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!