New Features & Improvements
- Massive performance overhaul: Improved levels, lighting, character rendering, hair systems, visual effects, gameplay code, and animations.
- Updated to Unreal Engine 5.5.4.
- Dynamic damage system: Wounds, bruises, blood splatters, and equipment scratches during battle. (No dismemberment yet—but we're working on it!)
- Facial expressions: Gladiators now show expressions during attacks, hits, and executions.
- New overlays for game over screens, flowing blood on defeat, and confetti on victories!
- Footprints in the sand.
- Selling your gladiators and gear.
- New hair, eyebrow, beard, and mustache styles.
- Improved hair rendering and physics and enabled groom on default. Make sure to change this if you modified this setting manually!
- Higher-res gladiator portraits with more reliable capturing.
- Hardware mouse cursor: The custom cursor now stays responsive even if the game lags or freezes.
- Improved gladiator rendering in menus: Now rotatable and better looking.
- Inventory tab in the Ludus for inspecting and selling your equipment.
- Sorting and filtering in the inventory tab and the barracks equipment selection.
- Adjusted intro camera.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed several soft locks in the gladiator level-up menu.
- Delete gladiator portraits of gladiators that don't exist anymore on game start
- Fixed visual clipping on various equipment pieces.
- Fixed gladiators randomizing their pose in the market on each visit.
- Red screen overlay now triggers correctly on damage.
- Tons of other edge-case fixes in UI and combat behavior.
Dev Notes
We know progress may feel slow and the game still feels a bit barebones — many of you have told us as much. But we’re incredibly grateful for your support and patience.
As a very small team, we have to choose carefully where to focus our limited resources. This update aimed to lay down a stronger technical foundation, optimize for more hardware, and prepare the game for much larger expansions going forward.
Here’s just some of what we’re working on next:
- Dynamic dismemberment system
- Full UI overhaul and controller support
- Complete combat rework (dodging, parrying, motion-captured animations)
- New maps and game modes
- Gladiator skill trees and talents
- Account-wide progression
- Coop mode and lobby invites
- Equipment durability and rare traits
- Permadeath in all non-practice modes
- XP and cost rebalancing for a faster, more varied experience
We truly believe in ROAL’s potential—and we’re going to keep building until we reach it. ❤️
Note: PvP is currently disabled while we migrate our matchmaking system. We're working to bring it back online as soon as possible!