There qere quite a few
While quicksaving and quickloading is a huge part of the core experience we felt that it would be best to TRY to reduce it as much as we can. Just out of fear that gamers today wouldnt "feel" it and be annoyed by the game. We thus looked for a feature that would let you escape when beeing seen and invented something we called "Freeze Mode". There were multiple iterations of it, here are some examples:
1) When you are seen the game freezes and you can teleport to a certain position in a radius around you. That turned out to be very irritating. In hectic situations people would smash buttons to escape and just trigger the teleport randomly. Also feedback wasnt great there.
2) We tried something of thre same cocnept but you could only teleport to a spot you had been to in the last X seconds. So you could sort of "rewind" that one character's movement. This still had the problems mentioned earlier and also wasnt intuitive. We then kept iterating and iterating and it just never felt right.
In the end we just settled for a Slowmo that starts when you are seen like in the Metal Gear games. Getting that right was also quite interessting. The perception of how fast you are and if the slow motion is actually a BENEFIT is pretty funny. People woul dthink they are slower, even though they were faster. Stuff like that. In the end we found that clean solution that most people dont even realize... but it works.
Of course we would have loved to try out a "rewind" feature instead of quickloading but that just was out of the question tech-wise. To implement something like this and make it worth it, it needs to be tied together more with gameplay. So that was not an option
Another huge topic was Shadow Mode. We had versions that were a lot more complex. You could chain multiple actions per character. But what we realized was that people just wanted MORE of that. They expected timelines where they could order commands etc. That would have resulted in a completely different experience and Shadow Tactics would almost have been a turn based game. So we cut back on all of that and made it a simple and clean thing where you can perform one action per character.