The app could be better

By Pez64, in The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth

I've been playing the game for a while now, already finished my first campaing. Loving it so far. This are some of the things that made me want to stop playing the game immediately due to misunderstandings with the app. (SORRY FOR MY BAD ENGLISH)

-When I bought the game I only had my cellphone at hand and so I used it to play since I was really excited to start. Quickly realized how small and uncomfortable a mobile device is to play this game for a couple of adventures (2-3 horus). I think is great how many options we have to download the app (play store, steam, app store, etc) but what´'s the point if we can't save all of our camaping data online in order to change wich device we want to play with? Perhaps we want to use our cellphone one day and a bigger computer the following week. Imagine what it would be if we lost our cellphone or someting else. We could lose the entire campaing in case of an accident! On the other hand, progress should be stored in any device and we should be able to run the app offline (recent experiences led me to believe that we need internet connection just to open the app, correct me if I'm wrong).

-Also, why add a "save and quit" button when the app already autosaves the progress? It's confusing. It's already difficult to play a campaing with an app that doesn't have an "Undo" button, so no misclicks or the entire campaing goes to the flush. But on top of that, having such an option tells me that the game *does not¨* autosaves and that if I misclick something I can just close the app and open it again to start the scenario again (this could be an option knowing that there's no undo button). We should be able to play any scenario that we already completed from the current campaing . I like the "losing forward" feature, but we need something to start over from an specific scenario in case something happens. (And besides, why not a "save and continue" option?...)

-Another thing: it's nice to have a register of every event that happens during an scenario, but it's not enough just to be able to read the text again. What the app really should do it's to show us the actual animation again (even if this means to restart the progress of an adventure from any point) in order to see where the characters are placed again in case we missed it. There's a lot to read in the beggining of the scenarios, and if you miss where the heroes (or enemies) are placed, you have no way to find out again. It's even more frustating to know that the game knows something you want to know but you just can't find it out.

-In my case, I learned that there's no way to restart an scenario from the app the hard way... it's not nice and I don't desire it to anyone. When I was in the 8th chapter of the campaing I needed to restart the scenario because I missed where the heroes should be placed (and the game would not tell me again). I thought "Ok, no worries, there's and Abandon hope option, surely there's a way to start over after that" (I knew that the game had a function of losing forward, I just thought that the game would behave like any other game I played during my lifetime) and then I was faced with 2 options: to start over the entire campaing or to move forward to the 9th scenario having lost (but not played) the 8th. What I want to point out is that the game should warn you not only about the loosing forward mechanic, but also about the no-restart availability, which are not the same thing.


-Lastly, WHY SO FEW SAVE SLOTS? I have lots of friends I want to show and play this game with. The fewer save slots, the fewer friends I can play with simultaneously.

I love the game, really, It's entertaining and the desing it's excellent... The app it's good enough, but it looks like it was designed in 2003 and instead of helping you, sometimes, makes you want to stop playing, and this is unnaceptable.

Precision -> for the "autosave" it is incorrect :

game only autosave at each turn. Not after each actions.

an UNDO and a Replay Adventure option are needed. For “scoring” purposes, you could add how many retries per Adventure the player(s) did.


As far as save slots, on android and steam you can access the save files on a computer and move then around. So, if you run out of slots just move the saves you arent using to a folder on your computer. Just make sure to have backups too in case you overwrite the wrong file or Steam cloud services do it.

On 10/23/2019 at 12:22 AM, Gamemasterbob said:

an UNDO and a Replay Adventure option are needed. For “scoring” purposes, you could add how many retries per Adventure the player(s) did.

Absolutely. Anyway, it's not like preventing cheating in a coop game should be a priority (the players are doing this to themselves anyway), there are already plenty of ways to cheat anyway, and errors are possible when entering success and in a lot of other places.

On 10/23/2019 at 1:21 AM, Thaeggan said:

As far as save slots, on android and steam you can access the save files on a computer and move then around. So, if you run out of slots just move the saves you arent using to a folder on your computer. Just make sure to have backups too in case you overwrite the wrong file or Steam cloud services do it.

I'm not sure if it is at all a good idea however, there seem to be an internal save file or something that can get lost.

So our issue with the map was in the final adventure (semi-spoilers, but not that much, you should know the name of the final boss from adventure 2 or 3).

So what happened in when we triggered the apparition of Atarin for the final fight, he did not spawn. What we learned is that there is a maximum number of enemy group on the map and when the limit is reached, no more monster can spawn. There is not an exception for an enemy that is the victory condition of the scenario (I reported that issue). Since we did not have any idea of what we were doing we played a few round after that, so we could not just replay the round and killing some group to make space.

We looked into the save files to try to rewind the game (something that SHOULD be doable by an undo feature) or to restart the adventure (something that also should be possible). We realised that there seem to be a save file that logs the state of the game between scenarios and an internal save file that stores the game state between turns. We achieved a restart of the senario by copying the save file to another "fake" save game. However any modifications to the state of the game inside the scenario was never taken into account (thus the theory of an internal save file for scenario state).

When we replayed the scenario of the first time, we messed up a check (the player that managed the app played too fast, entered not enough success and clicked ok) and the token was removed. It was at the start of a turn, so we elected to reload the game to redo the action and enter the good number of success (which should be done with a *** undo button). However it seems like the copied save file we were playing did not save the game state between turn (I surmise the internal save we think exist was just never created).

So we played the scenario a third time :)