I was surprised/annoyed by this as a very casual gamer—my sister lent me her Xbox One a few weeks ago, and I have a copy of Halo (Master Chief Collection). I wanted to play it for a few minutes just to relive some memories from Halo CE and see how the remastered graphics looked.

It took like 20 minutes for the game to copy from the disc to internal storage (luckily her Xbox had some free space!), and then it spent another 10 or so downloading an update/patch.

Back when I remember playing Sega, Nintendo, etc. (even Xbox 360, which was the last console I owned), it was a matter of plugging in a cartridge/disc, turning on the system, and playing the game after a few boot screens.

In the end, I only got about 20 minutes of time to play the game since it was night and I had to be up early to help the kids. The experience didn't make me anxious to buy a modern gaming system.

Ah, yes, in the days of yore when the code could fit in an 8k memory chip! :D https://benfry.com/distellamap/

Sorry to hear it was not an enjoyable evening.

With the higher resolutions many TVs support, there's only so much bandwidth and memory headroom to support textures that big, and DVD drives just don't have the seek speed to support. Heck, in the 360 generation we were carefully laying out files broken apart and spaced so the platter would be under the read head at just the right time to reduce that latency.

As for the updates... well, I'm intimately familiar with why patching the four concurrent titles is they way it is. I have hear our feedback was incorporated into a new update system. It's been personally frustrating, when Microsoft/Bungie pioneered the Play-While-Install concept all the way back in Halo 2 Vista. We'll see!

The feedback in this post is my own, and is not meant to reflect that of my employer 343 Industries.

Oh right, console gamer problems. I guess cloud gaming will make them happy, I really hope it doesn't bleed over into PC gaming.

Isn't it already a meme that Steam seems to always require updates before you can play anything?

Steam seems to patch very quickly so that's never been an issue for me.

Some games patch very poorly due to Steam's update mechanism. Path of Exile is notorious for this, to the point many download the standalone client instead. The issue is that it uses one big file for data and this interacts poorly with steam (a tiny patch will take half an hour to apply after downloading, even on SSD).

Steam updates in the background, so it's not really an issue.

However, the install times are still annoying. I really wish more games had play-while-install features. That being said, Steam downloads so much faster than a PS4 installs. I have a gigabit home connection and can get pretty close to saturating it while downloading from Steam, while the PS4 is slow -- apparently due to some technical limitations of the PS4.

If it is, then the meme is an old one. I haven't had to patch before playing in years. Even new games seem to come patched.

You can stop it doing that in the settings if you please.

PC gaming is already just playing catch-up on all the console strategies. That battle was lost as soon as Steam became popular (and game renting indefinitely became enforcable, even for offline games, on PC).

I always thought that it was console that was just playing catch up on all the PC strategies. Could you please further elaborate?

I was surprised this generation to see that they still have disc drives in consoles. I imagine next gen they'll finally be gone.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

The bandwidth is great, the ping is awful.

The one and only time I touched an Xbox one, my cousin's, we picked up the game from the store and it turned out to contain a blank disk that went and downloaded the game on insertion. Perhaps that's what happened in your case?

Regardless, never again. It's downright offensive.

>it was a matter of plugging in a cartridge/disc, turning on the system, and playing the game after a few boot screens.

It was also a matter of traveling to the store during opening hours, purchasing the game and traveling home. That is almost always less convenient than purchasing it in a UI and having it download.

What does annoy me is how steam and probably other platforms force you to install updates before you can start a game even if the game has no online features.

I had a comical situation happen a few years ago when I went to a friends house.

Tried to play Halo on his xbox one, something he played almost daily. Required an update which took maybe 10 minutes. Got in and realized we couldn't play local split screen online. Fine, he has a gaming pc, let's fire that up and play with his Rift.

Pc has an update, then steam needed some kind of update, and Oculus did, and then the damn game we wanted to play had it's own update. We just sat there laughing as all in all it took an hour from when we sat down to actually playing something.

If you're not playing regularly, the amount of updates that can happen are insane.

I'm a "patient gamer" so I play games that likely wont be getting updates as much anymore. The newest games I have right now are basically because of Humble Choice. I probably wont play them yet either. I got too many games. I might freeze Humble Choice for a few months at this point.

Linux handles this with much more grace. The entire system from the kernel to the web browser can be updated in a single action without requiring downtime during the update. if steam would integrate itself with linux better, perhaps by using flatpak for itself and all games then things would just be kept up to date for you without 1000 updaters opening when you turn on your compuer.

I've started a process of starting our XBox One about every month, or even three weeks, so that any console updates are done before my wife (main player by about a 90/10 split) has to wait 45 minutes for download/validate/apply cycle.

If she has a game in, I start it as well, same reason.

I like the idea that they are both getting security and/or bug fixes (I'm looking at you, Bethesda) but yeah damn, it's a pain to wait an hour to start playing anymore.

All of them. At least from a console/dual boot perspective. Maybe if the game updates in the background this isn’t true.

But really. Every 3 weeks when I get time to play I spend 40~ minutes updating the game on PS4 because the patch sizes are gigabytes and the harddisk is slow.

The situation is only /slightly/ improved on a dual boot setup but then it’s also complaining about windows updates too, so not much time is actually won there.

Nearly every major FPS has frequent updates.

It's not a huge deal if automatic updates work as expected. I've have too many times where my Playstation fails to auto-update and I'm stuck waiting an hour+ for an update.

I will take this one. I use my ps4 mostly for netflix, but recent holiday season left me with some games. You would be surprised how often those games force you into updates. And then there is PS system updates..

That was my experience with the PS3