Gladiator Trials: Online

Multiplayer was something I had wished to include in the original release, but found it would take too much time and later decided to release a special online edition titled "Gladiator Trials: Online", aimed at a mid 2005 release. This never came to be due to the difficulties in getting the game play to work in multiplayer, but even today there is multiplayer code in Gladiator Trials II.

I had  a few ideas of how multiplayer could work, the first was played mostly offline and you would take your gladiators online to verse in the arena, with mods like 1vs1 up to 4vs4 as well as some team play for up to 4 people. You would enter a multiplayer screen, basically a chat room which showed what fights you were able to enter. They were color coded with grey fights having no xp gains (your gladiators being much higher levels), to red with extra xp (your gladiators much lower levels).

There were two different modes planned, one being for hard core players where once your gladiators died they were gone for good. I allowed a surrender option in the arena for this, to help prevent all the player's gladiators being killed off in one go. The "normal" mode would have a grace of 3 lives for each gladiator, after which each ressurection would cost a substaintial amount of gold.

It was too open to cheating, and I also felt the combat wouldn't have really been that exciting to create an entire multiplayer aspect around. The last multiplayer mode was almost an entirely new game, and resulted in too much work to complete, but some code remains present in Gladiator Trials II, far from functional though.

You would all start out at your own camp and play just like single player, being able to enter the arena for xp and gold. The difference comes from having a world view, which players switched between with the tab key. The world view showed your camp about the same size as a single building, and your gladiators were represented as the same size as in the camp. You needed to assign your gladiators to the outside at your camp screen, otherwise they wouldn't be visible/controllable in the world view. The world view played in real-time and you simply moved your gladiators to the other player's camps and attack/destroy them.

It sounded very fun on paper, but after a bit of work was done I realized it was virtually a new game and strayed too far from the single player mode. It would have ended up almost identical to all those other RTS game's flooding the market today, and with such a small budget who would have wanted yet another RTS game? The risk was too great and thus multiplayer was finally put to rest, I still have a strong desire to create a multiplayer title but that will just have to wait...