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Right now, if you load up a saved game, you can't use the "go back" button to go back before the point where the game was saved. This makes it difficult to explore all the branches of a long storygame like Eternal. If you want to explore a branch before the savepoint, you would have to start at the beginning and click all the way to the branching path. It would be great if you could go back to previous choices from a saved game. Obviously, this would require saving previous choices, since there could be 2 or more pages that lead to the same destination page. This would probably take a lot of work to implement with the current save system, so I don't expect it to be fulfilled anytime soon.

Tony would have to figure out why this is and how complicated changing it would be, but I'm sort of amazed no one has ever noticed it before.

In the meantime, I just tested it and quicksaves made with the extension don't have this issue. The only limitations with those is that you have to be using the same device.

I mean I noticed it, but I just never bothered too much about it since it usually wasn't an issue given how little I actually use it.

About the only time it was an issue, was with Berka's Delve game where I saved and got stuck in a glitch and couldn't go back far enough to correct everything and would have had to start all over again.

Weird, this is the first I've ever heard of you playing other people's games. Surely that can't be right.

I think I can shed some light on this. I knew about this quirk a while back. Years ago people wanted a toggle 'on' and 'off' box for the "Go back" button from the editor. It was heatedly debated, but 3J, and most sane people too, were against it. During that time I recommended a compromise that people seemed to like. I wanted a counter that would track the number of times the button was used. This would allow us to see who used to the "Go back" button and who didn't for games with high scores. It also allowed us some measure of insight into how much a reviewer explored a story before leaving a review.

So here comes the more pertinent part of my reply. We discovered that the suggestion could not be implemented. The "Go back" button uses the same function as "ALT + Left Arrow" or just pressing the back arrow on your browser. Basically, it retrieves the page because you were just there, not by actually backtracking where you came from. The story viewer, if I understand correctly, has no way of knowing otherwise where you came from to get to a page. Hence, you can't backtrack from saved games.

Aha, so I was correct in assuming that's how it worked. I assume that the "saves" merely just remember the one page you're on when you save the game, and all the variable values. If I'm correct that means this is impossible without modifying what the system saves.

That's exactly how it works. The rejection reason was:

"Not technically feasible the way things are implemented now (and in the foreseeable future)."

Which means that this will have the same problem.

Did anyone point out to the people arguing that this would in no way prevent anyone from doing what everyone does anyway: just using the back button on their browser?

I don't think I have ever used the built in button. It's just easier to click your mouse wherever it happens to be than move it up to a tiny button on top of the screen.

3J would always eventually point out that it was not currently possible, and if it was, it wasn't something they were interested in implementing.

Best I can do is probably look at whatever CYSCE did and do something there, because a robust solution would need lots of problem solving to deal with reversing arbitrary code and so on. I haven't looked into anything related to the storygame engine, but there's a lot of other site things to work on before frying this one, so I'll just leave this in limbo.