Xbox Is Getting A New 'Suspend' Feature To Help With Download Speeds

Nice. Now we have a choice for Quick Resume.

Hopefully there is a list to see what we have suspended as well.

I am all for new Quick Resume features, but it isn't really a stable feature right now. I won't say don't use it, but use it with caution - DEFINTELY save your game before attempting to utilize the feature.

Maybe with these improved features, there are also fixes being implemented behind the scenes?

I mean, I could enable Insider firmware on my system, but at one point my Xbox One X almost got stuck in an endless System Update loop and another time I completely lost the ability to use Dolby Atmos for Headphones.

Not sure I want my beautiful mostly new (had it for about a month or so now) Series X to become a guinea pig....

@OliverOwen It depends on the game. Some work better than others. Many games it just works fine on. Some it doesn't work at all on (Watch Dogs Legion, a ubisoft game that keeps an online connection, never does quick resume. Immortals Fenyx rising, another ubisoft game that keeps an online connection.....does work with quick resume, but with occasional quirks. Namely I played it weekly for weeks with no problem. One day I did it with QR and the game was apparently never saving over hours of play. It glitched from the quick resume start. I found out the hard way after beating the game, and then discovering NG+ wasn't available still....I had to redo all the ending content all over again. Of COURSE the day it picked to glitch the saves was the day I beat the campaign.

Other games work sporadically or not at all. Overally Hitman 3, Fenyx, FFXV have been working fine. Random other games then remove them from the QR without warning if you're trying other things at random. But the big one with the "suspend" feature, is that if you go to exit a game in order to boost download speeds (since the console downloads slow while games are running) you didn't have a choice to suspend your game to QR, you either had to kill it without QR, or you had to launch a random other game to force your system to QR the current game, and then kill that game without QR. So a suspend feature is worth its weight if only for when you close to download things.

@GamingFan4Lyf there's definitely people that love being guinnea pigs. Look at Android XDA and the amount of people that every 3-6 months buy the latest, $1200 (formerly $700....) flagship phone in order to turn it into a beta test platform for the lulz. I will never understand these people.

@NEStalgia I really liked getting Insider Content until I had those two issues almost back-to-back. Especially since they happened when the Series X was out.

If my Xbox One X had been bricked, I would have been pissed as Series X were/are very hard to get and the Xbox One X is no longer in production. So...replacing it would have sucked. Either pay an arm and a leg for an Xbox One X, or suck it up and downgrade to a One S until I could get my hands on a Series X.

Thankfully, none of those scenarios played out.

I reverted my Xbox One X back to "consumer" software after the Dolby Atmos issue came around. Now it sits in my basement collecting dust.

I am afraid to do it at all. I'll gladly test games and other things with the Insider Access I have, but not at the system level.

I hope they add an option to disable it. I imagine it take a big chunk of drive space and I'm sure some people (especially s owners) would be happy to have that back.

Yes! This is exactly what I was asking for in my last post. A choice to have the suspend game option (a la PS4 last gen) or Quick resume which has been a ball ache for me.
Saying that I've been jumping between Doom 1, 2 and 3 and has worked brilliantly for these games (even though these games have excellent save options internally).
To be fair if games had a better save / checkpoint structure going on it wouldn't really be an issue at all. And with the crazy fast load times this gen will offer Quick Resume would probably needless.

@blinx01 I could be wrong, but I think I remember reading on here that they are working on adding a feature so you can see what you have in your Quick Resume queue.

Excellent! Like this idea. Gives me more control I'm all for it.

Unfortunately I don't think this will help me with download speeds. I think Xbox's servers are just slower than they should be in 2021. I have gigabit internet and EVERY device I own achieves between 800Mbps-1Gbps. My Series X never downloads above 250Mbps even with no games and no other apps running or recently used - and it was the same with my One X the entire time I owned it. It seems as though game consoles in general are severely limited - my Switch downloads slow, my old PS4 downloaded slow. And this was with multiple AC/AX routers from multiple brands. Always the same - super fast almost 1Gbps on every device I own but game consoles.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and Immortal's Fenix Rising both give me (what looks like) corrupted saved games if I use QR. So I have to shut off quick resume every time I load them up. Games save fine after doing this. Have no idea why QR seems to mess up both these games ... and both from Ubi as well. Same engine too.

@pcr4805 Wifi, or wired? PS4 was dog-slow as a downloader. And Switch is a horrible mess for downloading. It stalls more often than it doesn't, and creeps along with a very slow encryption mechanism for the SD card.

But XSX, wired, downloads at least 500mb/s+ for me (with no games/apps running) on a wired connection. At that point it's largely limited by the SSD more than the download speed. X1X was limited to around 250-300 by the speed of teh HDD.

It's very possible your ISP is throttling game traffic though. That's a massive bandwidth hog that ISPs aren't thrilled with.

@ymo1965 I have, but haven't started Valhalla. But I've been using Fenyx with QR for months, and the only related probems I've had are occasionally the QR doesn't really hold and I have to launch clean. And once, I played for hours (beat the story!) only to find that none of my saves post-QR actually were being auto-saved, and thus I had to beat the story all over again to unlock NG+. But that happened only once. Strange you're getting save corruption, I, knock on wood, haven't had that.

Wired.... I purchased both these games in December from the m$ store and refunded because of this corruption issue. I ended up buying the physical discs recently much cheaper, but still does it. It's not just me though. If you Google search about corrupted saves, you'll find it was/is fairly common. There was supposed to be a fix/update, but it did nothing for me.

Alternatively they could just let us download while playing. Not all of us have abysmal service. Kind of crazy inconveniencing customer like this when you can go to PC and not have to deal with such BS.

@InterceptorAlpha Agreed, PC doesn't have this issue. This is a M$ issue with their OS. Still not fixed from the Xbox One if I'm right. If you care so much about customer experience M$, then fix this properly fgs. Never proper fixes, just workarounds :/

@InterceptorAlpha You can download games/updates to things while playing a game. Unless I'm completely missing something here, not sure the point of the complaint here.

@ymo1965 Your complaint about Quick Resume is valid, but you could have easily avoided corrupt saves from it by just closing the game. If you have to shut off Quick Resume every time you load them up, then you aren't closing the games. While Quick Resume should work as intended, I'm not sure why it's so hard to hit a few buttons to close a game for the time being.

The download speed complaint is getting old. Especially on the Series X where download speeds are improved over the Xbox One and download at least as fast if not faster than the PS5 does. I've used both, so I'm not making it up to make Xbox look better.

@KilloWertz I'm getting about 48MB download on my PC, but the Xbox is up and down more times than a hookers underwear. Why can't it be stable? makes no sense.

@KilloWertz You can. But not at full speed. Which is the point of this article and the source of my complaint.

@ymo1965 Ok, that's fair. You're not wrong. The Mbps jump around constantly while downloading. In the end, it makes no difference really as the Series X still downloads for me better than an Xbox ever has, but maybe they should just remove the Mbps thing. It doesn't show the download speed on the PS4 or PS5. If you never saw the fact that it jumps all over the place, you would likely be fine. The Completes in time estimate should go away too since it's useless. I just ignore it, so no biggie, but it's still useless.

@InterceptorAlpha This article is about the upcoming Suspend feature. You can download at full speed if you suspend a game you have in Quick Resume (or a game not closed, which is basically the same thing).

You made it seem like you were saying that you couldn't download at all while playing a game. Slight misunderstanding I guess, but downloads while playing a game don't seem that bad to me. Yeah, it would be better to be able to continue downloading at full speed, but I'm guessing it's a memory issue that makes it impossible?

@KilloWertz No. I specifically said that Xbox restricts your download speed when playing a game. Something that doesn't happen on PC. It is extremely annoying and the function shouldn't exist being with.

@InterceptorAlpha "Alternatively they could just let us download while playing." That's what I responded to and why I wasn't completely sure what you meant.

No, it shouldn't exist, but it does. It's not like it restricts is so much that it might as well not let you download anything at all while playing a game. I was downloading an update today for Doom Eternal while playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla and it downloaded nearly as much as it does when my system is sitting idle, so I'm not sure why it's such a catastrophic problem.

@KilloWertz Except it does. The restriction is the difference between having a game downloaded in minutes versus hours.

@InterceptorAlpha Maybe it only really slows down if you're playing an actual multiplayer game instead of a single player game that is just connected to the network basically?

I'm not trying to say you're lying or that you're an idiot or whatever. I just honestly don't understand why it's such a big deal based on what I've experienced myself. Like I said, yesterday I downloaded a portion of the patch for Doom Eternal while playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla and it downloaded almost as much of it as it normally would. I have DSL internet, so it's not like I'm working with a great connection either.

@KilloWertz Nope. Is slows down regardless of even if you are playing a game or not. So long as it in the background for instant resume it doesn't work.

And it is a big issue because I own literally hundreds of games and despite my Series X with my 5tb HDD I do not have the space for my games. So I frequently have to uninstall and re-download games.

@InterceptorAlpha Then I still remain being extremely confused as, like I've said, it doesn't make much of a difference for me when I am playing a game. I don't know what to tell you, but I still don't see the big deal as things have been just fine for me.

@KilloWertz Based on what you said, you wouldn't really.

With your internet your slowdown will be marginal because there's not a huge difference between you DSL speed and Microsoft throttled download speed.

In my case I am being slowed from several hundred MB/s to tens of MB/s.