The Xbox Series X and S have lots of quality-of-life touches that look small on paper but vastly improve the experience of playing games in practice. One of those is Quick Resume, which makes it easy to swap between several games at once, and a new update makes it even more robust.
Currently, Quick Resume will let you keep a number of games running in the background. For example, if you’re in the middle of Halo: Infinite’s campaign and want to jump into a quick round of Darkest Dungeon, you can back out, load up the new game, and then pick Halo: Infinite right back up from where you left off at any time without having to restart the game.
But it’s still far from perfect. There’s no easy way to track when putting a new game into Quick Resume will boot out an older one, or choose which game gets closed out. Microsoft’s latest Series X/S update adds a new feature called “Pin to Quick Resume” to help address this. It will let you flag up to two games so they remain in Quick Resume no matter what. For me, this would currently be Dying Light 2 and FAR: Changing Tides (which is wonderful by the way).
This is especially useful in the context of Game Pass, where I’m swapping in and out of multiple new games every week just to try them out. While not every game supports the feature, it’s basically an auto-save state for the ones that do, and as with things like Smart Delivery, it’s turned out to be really nice to have.
The March update bringing Quick Resume pins to Xbox Series X/S also added an audio setup tool to help automatically optimize your sound settings, and will now let you remap the share button on the Xbox controller. Now, if only you could use the share button to take screenshots of the home menu.