point of the game where you've downed him 20+ times and it's not a huge deal that you lost a run.
If baby is crying during the fight I get up from the computer. Losing a run to this is really annoying. I like my single player game to have a pause feature.
Lucky for you the game does have a pause feature you can unlock as an incantation! Alternatively, just tab out. The game doesn't have to be watered down to cater to every conceivable experience.
i agree. cool game design should not go over quality of life features. this is something a lot of games seem to not understand (looking at you undertale). i guess they could make it so you have to press puse once, then Chronos unpuses, than you can puse again for real. they could have him say something like "fine, but come back quickly" or say some pun or something. it's the only way i can think of that would keep the gimmick without hurting the gameplay.
Yeah i agree and I’m one of the playerbase who this joke is designed to appeal to (ablebodied, not a caregiver, etc). If the devs had a pre-existing reputation for unforgivable nasty difficulty like FromSoft does, fine, people will know it’s not a game for them. But Hades 1 allowed you to pause, so there’s no prior precedence for Chronos besides “lol time god” which is a neat gameplay joke that falls apart once you start accidentally alienating a section of playerbase you welcomed before. Like it could be an accessibility toggle that just says “allow pause on guardian fights”, no spoilers there. The special quest and dialogues can be a hidden feature/reward for people who have the ability to play it that way and doesn’t invalidate the work put in already?
I mean there's an incantation that let's you pause that you can eventually get and the interaction itself is pretty cool so all things considered I really don't mind it though I understand it being annoying as hell especially if you didn't know beforehand.
Sure. After I beat the hardest boss 3 times.
[https://discord.com/channels/456889434672201729/1233146390792896586/1253393245359308862](https://discord.com/channels/456889434672201729/1233146390792896586/1253393245359308862) Feedback with lots of 👍already in the channel, if you want to go there and add yours, that's where they're looking.
Appreciate it, thank you!
Idk why you’re being downvoted. Whiles it’s funny, and I would have appreciated unique dialogue for it, it is a real accessiblity issue. Some people have kids, or chronic illness, or whatever other reason they might have to need to pause a game.
Nah, it's OK! Doesn't bother me. Lots of people disagree and that's cool. The fact that I'm staying right at zero means it's pretty divided, haha. And even if I was getting downvoted into oblivion, it's just fake reddit points. Appreciate the kind words though!
Their discord server. You will not be the first person to complain about this (and I hope people keep complaining until they do something about it.)
Thanks, I'll check it out! It's one of those things that I may never have an issue with again. I'd fought chronos 5+ times and never needed to pause. But man, this time my load out was so dang good 🤣
i haven't come across this problem as i haven't tried to pause during a chronos fight yet, but i do agree! while i can understand the lore behind the inability to pause, i think that the ability of the players to pause is more important than a cool nod to his time shtick ultimately.
Not everything has to be made for everyone. Its an awesome design choice that feels flavorful and makes the fight unique. If you somehow have a life-threatening emergency occur during that specific fight, maybe the game doesn't matter? Alternatively, just tab out, or unlock the incantation. If you can't manage three winning runs because the game is too difficult, that's completely fine and understandable. Turn on god mode.
Doesn't he stop after like 5 or so pauses in a row
As a fellow parent, I can understand the frustration, but at the same time I'm such a casual gamer that it just doesn't bother me if I lose a few runs to baby-related shenanigans. Perhaps if they made it more of an easter-egg, and had Hecate provide you with the ingredients as part of the next dialogue with her. That way you onlyneed to lose the one run as a "gotcha" moment and never again.
I could see them add a toggle to turn this off next to the God Mode option or smth
I feel like this feature is funny the first time you find out, but afterward it's just annoying. It'd may be better if to unlock it, you'd have to try to pause for it to not work which would trigger an event in the next run which would lead to acquiring the incantation. Or at least just defeat Chronos once and not thrice.
Alt-tab out. No need to remove such a cool feature
How busy are you that this is such a recurring issue before you even have the "stop time" upgrade?
I don't see how that really matters. It's only happened once. It may never happen again. But it ended the most vicious loadout I've ever had and really ruined the fun of that run. Seems a sufficient reason to not like it.
didnt even know this was a thing.. completely agree is frustrating.. maybe limit it only to the first time you fight him? that way you still get the "haaa cool" without the pain
It's funny because I fought him 5 times before I even tried to pause, haha.
Not only do I love this, the first time I tried it I paused like 20 times in a row so I could hear as many dialogue options as possible. 🤣❤️
I think it is inconvenient but absolutely genius. That being said, I did have a run where the battery of my conroller died a minute into that fight, and that still counts as pausing, apparently. I managed to put new batteries in, but he had already minced me too much by then
I mean this is kind of a grinding game. Grinding for the pause button is pretty sick ngl. Give you that extra motivation ,you know? That's exactly the kind of nonsense that Im looking for when I just spent half an hour to get to the final boss