Xbox’s Best Feature In Years Just Got A Huge Fix

The Xbox Series X/S didn’t come anywhere close to wining this console generation, but it did win the prize for best feature of the new hardware cycle, at least in my heart. Quick Resume remains a novel perk that I now take for granted just like fast load times. It has one major drawback, however, and Microsoft just announced a fix is finally going into testing.

The way Quick Resume works, any game you play and then move on from will remain suspended in the background while you open other apps or play other games. Years into the Xbox Series X/S’s life, it now supports having tons of game suspended in the background at the same time, but not every game benefits from this approach.

While it’s great for single-player games, always-online and multiplayer games frequently get messed up when coming back from the console sleep state. Some games can get caught in weird login error loops or start running into other weird and unpredictable issues. When it comes to games like Minecraft, it’s usually just better to save and quit and then restart from scratch each time you want to play.

Well, an upcoming Quick Resume update will let you toggle the feature on for individual games. “Quick Resume is one of the most loved features on Xbox, but we’ve heard that for certain games it doesn’t always deliver the experience you expect, especially after long periods of inactivity,” reads a new blog post over on Xbox Wire. “With this update, you can disable Quick Resume on a per-game basis to ensure those games always launch fresh.”

The feature is currently live for Xbox Insiders to begin testing along with a suite of other updates. Those include a higher number of Groups to sort games into on the home menu, custom background colors, and more prominently displayed achievement badges. The new features, including improved Quick Resume, will eventually roll out to everyone.

Microsoft has continued to iterate on the Xbox dashboard experience even as its pivoted away from hardware exclusives. We’ll see how much of that progress carries forward to the company’s PC-based next-gen product called Project Helix as we approach its rumored 2027 ship date.