Microsoft has detailed its newest Alpha Skip-Ahead update for Xbox Insiders, and it contains a pretty neat new feature for game installations. The team is aiming to make installing games more flexible by allowing users to pick and choose what they want to install at the point of finding the game and hitting the download button.
This means that basically, games that support this feature should be a smaller initial download if you don't want to install multiplayer content or HD textures or something of that ilk. Here's how Microsoft describes the update:
"Game Installation - Choose what to install
We've added a new option that will appear before installing games with additional downloadable content or features. Choose what to install! Whether you want to save some space, reduce the time it takes to download, or you're just not interested in the content, this new option provides more control over your game installations before you even start."
Now, this isn't an entirely new feature - plenty of big AAA games these days let you delete parts of the game to suit your needs. However, not all of them allow you to do this at the beginning, with games often requiring a full download before then being able to chop and change which content remains installed. Hopefully, this will improve the process for some games and allow people to make those cuts before downloading.
At the time of writing, this update is only available to Alpha Skip-Ahead Xbox Insiders, but it will then come to other Insider rings and eventually all Xbox users in the coming weeks. If you want to see what else is available in the new update, check out the release notes via Xbox Support.
Does this sound helpful to you? Tell us what you think of this new feature down below.
[source support.xbox.com]
Comments 13
Not having to download the multiplayer component, that I’ll never use, would be amazing. But I doubt this will happen much.
this would be great for all the old caller duty games we never got.
Let’s bring Call Of Duty back down to a reasonable 200GB.
I’m somewhat worried that the feature may using the “manage content” part of the system that already exists, since some games don’t seem to support that option.
Good, can leave out un-needed, unwanted language packs
Choosing SP & MP should be a normal thing.
My SSD's on XSX are quite full (bought an extra cheap 1TB WD SSD on Prime Day) and I wasn't aware (before it happened that is) that it deletes your full game and completely re-downloads it with the update. Instead of 1OGB it was a +100GB DL. I'd rather would've liked a warning it was going to do that so I could move or delete a few games.
I'd like the ability to change the download order.
Omg....if I could reduce that 285.8gig file size of Microsoft Flight Simulator, I would be ever so grateful. Edit: it is nice to see Xbox make some effort to fix their giant screw up of capping the SSD size while also requiring all new games to have a dedicated Series version and no option to download a smaller file size of say XB1.
How about the ability to choose X/S or non X/S versions of games on X/S consoles. I'm not paying 200+ for a memory card
SP/MP selection is something and great to have, surprised took this long, but give me PS/Switch style 'ignore updates' option too Xbox not force it all the time. Downloading it when I want to not forcing the update and going uh what space do I have, oh, or just playing the 1.0 version not only the rare 1.0 disks I have on certain platforms with VC4 being my only 1.0 disk and no update.
Xbox finally did something right this week.
There was mild rejoicing.
Yeaaaaa.
This is a potential great feature that could save GBs of space!
Ooh this'll be good. I'd rather not have to download stuff for a multiplayer or single player mode if I'm not going to use it, etc. Of course that's only if developers portion these parts out to start with.
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