I’m not sure if everyone calls it this, but to me “ironman” games are those that don’t let you save and reload whenever you want. 30 years ago these games were the norm because most gaming was done either at arcades (which demanded quarters, so letting you save and reload anywhere hurt their business) or on rather weak computers (which didn’t have the memory for dedicated save slots). But for the most part, “ironman” seemed like a quaint 20th century style of gaming that was thrown own when computers got stronger and arcades died. Recently there’s been a resurgance of games that don’t let you save and reload, not for technical reasons, but for the personal reasons that the devs or power-gamers think it’s “cheating.” I normally don’t play ironman games, my time is worth more than that, but I received For the King as a gift and so decided to give it a go.

I decided to try For The King single player.  It was going ok, until I tried to fight my first battle 1 level higher than me (level 5 vs my level 4). First turn, the boss enemy confused my whole party.  Confusion rarely “wears off” in this game, so from then on the battle was auto-piloted into a total party kill.   And a total party kill would have been game over, 3 lost lives.

I don’t like ironman because it heavily discourages experimentation.  I decided to try this fight because my friend had told me that For the King doesn’t have the Divinity 2 problem of “battles at a higher level are impossible.”  And yet the way this battle went heavily teaches the player “never ever fight enemies higher level than you” because I barely scratched the enemies and the entire battle was decided on a single move from the first turn of the boss.

Of course, I said to hell with that and End-Task’d the game instead of letting it end in defeat.  And since the autosave was right before I tried the battle… I just went and tried again.

The battle went a hell of a lot better the second time.  The total-party-confuse still happened, but this time it didn’t occur until the enemy’s 3rd turn.  And also one of my characters switched to his gun, fired, and then snapped out of confusion (as I said, a rare occurrence).  I was actually able to reload and fire to kill the enemy myself.

This single battle teaches the player 2 entirely different lessons based on a single dice roll.  If the confusion comes out first turn, the lesson is “gtfo, high level enemies will kill you.”  If confusion comes out later, the lesson is simply that some enemies are powerful and have party-wide attacks.  In a normal game, the player can reload when killed and try again.  They can  see how the game “really” works, ie “are higher level enemies impossible or was I just unlucky?”  In ironman games, the player cannot learn how the game works in game.  It heavily encourages meta-gaming (looking everything up online) and discourages experimentation.

When you load up the game, it starts immediately with what feels like a developer having a hissy-fit over people complaining about randomness.  When I loaded the game for the first time, it forced me to accept what was essentially an in-game EULA saying “don’t think you’ll defeat the evil your first try, more powerful heroes than you have tried and failed.”  That same sentence loads up every time you start the game.  It REEKS of a dev being very angry at people complaining about the randomness and lost runs, and so trying to force the players to accept the “correct” way of thinking, ie that the game will happily waste your time with a bad roll. 

I on the other hand will continue to think my time is far more important than any game.  This is the kind of game I will never buy for myself, I’m a busy man and don’t want to spend hours on a game only to get kicked back to the beginning by a single bad roll.

But I can still see the appeal.  The systems are quite good, the focus is fun, and I’m loving my little cross-classing that I’ve been able to do.  I got a Goblin Bow in this game and handed it to both my Bard and Scholar at different points because it was stronger than their normal attacks and had pierce.  I handed the Bard a Magic Book weapon later because I hadn’t found good bard weapons and she had decent intelligence.  There’s a lot to like here, but the game would definitely be improved by having a non-ironman game mode.  It doesn’t hurt the ironman people’s fun and lets folks like me enjoy it too.