The upcoming Xbox Series X has a cool feature called Quick Resume. This allows you to keep multiple games active simultaneously, so you only need minimal loading times to switch between games. However, the feature has a small catch.
What is Quick Resume? The Xbox Series X, Microsoft’s upcoming new console, has a feature called Quick Resume. Games that support this can be “held” in a loaded state. If you want to play another game and then return to the previous game after some time, you can do so in about 8 seconds without further loading times.
Both games remain loaded by the system, so you can jump back in at the same spot where you left off. In a video, game journalist and YouTuber Alanah Pearce shows how the feature works.
In a video on Twitter, you can see how she starts a total of 4 games simultaneously and switches back and forth between them. The only wait time involved is about 6 to 8 seconds for the transition between the previously loaded games.
Even better: According to Alanah Pearce, the Quick Resume feature is supposed to work even when the console is completely turned off and even unplugged. Overall, the system is said to be able to hold up to 12 games in this way.
According to Pearce, it’s not just about playing a bunch of games simultaneously in one evening. Rather, it allows you to switch between games you want to play without long loading times over a week.
Quick Resume has a catch for MMO fans
What about online games? According to a user comment from Twitter user Nuggets, the feature has a catch. Anyone who plays online games will likely be immediately disconnected from the server when using Quick Resume and ends up back at the main screen. This has been the case with CoD, at least according to Nuggets. Therefore, the Quick Resume feature is useless for him.
Nevertheless, you at least save the basic loading times of the game and only have to reload the direct game entrance.
Is the feature really meaningful? In the comments under Alanah Pearce’s post, enthusiasm is limited. Why would you want to play so many games at once? Most users seem to prefer playing the same game for days and have no need to switch in a short time, especially since loading times are hardly ever long anymore thanks to SSDs and modern technology.
- Elias: “I see no need. Don’t games nowadays already have short loading times?”
- MeK BanE: “I am old-fashioned. I save the game. I quit it and return to the title screen. Because that’s how I’m used to it!”
- Alex Townley: “Well, I never play more than one game at a time, so I would never use it.”
Other players, on the other hand, still find the feature cool:
- Joel Tooke: “I regularly switch between multiplayer and single-player games, Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, and Vudu during the week. And it’s more about not having to load back into the title screen and then the game itself anymore.”
- Destry Weeks: “As a parent of a small child who always wants to play his games, I think it’s a great feature. Instead of constantly having to save my game, quit it, and then start his game, we can just switch back and forth here!”
- Xybran: “It’s a cool feature, it’s a nice additional option. Just like backward compatibility, while it’s not really a necessity, it’s still a good extra thing. I will never complain about MORE options/features.”
Jürgen’s conclusion on the topic
I am an impatient person who currently has very little free time to play. Therefore, every single second is precious, and every second I stare at annoying loading screens is a lost second. That’s why I find the Quick Resume feature pretty cool and useful.
Even though I usually only play one game per session. However, there may be times when I play for half an hour while my wife is putting our child to bed. When she comes back into the living room, I have to interrupt my gaming session because she wants to watch a series on Netflix, for example. After an episode, she might go to bed and I can quickly resume right where I left off. That’s actually pretty cool.
And when the child is old enough to play, we can easily switch between daddy’s games and my son’s kiddy games, as a user explained in the previous paragraph.
Jürgen Horn
Editor at MeinMMO
According to many users, what’s also interesting about the Xbox Series X is not just the great performance. Rather, it’s supposed to be the much-discussed “console feel” that users appreciate here. What this is all about, and how the Quick Resume feature also plays a role in it, you can find out here in our article on MeinMMO.
