10 Gaming Mechanics That Developers Should Have Fixed Years Ago

Everybody’s been there: you’ve gotten to a pivotal cutscene in a game, where the major plot twists are revealed and key characters show their true colours… and someone walks in. In any other part of the game, you would simply press pause, but for some reason cutscenes don’t always work like the rest of the game.

For many games, pressing pause during a cutscene either doesn’t do anything, meaning it can’t be stopped, or it actually skips the scene all together, meaning you’ve either got to reload the level to trigger the scene again or resort to watch what you skipped via YouTube. What other entertainment medium does this? Imagine having a film that you couldn't pause in certain places.

Developers have managed to agree amongst themselves that the ‘Start’ button on the controllers for major consoles is the best button to use for pausing the game, so surely they can also agree that every game they make from now on will give you the ability to pause a cutscene? Many games now give onscreen prompts for what button to press to skip a scene, so why not a prompt for how to pause it?