PS5 Doesn't Feature Xbox Series X/S-Style Quick Resume Game Swapping

Suspend/Resume works flawlessly on PS4. So why would I doubt their ability to implement Quick Resume (should they ever do it)?

It’s not complicated.

I’m well aware Suspend/Resume and Quick Resume aren’t the same thing. But they ARE similar. One company implemented the feature really well, the other didn’t. It’s not more complicated than that.

So given all that the Xbox OS has been this generation, you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t automatically assume it’ll work great in the wild.

The good news is that we’ve had plenty of videos now showing that it works really well. :slight_smile:

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Again, you’ll have to forgive me. My experience with Xbox features and the dashboard has almost NEVER measured up to what gets shown in demonstrations.

So maybe I’m just instinctively very gun shy on getting too excited about this stuff.

Fair enough. :slight_smile:

Suspend and resume was very hit and miss for me too, although lately more and more games have been working.

In a recent digital PS5 review video Rich suggests that quick resume may not be on PS5 because of the smaller hard drive size, however for the reserved partition to be the same as seriesX of 200gb, the ps5 would only have to go down to 625gb instead of 660gb.

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This is legitimately too bad, because this is THE next-gen feature for me. Not even with the beefiest PC you can realistically expect to run 7-8 new triple-A games at the same time, juggling off between them, and most importantly you certainly can’t keep them on for weeks while turning off your machine too.

This feature is going to drastically change my usage of certain games. I already applied it to several kinds of games I play, and the result is that it’s gonna be a gamechanger:

  1. Racing games
    I have a soft spot for racing games, be them simcades or pure arcade experiences (I don’t really play pure sims much). While I enjoy racing online, most of my time is spent playing career or custom races, and I like going long, often going for marathon 40-120 minutes races instead of the classic 3 laps sprints. Codemasters’ F1 games are the only modern racing game I can think of that allows you to pause and save your race, so you can get back to it anytime. This can not be done for games like Forza Horizon 4, Need For Speed Heat, DIRT 5 and so on. This means I can now set up a 2 hours long race, and I’m no longer tied to finishing it before even starting up a 4K movie on Netflix or another game. Even if the console updates or someone invites me to play some Warzone, I can jump in with them real quick and then come back to my business.

  2. Open world games
    While loading times greatly diminishing will already help enjoying such games more, this is a genre that lives on randomly generated activity, things respawning when loading a different area, checkpoints and quick travel zones that you always go back to when you start the game. Given the complexity of the games’ systems, most open world games don’t allow you to effectively restart where and how you were, but the world resets itself from the closest save point. This means that in a game like Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry where you need to capture outposts, all the enemies will have respawned. If you’re in a fierce boss battle, you will load back to the beginning, having to go against a full health bar again. Sometimes you’re even thrown back to the start of a lengthy mission, losing major progress. This will not happen with Quick Resume, making it far easier to set time aside for a game like Assassin’s Creed, knowing that I don’t necessarily have to finish the specific activities I start but I can just “freeze” them. Hell, think of an open-ish game like Borderlands 2 where you always spawn back at the start of an area with all monsters respawned. You may need like 20 minutes to go where you need to do something. This won’t be the case with Quick Resume.

  3. Slower, more tedious games
    Like many, I absolutely can enjoy slower, calmer, more monotonous games, such as certain walking simulators or puzzle games. They can, in some cases, be a bit long into tooth when you sit down and play them for an hour. Well, they can now be played for much shorter intervals since you can freeze the game wherever you are, play something more adrenaline-packed inbetween, then go back and continue the slow chug.

  4. Achievement/XP/etc. grinds We’ve all been there. Trying to farm XP in RPGs, trying to spam a certain activity in a game to get a crazy long achievement moving, using some trick that requires spamming a button or two for a prolonged amount of time. This is another activity that, in many cases, would have required you to set aside a reasonable amount of time so that you can make meaningful progress and even have the time to cash in on it. No longer: if you can put the game aside while you play other games inbetween, instead of grinding for an hour you can space that timeframe out with more exciting activities separating them.

  5. Game reviews This won’t apply to most people, but it’s a big one for me. Normally, when I have to review a game, I have to find the mindset or timeframe that I’m probably not gonna touch any other game for at least an hour or 2, as I need to make some sort of meaningful progress in what I’m trying to review. In many cases I need to finish the storyline, and as such, I can only exit the game when I’m done with a specific section or level to make sure I don’t waste too much time doing sections again. If I just “snap” a game I need to review on the side, I can always throw in a quick Call of Duty or Rocket League session while I clear my mind a bit, then jump back fresh.

For my gaming habits and playstyle, Quick Resume is going to be a huge feature. It’s one of those things that I can currently live without, but once I get used to its existence I will have a hard time doing without. Like cloud saves or using my phone while on the toilet :stuck_out_tongue: The fact PS5 will not feature such a function for the foreseeable future means that I am unable to choose it as my main place to play, because on my main place to play I like juggling between several games at once, and in fact I currently have 450+ games installed on my One X alone. Some games can’t be juggled properly because they require a lot of time to make meaningful progress in. While this applies to online games too where Quick Resume will not work (eg. Sea of Thieves), it’s gonna be a gamechanger when it comes to single player experiences for me. Far more than shortened load times, ray tracing and the likes.

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I have no idea what you’re talking about.

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Weird stance when you look all the videos about QuickResume.

QuickResume is the one single feature that was tested the most and with all sorts of combinations: Cold boot, warm boot, 5+ games, disc in & disc out. If there is one feature that will work on Xbox then it is QuickResume. The only caveat people found is the fact that you don’t get a warning if a game is kicked out of the QuickResume rotation due to storage limitations. But that is something Xbox already is looking at.

(I am aware that selected titles are disabled for QuickResume but the majority is not)

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One important use case I want to add. Game rotation among several family members playing on one account. Very convenient to just start where you left when your brother or sister or spouse took over.

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True, but I also get where they’re coming from. Once bitten, twice shy and it seems like they’ve been bitten pretty hard :frowning:

Just saying, there’s nothing more frustrating than having an issue and the prevailing response being “Works fine for me!”

(Except maybe seeing one person with the same issue and they follow it up with just “nvm fixed it” :stuck_out_tongue: )

Yes, that is one I somehow forgot despite living together with someone. We no longer have to reach a savepoint and turn off the game we’re doing, we can just suspend it while the other plays something else.

Is it just me or is Sony getting rid of splash screens to look like the game loads faster? Either way, I hope this is a trend that more studios follow!

To stay on topic, I know I will use the hell out of quick resume! I always play a couple of online matches of FIFA at night, so it is great to know that I will save 2 minutes worth of splash screens and loadings every time I open the game.

Yes, they could bring up a menu with all the games in quick resume and ask you which one you would like to close in order to quick resume on another game.