Hello,

New investigator here. Looking forward to joining the community.

I've seen old forum posts requesting an undo feature to be added to the application for the purposes of combating unintentional click/taps or accidents.

Just today our group encountered a potentially game-changing misinterpretation of the app that set in motion a series of events that ultimately resulted in the loss of the investigation.

In the previous discussions, I saw mostly "pro-undo" comments. Over the years of owning this game, I certainly have not seen any downside of adding an "undo" feature.

Do you all think that the feature could hurt the game? Why do you think FFG has resisted adding the feature?

Thanks.

I really wish there were an Undo feature. Last time we played, one player accidentally completed a puzzle using one more move than she should have (she forgot she was Dazed and couldn't spend her clue). Solving the puzzle changed the game state enough that we weren't up for trying to keep track of "how things would have been," so we decided to carry her Dazed over to another round but felt like we had inadvertently cheated in doing so. (In a way, I'm glad we lost anyway; if we'd won, it would've needed an asterisk.)

To play devil's advocate, I suppose adding an "undo" button would make it easier to "cheat". However, it's a co-op game, so who cares...

Like many others, we've had unintentional clicks that an "undo" button would have been a lifesaver for. Heck, in the game we played with Nikki Valens at Arkham Nights this year, one of the players accidentally took one too many steps on a puzzle, and we had to just sort of hand-wave it away. So, the designers are definitely aware.

1 hour ago, pklevine said:

I really wish there were an Undo feature. Last time we played, one player accidentally completed a puzzle using one more move than she should have (she forgot she was Dazed and couldn't spend her clue). Solving the puzzle changed the game state enough that we weren't up for trying to keep track of "how things would have been," so we decided to carry her Dazed over to another round but felt like we had inadvertently cheated in doing so. (In a way, I'm glad we lost anyway; if we'd won, it would've needed an asterisk.)

This exact thing happened to my group the last time we played. Now I am wondering if you are in my gaming group.

12 hours ago, KBlumhardt said:

To play devil's advocate, I suppose adding an "undo" button would make it easier to "cheat".

Like, easier than adding any number of successes to a test, taking any number of moves in a puzzle, taking any number of actions in a turn, or dealing any amount of damage to a monster?
"Undo" button would be a far less effective way of cheating than the methods already at our disposal. :-)

18 hours ago, KBlumhardt said:

To play devil's advocate, I suppose adding an "undo" button would make it easier to "cheat".

I . . . guess? But if you WANT to cheat at this game, there's nothing that can stop you. So that's not really a useful counterpoint, IMO.

So why do you all think FFG has resisted adding this feature? It seems to be a unanimous opinion that the feature would benefit the game.

I cannot see that addition to the application being particularly difficult from a programming perspective either.

10 minutes ago, oragif said:

So why do you all think FFG has resisted adding this feature? It seems to be a unanimous opinion that the feature would benefit the game.

I cannot see that addition to the application being particularly difficult from a programming perspective either.

An "Undo" feature is not trivial to build.

Ok, technically you just have to save the last step or a list of previous steps and then walk backwards to these steps to restore a previous game state.

So one first problem is what constitutes one step? The last click? The last complete interaction (like a puzzle or a monster activation)? The last phase? A mix of those?

A second problem is how the game should behave once it has been restored to a previous feature. Should it redo the undone steps or take them differently when they are repeated? Did a user go back because to correct a wrong click or did she just want to reread an instruction she inadvertently clicked away when passing the tablet?

What new data does the software have to store that it could ignore so far? Many things like monster fights are just displaying some random text from a list once. Remembering exactly what was displayed in which sequence and in which context and storing it in some way that the app can make sense of later is not easy.

Where to put the button to make it accessible in every situation and submenu?What if the user clicks "Undo" by accident, will that have the potential to break a game in some circumstances?

One huge problem is communicating to the user what precisely going back will mean. If I click the "Undo"-button, I want to have an exact idea what it will do in any given situation, but I don't want to have to read or understand stuff to know.

An "Undo" feature is not impossibly hard to do at all, but it is hard to do right. And if not done right, it will most certainly be very annoying and more trouble than help. So this is not something any intern could add in an afternoon. It is something software designers have to think about, a piece of software that has to be integrated in everything the app does and has the potential to break the build at any turn. It has to be tried and tested exhaustingly. It is a major addition that will take lots of time and work to add and to keep in line with everything the app will do in the future.

And then there is the question: Should the team work on something like this instead of fixing bugs and adding new content? Will the result pay for all this work? Will this feature make more people spend money on the game? Or is it necessary to keep people from not buying more content?

I would not expect a working "Undo" feature anytime soon. Not because FFG are dumb or evil, but because it is hard to do and really not that necessary compared to keeping the software working and adding new stuff to play.

Well, if you run the game on Steam there is already a third party solution to that:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1884012/how-add-undo-mom-windows

This software just saves a series of versions of a running game and allows you to step back to an earlier phase. E.g. during the investigator phase you could step back to the beginning of this investigator phase. You lose every progress in between and you have no guarantee that everything will happen the same way it did before if you repeat it. You yourself also have to remember the positions of all figures, state of investigators' damage and horror, equipment and other cards at the beginning of the phase, since the app does not have this information. Best take some pictures of the gaming table at the start of every phase.

This is a heavy-handed solution that might be useful in some situations. But if FFG offered something like this as a feature, we would rightly hate them for it.