Last spring, while playing through Mass Effect 2 for the first time ever, I noticed that my endgame hour count tallied more than 87 hours. Weird, but whatever. Moving on. Turns out, Xbox’s ballyhooed next-gen Quick Resume feature appears to keep running the clock on some games.
Of all the features introduced with the Xbox Series X and S, few impressed more than Quick Resume. Sure, the next-gen consoles offered improved graphics and heightened performance, but Quick Resume — a background-operating feature that let you suspend around half a dozen games without closing them — felt legitimately fresh. Microsoft has further fine-tuned the feature in recent months. For instance, last week’s Xbox update (finally!) allows you to see which games you’ve suspended via Quick Resume, checking off one of the long-requested updates for the Xbox Series X and S.
But it’s still not perfect. And one quiet issue indicative of that imperfection is how some suspended games continue to run up the clock.
Mass Effect 2 was one thing. That’s an old game — played via not just one but two generations of backward compatibility — so I figured something was off. This past weekend, I ran into a more egregious example. On Thursday, I played a bunch of [redacted upcoming Xbox One action-RPG], and then powered my Series X off for the weekend. When I turned the thing back on last night, my hour count had soared past five (!!) days. Needless to say, that’s far more than what I’ve actually played.
I’m not alone. One Reddit user pointed out how, on Xbox Series S, their hour count for Dragon Age: Inquisition — BioWare’s Xbox One game about how much Solas sucks — topped 150 hours, despite having played way less than that. Their friend reportedly played 80 hours of Dragon Quest, yet the hour clock showed a total of more than 200 hours. (The post doesn’t detail which Dragon Quest, but other users have mentioned a similar issue with Dragon Quest XI, a role-playing game that landed on Xbox One in December.)
Yet, the issue doesn’t seem to affect all games. Exhibit A: Ubisoft “map games” that tally your in-game total, like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Immortals Fenyx Rising, seem to accurately keep track of time. (In the fall, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla had its own issue with Quick Resume where support for the feature quietly vacillated between two states known as “working” and “not working.” It works now.) Both of those games are for Xbox Series X/S, rather than Xbox One.
The issue, so far as I’ve read (and so far as I’ve experienced), does not seem to affect next-gen games, suggesting that Quick Resume might sputter a bit when you throw last-gen games into the mix. Beyond mere hour counts, one colleague told me that Minecraft Dungeons, an Xbox One dungeon-crawler, has continued to play on Xbox Series S despite being ostensibly suspended.
When reached for comment about why this is happening and if there’s a fix in the works, representatives for Microsoft said they were looking into it.
Hour tallies might seem like a niche talking point — the sort of discussion reserved for journalists and super-users — but, to some players, they’re an invaluable tool for time management. Let’s say you know a completionist run of Mass Effect 2 lasts around 50 hours and use that to approximate an endpoint. That number being wrong can throw off a player’s entire run. If the world’s latest unattainable 12-teraflop supercomputer can’t properly keep track of time, what hope do the rest of us have?
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