Nothing frustrates me more than not being able to pause for no seemingly good reason. I’m playing Wild Hearts right now and even though I never play online I cannot pause for some reason. To simulate pausing, I can turn off the xbox and the quick resume feature makes it look like the game was paused when I turn the console back on.
Other games guilty of this are Fromsoft games: Dark Souls, Elden Ring and so on.
Obviously all of these games have an online component. Not allowing pausing when this component is activated makes sense. But if I am playing completely online why cannot I pause? In Soulslike the worst exploit I can think of is switching equipment on the fly but is that really that bad? When stuff comes up in the middle crucial moments it frustrates me a lot.
I think it is only this way in Dark Souls because Demon’s Souls was very messy and allowed for multiplayer to start even during one specific boss battle. So to keep the whole thing seamless (considering how otherwise janky the game was) they just went with “no pause” and it somehow became a tradition. Sekiro which is offline-only has a pause button AFAIK and you can “pause” Bloodborne by pressing the home button.
I’m not sure if there is ever a design benefit to not allowing pausing, it’s mostly from technical difficulties. Monster Hunter is identical to Dark Souls and always had a pause button since at least the Wii version.