Xbox has my favorite next-gen feature in Quick Resume – while better than PS5’s offering, it often breaks

We all love the generational shift in video games – it’s exciting to see the advantages and capabilities of new hardware, and the advantages of having more features available to game developers are of course huge. However, I’m surprised by my favorite new-generation feature, because it’s hardly anything exciting: quick resume.

If you roll your eyes at this, you’re probably only playing on the PS5, where the pause and resume features are far less useful — or you’re lucky that no outside influences affect your playtime.

I rarely play one game at a time—even when Elden Ring dominates my life, I’m playing Final Fantasy XII—and a quick recovery saves a lot of time. Also, since these consoles came out, I’ve had a new baby, and it turns out that when there’s some kind of emergency related to feeding, pooping, or screaming, fast recovery can quickly stop and restart what I’m doing , which is very valuable.

when you come back Xbox Series X

Sherif wrote about Quick Resume when it was first published, and it sums it up nicely. It works great. A year and a half later, I’m inclined to agree – it’s by far the best new quality of life feature on these next-gen consoles, at least in the way I tend to use them. However, there is a difference. At that time, things didn’t work because it was broken. More than a year later, Quick Resume still has problems – but the problem is different.

An element of Quick Resume was directly broken – I really don’t see a way to fix it. That’s how it interacts with games that have any major always-on components that weren’t designed with that feature in mind.

I’ve had this problem in a few games before, but it’s moving to Xbox for my 4th Elden Ring playthrough, and it’s really made me see how quick recovery can be when it’s not fully considered or integrated Frustrated. The problem is basically this: When a game’s state is saved in a quick restore and then picked up, the connection to the server is naturally broken. Different games handle this differently – some are more elegant than others.

For example, Elden Ring can happily pause and then resume – but when you do, the game magically restarts where you left off within a second…and then directs you to the main menu, so you have a chance to log back in. It’s almost worse than “quick recovery” not working at all because it’s a tease – you’ll see the game is ready for you, but, no, it doesn’t. Back to the menu you went to. pain.

I’ve had this happen elsewhere as well. Many Ubisoft games with always-on hooks are frustrating in this way. And, as we all know, Xbox Exclusive Halo Infinite sees its integration broken after its developers advise players not to use Quick Resume initially.

This is not an insurmountable problem, but it requires developers to think about it and actively solve it. No Man’s Sky is always online, but when it resumes, the game silently reconnects to the servers in the background, seamlessly. Doom Eternal will disconnect you from the server, but you can reconnect without having to keep returning to the main menu. These things are acceptable. Teasing…it’s very frustrating. In these cases, developers can also turn off fast recovery completely.

But these frustrations don’t dampen the magic while it works. It’s fast, time-saving and convenient. I’ve been switching back and forth between LEGO Star Wars and GTA5 Next Generation lately, and it really works. seamless. The other day I wanted to go back to Nier Automata and the game automatically reverted to my session from about six months ago – it felt like black magic. I like it.

I just wish it would work properly more often. It would also be great if Sony could upgrade its suspend mode to support more than one game, and when the console is completely off.