I've been picking away at Redfall since I started it in October and I really should stop. Today I was playing a couple of the "story" missions and got to one where you're searching this house multiple times and there are no lights so you have to use a flashlight. It was boring and frustrating and it was making my eyes tired. After awhile I wanted to just save and quit and come back to it later, or barring that pause the game and do something else for awhile.

Except that Redfall is online only so you can't save your location and return nor can you pause indefinitely (though maybe you can if you just leave the console on and running, which I did not want to do.)

I think the game saves your progress at certain points during missions but I would have to spawn back at the headquarters then fast travel to the nearest marker, then kill all the respawned enemies I'd cleared, and I'd probably end up just never playing the game again instead.

I might do that anyway even though I pushed through and finished the mission, hating it every moment.

The thing is that this has come up many times even playing games I actually like. Outriders was an okay third person shooter that I had at least a decent time with and I might have been tempted to buy the game and its DLC (I played it on Game Pass) if I could play it like a normal game with pausing and saving. I can't, so I haven't.

Diablo IV can be fun, but would be much better if I could pause and quick resume, or even better save mid mission.

Almost every always online game that has a significant single player component leaves me feeling this way.

Redfall is particularly egregious because it has a max of 4 players and it doesn't have matchmaking so there is absolutely no reason it shouldn't be an offline shooter with online co-op options, like games have had for almost 20 years. There's no reason for this to be online only. At least with Diablo IV they try to do stuff with community events and running into players randomly in the world that gives some reason for it to be the way it is, even though those things are not a worthwhile tradeoff. But for Redfall it just makes an already terrible game even worse. It's bad enough your stupid game has me searching with a flashlight but I can't even take a break? Fuck you, devs. Sincerely. May all your food be delivered with the drinks spilled in the bag.

I hear a lot of people complain about always online games because you can't play when the servers are down and because when they go offline you can never play them again (That's actually a positive for something like Redfall) but for me the lack of pause and mid-mission saves are probably worse.

Who are these people who think this is not a big deal? Do they not have bladders? Colons? Do they never get a phone call? They obviously don't have kids, which is good, because they are immoral monsters, but surely they realize that it's good to be able to stop playing a game and start again.

This has been something that has been in games since the 1980s (pausing) or the 1990s (quicksaving on PC) so it's something that I came to rely on, and yet these days more and more it's just taken away and I feel like I'm the only one who cares.

I've definitely not bought games specifically because they were always online and it's often for this reason. It feels like a big personal "fuck you" from the developers and I feel kind of crazy because it often seems like I'm the only person it really bothers.