A question only Hinterland can answer

[yoww89]

I'm surprised I didn't find any post about this. It's been almost a year since I last played the game, and coming back now I just discovered a big change they've made in the Steam version. Steam Overlay now pauses the game!! I mean, that was a big saviour to me back then during my long walks in my late game Stalker. Being able to chat with friends or browse the internet while still hearing the game and seeing a big part of the screen was really good. Sure, the ideal situation would be to not pause the game while in windowed mode and doing other stuff on a second monitor like a lot of modern games do, but Steam Overlay was the next best thing.

I know some of you fellow players might read this and think "Nah man, it ruins the immersion" or "The Long Dark is a punishing survival game where you have to be alert all the time" and I can understand that. I even got jumped by some wolves a couple of times while auto walking and using the Steam Overlay. But in a late late game like my save, an eventual struggle won't kill me. But you know what's going to kill me? Hours of watching my character walk. Well, not literally kill me, but it might eventually kill my drive to continue playing the game. I know some people love walking simulators and that's fine, but that's not me. That's not what got me into the Long Dark. Plus, why not give players the choice? If you don't like it, don't use it. I bet some people didn't even know this was a thing. But let people who like it, use it. Simple as that. So going back to my post title: Why Hinterland? Why would you change that? What's the gain I'm not seeing here?

As far as my knowledge about this goes (which is just one google search ), it's just an option developers can toggle on or off in their steam games. So why fix what's not broken?

TL,DR: Why make Steam Overlay pause the game now?