Ironman Mode?

[Ixnatifual]

Firaxis are making a reimagining of the old X-COM: Enemy Unknown game. In the new game, in addiction to picking a difficulty setting, you can also opt to play in "Ironman Mode." In this mode you have only one save game, which is always "current." So if you load the game you're at the same spot where you loaded from. This way players can force themselves to not "savescum" by saving and reloading when something goes wrong.

If you die, the savegame is of course deleted.

It would be kind of cool to have a similar option for Grimrock. The point would be that you can actually lose the game, and each game is an effort to see how far down the dungeon you can make it. Roguelikes typically work in similar fashion.

[Darklord]

Sounds like an interesting challenge, bit to hard core for me although I did complete Zelda 3 without dieing/saving once it was the only way to get right to the end with 0 on the save, you had to do it all in one playthrough.

Of course that was when I was young and didn't have anything better to do!

Daniel.

[Ixnatifual]

Naturally, an Ironman Mode for Grimrock wouldn't be complete without a graveyard listing the names of deceased party members, which dungeon they entered, what floor they died on and which enemy/trap did them in at the end.

[DJK]

What keeps you from "moving" the "current savegame" from it's location (wherever it's saved) to a backup.. then while palying at regular intervals keep backing up your savegame, if you die, copy the backup over the "game over party" save and presto ?

Unless the savegame is kept in the cloud .. aka: on almost human servers... but that's a lot of hassle and well, if you want to cheat in a single player game you can cheat.. even if you need to cheatengine it..

[Ixnatifual]

Nothing. But why would you pick Ironman mode if you're going to cheat that way? It would be a lot less hassle to just play normally then since you can use the quickload and quicksave features.

[Dr.Disaster]

Me thinks Ironman is a misleading term here. I'm sure you're more looking for some kind of Hardcore mode as in Dungeon Hack but with no access to save and restore. A character death and exiting to Main Menu is the only way to save the game in a non-accessable file and the game will only load this save when you want to continue. The only way to recover dead characters would be with a crystal and when all chars die the save game is deleted.

Actually this could be done by adding a new option to the start new game choices. Yet hiding those save game files would be really tough.

[Ixnatifual]

That's not really the kind of feature I'm looking for it. I'm not sure if that feature really makes sense, either It's exactly the Ironman mode from X-COM: EU I'd like to see here. Perhaps I simply suck at explaining it.

Perhaps this way of explaining it will let you home in on what I'm looking for.
- There's a single save game, but you don't manually save.
- The save game is automatically updated to the current game state whenever a change in game state happens.
- Save game is deleted if the party dies, since this ends the current game.

This means if you pick this mode, you can't use the save/reload feature normally, and have to face the consequences of anything that happens. Including losing your party, which means you have to start over. But you can just exit the game if you need a break, and reload to where you left off without having to kill any of your characters.

[J. Trudel]

That's not really the kind of feature I'm looking for it. I'm not sure if that feature really makes sense, either It's exactly the Ironman mode from X-COM: EU I'd like to see here. Perhaps I simply suck at explaining it.

Perhaps this way of explaining it will let you home in on what I'm looking for.
- There's a single save game, but you don't manually save.
- The save game is automatically updated to the current game state whenever a change in game state happens.
- Save game is deleted if the party dies, since this ends the current game.

This means if you pick this mode, you can't use the save/reload feature normally, and have to face the consequences of anything that happens. Including losing your party, which means you have to start over. But you can just exit the game if you need a break, and reload to where you left off without having to kill any of your characters.

It would be far easier this way :
- Saving the game send you to the main menu
- Loading the game delete your save file
This way there is no save file if you die it's back to new game, and if you save it's to quit the game.
I believe it could be scripted in LUA for custom dungeons

[Ixnatifual]

What if the game crashes while you're playing or the power comes off? There'd be no save game!

[Sol_HSA]

What if the game crashes while you're playing or the power comes off? There'd be no save game!

Sounds like an act of god to me =)