So I bought an Xbox Series X back in August 2023, in preparation for the then-imminent release of “Starfield”. But that’s neither here nor there. What matters is that I’ve noticed something over time that has really come to bother me more and more about the Series X platform.
It’s slow. Like really, really slow.
Now I don’t mean it’s slow while playing games, to be fair it does a fine job in that regard. No, the problem is when I’m trying to load games, especially when the console has just started up, or after a full restart.
The problem is with the cloud saves.
Let’s look at one such comparison. I have “Balatro” on both the Xbox Series X and the Nintendo Switch (good games deserve to be bought multiple times). The game runs just fine on both systems, but – like most games on the Series X – it loads significantly slower on the Xbox than on the Switch. Why, though?
Before you ask, no it isn’t the internet connection on the Xbox, it works just fine. The problem is that the Xbox copies all of your saves to the cloud as part of the Gamepass service, and apparently downloads those saves as a part of loading those games. The Switch seems to load local saves, and thus loads its games much faster.
Now obviously, this isn’t always the case. If you start or restart your Xbox (at least the Series X, anyway), then wait for a while to allow all of the cloud saves to download for all of your games, once that is all over any game you launch will start basically as fast or faster than on other consoles. Basically. Sometimes that is a really long time you have to wait, actually, at least in my experience.
Don’t ask how long you have to wait for “Starfield” to be ready to load sometimes… and that’s before the mods become involved!
Now why is it that I accuse Gamepass and cloud saves of being the problem? Simple… I turned off my Xbox’s internet connection, then tried loading a few games for comparison. Strangely enough, aside from games that require an internet connection (looking at you, “Starfield”), every one of those games loaded almost immediately when they weren’t trying to load cloud saves first.
So now the question is, why does Xbox bother? Now I’m no expert in game design, but wouldn’t it be better to do a quick check against the local saves and cloud save, to see if they are the same or different, and only load the cloud save if it is necessary? I mean, isn’t it embarrassing that Nintendo is eating Microsoft’s lunch, when it comes to loading the exact same games of their respective consoles?
At this point, if my favorite games on Xbox didn’t require internet access, I would shut down my Gamepass subscription immediately and not bother with cloud saves ever again.
