Finally some free time. Let’s power that game system up and wait for an hour on downloading updates!
Yesterday was comedic. I was sick for a week and had been doing nothing but playing catch up and surviving home construction, but finally I had a little free time, I wanted to do just a little VR, little gaming, do something that did not involve listening to my house get torn apart while being the sickest I recall being in my life. Bad week man.
Powered up my VR rig which the last time I played with it it was called the Oculus Quest 2. Pretty sure it rebranded to META Quest or something. It’s been a bit. Updated the OS, went to play a game and it needed an update so decided while it was downloading to just pop into a STEAM VR and… oh yeah that needed an update too and then nothing worked.
I got Google Earth working, but that was it and I didn’t really want to spend time debugging what was going on and why I was standing in what looked like a Battle Zone landscape in STEAM VR with nothing. There were bunch of notification on my computer screen, but yeah… I decided to put being my own tech support off.
It was time for some celebratory XBOX I decided, and once I found where my wife had hidden the remotes this particular time I was greeted by my always-on quick start XBOX that I needed a system update. Only 900 meg or so and that was several minutes then I went to my game.
I don’t remember what game I went to, it demanded a 90 gigabyte update. My gigabit connection can theoretically download 90 gigabytes in about 13 minutes, but I wanted to play something now. I swapped to another of my games, it wanted an update before allowing me to play. I queued that update as it was also another high-gigger and I just wanted to play something.
I looked at a couple of the XBOX play pass games thinking maybe I could get to play something in less than 5 or 10 minutes, nope. By the time I walked away my always on Series X which never updates automatically despite being told to, like my four previous units before it, was in the middle of 220 gigs of updating. Best case scenario was 32 minutes of waiting, but I really wasn’t seeing near gigabit speeds on the Microsoft servers. More like 200mbit or so. Meh.
It’s the next day now, I really don’t recall what I didn’t get to play last night. I ran into a local Minecraft celebrity today who’d read my tweets complaining last night about this and we talked for a few minutes. 90 gigs for an update. Just absurd what bandwidth requirements are for next to no visible payoff.
As to why my always on XBOX never updates, and has never updated for me for the past 4 generations of XBOXes, don’t know. One post I see from seven years ago suspected it had to do with having an external storage unit, which I have had for at least 3 generations of XBOX and will investigate.
What I do know, or suspect, MS has completely abandoned patching. Honestly can’t believe the size of these things and even if they were pushing out brand new hour long HDR-10 video content with these games it wouldn’t be that size.
Gaming is one of the only industries I watch where the exterior experience seems to be getting worse as the product gets better and better.
I mean, I can’t just point the finger at gaming – I had an Android phone off for nearly two months and the updates on it were some of the stupidest set of processes I can imagine. Don’t even get me started on serial Android OS updates that I have to remember to do on my wife’s phone every few months…
It was suggested I get Walkabout Golf to play while I’m waiting for other systems to update… might go ahead and do that.
