OI! [tactical/combat] PAUSE!

Sorry, I should've specified. I was talking about Not being able to choose which powers the squadmates use on combat, not the tactical pause in general.

Tiptoed through the thread, thank you for not posting story-spoilers.


I use pause a lot, so I am not sure how this will affect me.

When I was younger I was very active in my MMO. I was one of the officers and part of the raidteam. It was fun! I also did lots of cool stuff at work. It was going great until it just didn't work out anymore. It came gradually but after a while I lost the ability to handle stress, I got burned out. I went from superwoman doing all the stuff super-well to sitting in a sofa and on a really good day I could walk around the house.

It took a few years to come back to working but here I am. I am now super carefull about stress. I use pause in game to keep the combat enjoyable on a tactical lvl but not too hectic so that I feel stressed out. It is not the difficulty of the game but the need to react quickly, timed stress that does not work for me so that is where pause comes in. There is a threshold for how much stress I can take, husband + kiddo and work comes first and then in the evening I use what ever I have left for enjoyment. We will see how it works for me, I might just stick it on casual and gun down everything because Story > combat for me but I will miss planing if I can't use it anymore. Time stress is also why I don't participate in MP anymore. I used to do it, I had a blast on mumble with my guildies but now I lose energy very quickly when playing MP. I can only do it for a short while and need time to charge up again and it just takes to much time to get good at it that way, and it isn't as fun now. I sucks, still miss doing raids and having fun on mumble but it is too much for me to do it on regular basis.

Knowing the game inside out makes things easier, but it does not take away the time-stress which used to be part of the enjoyment for me. This is not a L2p unfortunately. We will see how it turns out.

I don't think anybody is realistically expecting them to put it in at this stage but, to be honest, they already have a way to pause the game while bringing up a wheel that selects options.

All they needed to do was add another wheel for powers with the ability to move the camera while the wheel was up  I can't imagine it would have taken that much extra effort if they'd wanted to.

I my BioWare games, it is what I spend most my gaming-time on. And I agree, I won't judge it before hand. So far every game has been really fun for me so I think that this will be good as well. It is more like like they removed something I used to rely on, so I am just a little bit curious/anxious about how it will turn out. Will do a PT on casual or narrative to get a feel for it and then take it from there. I knew how to get a balance between fun/stress when I had tactical play, just have to see how I make it work in the new game.

Also, sometimes it is just nice to talk a bit with others who are sitting in the same boat you know. Guess I will turn to the forum if I feel that I need suggestions for hitting the right spot in the game. We will see soon      can't wait to play!

How well did you think the squadmates did with combos? My impression was that this worked pretty well, assuming you had sensible and complimentary builds in the party.

Partly this was because in DA:I your build largely dictates your tactics. I think ME:A might end up in a similar place because it looks like the squadmates will have limited power sets. So it'll be on the player to set up power loadouts for Ryder which synergize well with the current squad.

I have peripheral neuropathy* as well, although it's not as bad as yours seems to be. I can't use a keyboard or mouse - for any purpose - while it's on a desk. My last 3 fingers on both hands went numb for about 18 months, and my right hand would frequently swell and become red and hot. Switching solely to a laptop on my lap while I sat on the sofa helped ease it in time. I've gone back to using a desktop now, but I've set it up so I'm in a comfortable chair and I use a wireless keyboard on my lap, and my mouse is on an adjustable-height laptop stand at the side of me. I still get some tingling and numbness, and I have to be careful to not overdo it with my hands in certain positions for too long, but as of yet it hasn't stopped me from being able to play any of the games I like. I'm pretty certain it comes from around my elbows, with compression of the nerves leading to permanent damage. Certainly, pressing - or even just resting - my arms against things brings it back on again, although I can almost always feel a tiny bit of numbness and tingling in the tips of my last two fingers these days.


* Fun fact: when I first went to the doctor about this, he was running through various things it might or might not be, before sending me off for blood tests. At one point he said, "Do you watch House?" To which I replied, "No, but I know it's never lupus." And he said, "Well it might be." 

I thought that was amusing. And no, it's still never lupus.

Weelll, that depends. Do you remember me as a nice person or not. Because if you do then then it was totally me  


I had the same name on BSN, and the same pic for many many years. I think I found the forum about the same time, know that I missed out on ME and I didn't start writing on the forum straight away when I got DA:O so maybe we got started around the same time. Nice to know that people are coming back here. Got a few old friends from BSN on twitter who I try to drag over here as well. Hoping that ME:A will do the trick.

Sure, but you need to pay the freight on that.  Wasn't trying to piss anyone off, so sorry about that.  If you can't play due to a disability, then that sucks.  The decision by Bioware/EA was certainly to increase MP numbers...and I'm sure they believe (right or not) that any lost revenue from removing the pause function would be surpassed by the MP $ generated.  I wouldn't be surprised if a pause function isn't modded in by someone later, so maybe there is still hope...though it probably will not work as well as the original trilogy.

You're not really pissing me off, you're just a melange of patronizing, sympathetic and dismissive I get to deal with a lot but I apologize for getting exasperated.




I was hoping Ian might see this thread and clarify since I know he visit the Twitter thread at least (it is Ian, right?) but alas, senpai does not notice me.



I was born with it (though it wasn't Maybelline)/was diagnosed early and it's been a gradual decline since then, though my neurologist says my strain tends to lock/slow around my current age so there's that. I've had a bunch of surgeries for my legs but my hands, while slow and clumsy, work admirably. When it comes to FPS there's a reason I don't play them (actually, there are multiple), a frenetic pace coupled with always just being slightly too slow or not quite coordinated enough always leaves me feeling core-audience adjacent, it's frustrating but relatively minor. Relatively minor frustrations as the tagline to your life levels up and is at least moderately frustrating.

If I may be allowed a moment of overwrought sentiment; the reason this bothers me as much as it does is because it's Bioware. The decision is a cynical one, they know certain people will complain (seriously, don't try to tell me accessibility and pause was not a category in their mindmap when they designed the controls) but they also know there aren't enough certain people to make enough noise so that they have to listen to it, so they can (and do) ignore it. Intellectually I know this is how businesses operate, from a personal level I know the strides Bioware has taken to include another part of my identity (LGBT), this causes cognitive dissonance which resolves itself in the form of: for Bioware the various parts of my identity is accessories.

They want the gay market so they'll include them, the disabled market is negligible and so is neglected. It's not an overarching ideology of inclusivity it's compartmentalization and commodification. This is where the world-wise go "DUH!" I'm sure, and yeah I mean I should know better and I think if it had been any other business I'd be less put off by it but this is also the business that included meaningful representation for a different aspect of my identity for the first time in games so I want to like them.

This is all well put.

BioWare always keep making an effort to learn and to continue to make their games more inclusive (which apart from being the right thing to do also makes financial sense), but there's always a blind spot of some sort, and it really stings when it happens.

There's no surprise, I suppose, that accessibility and disability is where one of the biggest blind spots exist, because of how you say the audience isn't big enough, and also I'd say the nature of video games - AAA titles especially, and action even more so - has always centred around player skill, and that skill almost always ends up equalling a certain amount of dexterity and motor tasks. RPGs of old, with point and click, turn-based and even dice-roll combat, were more inclusive and accessible from the beginning, but as those lines blur the people who got into games via RPGs are being squeezed out. With each subsequent game, it's a little faster, a little more actiony, a little less take-your-time-and-plan-this-out... and a few more people find they can't continue.

Of course, there's nothing saying games have to be developed with these issues in mind, but when a franchise - and indeed a company's entire back catalogue - has had options that make it easier for people, to remove it is like a bigger slap in the face than if it was never there to begin with. That's not to say they're not within their right to do it, but that it's going to sting. Especially, as you say, because they try so hard in other areas to be inclusive.

"core-audience adjacent" - that's a good phrase.