You actually can pause Outriders in singleplayer... if you've got an Nvidia GPU

(Image credit: Square Enix)

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.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.