Outriders is the latest game to prevent players from being able to pause when they’re in its singleplayer mode, a common annoyance familiar to players of Souls-likes, action-RPGs, and basically any game-as-a-service that isn’t Warframe. Thing is, you actually can pause Outriders when you’re playing it alone. You just have to have access to Nvidia’s Ansel, as discovered by Redditor Aced-Bread.
Owners of Nvidia GPUs will be familiar with GeForce Experience, the software that downloads driver updates and forgets your password. It also comes with a photo mode called Ansel that you can enter in supported games by pressing Alt-F2, then zooming around in free-camera applying post-processing filters and so on. Outriders is one of those supported games and, when you’re not partied-up, you can use it to pause then finally go to the toilet, answer the door, let the dog out, pay attention to your loved ones, or whatever.
As Morgan wrote, Outriders is the latest game to remind us how much online-only singleplayer sucks. The frequent disconnections are a serious problem, but the lack of a pause button is annoying too given that it’s a game designed to lack downtime or safe zones. The fact that Outriders is fully capable of being paused, but just won’t let you unless you have a specific brand of graphics card, seems like rubbing salt in the wound.