There is already a pause mechnic, the turn based mode you enter with space bar.
That's not a pause mechanic, that's transitioning to a round-by-round action outside of initiative. It does not facilitate simultaneous party actions outside of combat, or when initiating combat via a party held surprise round.
I would just like to point out to you that this is early access and you were asked to do an evil playthrough, hence the evil/neutral companions. That said, you do have some points but they're all over these forums so I'm not going into that again.
I honestly never saw anything that asked players to be evil out the gate. I saw them say that they were going to provide incentives to be evil if you chose to be. Those are very different messages to me. I personally dislike the feeling of being railroaded into playing an evil character.
