Video Game / We Who Are About to Die

Morituri Te Salutant

We Who Are About To Die is a Gladiatorial Rogue-lite RPG created by Jordy Lakiere. The player controls one of the many Aspirants thrown into the arenas of The Empire — willingly or otherwise — to make their name known across the many arenas, or die trying. Roaring crowds eager to see blood spilled will judge your battles, and the four generous yet fickle patrons will offer you arenas and matches in which you may prove yourself. And if you die, as so many have before you... there will always be another Aspirant to crawl their way up from the bottom until they fall as well.

Combat in the game is physics-based, with swings and stabs that require skilled directional and positional control to make the most of them. The Stamina system ensures you must play tactically and patiently, making each swing count as you cut into an enemy's unguarded spots and strike where you're able, while preventing them from doing the same to you. Throughout each battle, the crowd will also throw in more disposable weapons for you to use, in case yours breaks, or simply to make a show for them as you cut down your opponents. Death is permanent, and as soon as you die you will switch to the next Aspirant.

Between battles, the player must manage their Aspirant's career, hiring staff to keep their health and equipment in top shape and wielding fame and fortune alike to give themselves an edge. And as their fame rises, more boons may be granted to the current gladiator, or the next ones. And knowing you are about to die, there's always Investing in the next Aspirant to come along, to make sure they have a better head start than the current one did.

The game, playable through Steam, entered Early Access in November 14, 2022.

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This game provides examples of:

• Berserk Button: Certain actions will visibly piss off the crowds, which is a problem when their Favor is one of your lifelines. Specifically, taking too long to hit someone, running from scuffles, striking foes In the Back and especially smacking your own teammates will lead to booing, Produce Pelting and steep drops in Favor earnings.
• Blood Knight: Thrill-Seeking Civilians often jump into the arena not for money or glory, but because the life-threatening violence involved just makes their hearts soar. Often their ultimate goal isn't approval or a massive fund: They just want to kill, and will happily retire once they've had their fill of a given number of dead Aspirants.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Blunt weapons tend to be quick and easy to use, and sturdy, meaning they're less likely to require repairs. They also have a bonus to damage against non-padded armor. But they're actually boring: while they're good enough as weapons, they don't draw blood or dismember (which excites the audience) and they almost always have a fame malus.
  • Armor is practical through-and-through: a hit to a non-armored part of your body is much more dangerous and potentially lethal than it would be if the strike hit armor. But the boring, mundane armor is boring and mundane and doesn't get the crowd excited. Fancy armor that also provides good protection is expensive, so you're stuck choosing between ineffective but crowd-pleasing armor, and dull but protective armor, until you can afford the good stuff.
  • Scollo upgrades. The cost in fame and gold can be prohibitive, but more effective healing and armor repair, additional backup in some matches, and getting additional patron bonuses adds up in the long run. The best Scollo upgrade is the Heirloom upgrade, which costs 10,000 fame and 1,000 gold, but lets you carry over a weapon or armor to your next character (as long as it's not legendary or godly class) for when this character inevitably dies or retires.
  • "Future bonuses": when you rank up, you will occasionally get the option of choosing bonuses for aspirants after the one you're playing. This essentially defers an immediate but temporary bonus to your current character for a long-term but permanent bonus to future characters. Starting with up to 5,000 gold and fame and +5 to all skills for all future characters makes a huge difference later in the game.
• Breakable Weapons: Like anything else, weapons have durability, and it falls with time. Certain weapons like the Iron Claw have especially low Durability in exchange for higher damage, too. It's outright exaggerated with the Improvised Weapons in the arena like branches and jugs, which will smash with one hit whether it's coming or going.
• Breather Level:
  • Many Vs 1 fights: while your allies may end up as hindrances, and you take fame penalties for the (almost inevitable) damage that you inflict on them, the fact that you're basically ganging up on one opponent means that you'll likely escape with minimal damage to worry about. The drawback, of course, is that these fights have less of a payout, and getting the crowd excited is much more difficult so your fame bonus will be minimal.
  • Luck of the Draw modifiers tend to be this as you get into increasingly difficult fights. High level opponents have high level equipment to match, but Luck of the Draw means everyone starts with no weapon or shield and can only use what they can scavenge. Armor is still a pain to break through, but you at least don't have to worry about matching your opponent's gear quality.
• Combat Breakdown: It depends on durability, but longer fights can end like this. Everyone starts as skilled warriors swinging their sharpened blades and skillfully parrying and blocking, but as the Stamina caps fall and weapons break it easily devolves into two exhausted, desperate and heavily injured men smashing random debris scattered across arena into each other's faces.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The more you fight in a particular type of battle, the more difficult those battles become. While fights will always scale with your rank, choosing to only do those fights will result in better geared and skilled opponents. While this is dangerous, it's also lucrative, as higher rank fights pay much better.
• Critical Existence Failure: Not quite. You will still stand until your very last hitpoint comes off, but the more you're damaged the less Stamina you have, so every hit you take costs you dearly.
• Crowd Pleaser: The whole point of the Fame currency is that the crowds will love you more the more you play to their expectations. The crowds are fickle, though: if you're not continually pleasing them, they get bored quickly. Shedding blood, fighting multiple enemies, dismemberments, dangerous taunts, and swapping weapons will all increase the crowd's favor. Weapons and armor also have a fame multiplier, with fancy and elaborate gear being more effective at fame generation than boring but practical gear.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Throwing. Chucking a weapon, pot, rock, or piece of wood at an opponent from a distance is good for inflicting unexpected damage, as most opponents won't actually try to block until they're closer. Throwing is difficult to pull off in the heat of the moment, but some weapons inflict far more damage when thrown, like pilums and rocks, due to the speed of the projectile.
  • Golden Jugs. In a battle with the Spoils to the Victor modifier, you can take any weapon and shield you grab out of the arena with you (you normally can't take anything you didn't bring in yourself). If you happen to end a match in which a golden jug (or to a lesser extent, a fancy jug) is on the ground, and you're willing to lose your weapon permanently, you can take the jug with you and sell it for 2,500 gold, an amazing sum for such a fragile item.
  • 1 versus Many fights: you will always be outnumbered at least 2 to 1, and as much as 8 to 1 or even 12 to 1, and there's no Mook Chivalry here. But winning has some of the best payouts around.
• Easy Mode: The Aspiring Champion background is generally one of the easiest, as the only downside is losing 50% of your fame earnings to the Scollo. Decreased training costs and a relatively easy-to-achieve goal of reaching rank 12 of 18 makes Aspiring Champions the least gimmicky background to run.
  • The Blacksmith Trainee is also relatively easy: any gear they buy starts off horribly damaged, but they get free repairs on anything in their auxiliary, and they get frequent discounts on gear, up to 50%. Their disadvantage is that they can't make any money from gear sales, and their goal is to "sell" 100,000 gold worth of equipment, but selling gear isn't generally a good way of making money anyway, and their discount on buying gear makes it possible to purchase some almost broken stuff, complete a match, and then "sell" that same stuff for a hefty boost towards their goal.
• The Empire: Terantia is very much a Roman-styled empire, complete with implied invasions and enslavement of foreign peoples that are then brought to the arena so you can fight them.
• Fiction 500: All four patrons are pretty rich, but Valerius in particular is noted to be absurdly wealthy, to the point he can casually make bets of hundreds of thousands against you just to screw over your earnings. He's most likely inspired by Crassus, the richest man in Rome.
• Gladiator Games: The very heart of the game, with every battle being another match at one of the Arenas and each week being spent managing the gladiators' off time.
• Harder Than Hard: The Disgraced Politician background. You start with Entourage (bring 2 extra fighters on your side to a battle) and Entourage is active on every battle, and that's exactly where your advantages end. You start with terrible equipment^note in most cases, you won't even have a weapon, starting with a golden jug that you can sell for money instead, zero skills (except any skill bonuses from previous aspirants), and only 50 health, where other aspirants start with at least 100. And if that's not enough, the crowd absolutely hates you, meaning you'll find it incredibly difficult to end a fight with positive crowd approval, which will cut into your fame earnings, meaning you'll have trouble with basic Scollo upgrades and rerolling the merchant offerings, and even the basic act of revealing what matches are available! The fact that you have Entourage also means you'll have trouble killing opponents yourself, the primary means of pleasing the crowd. While it's certainly possible to overcome these difficulties, it's a harsh and steep uphill battle.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: The crowd sure thinks so! Helmets are very important, but they're also up there with shields when it comes to items that cut into your Fame earnings, since they naturally hide your face and make you less notable. Making your name with a big helmet on can be significantly harder if you don't make a show. However, some of the best helmets are also very stylish: the most reasonably valuable helmet is a fancy brass lion head that provides great protection and a +30% fame bonus!
  • Stylish helmets, on the other hand, are great for earning fame. Some are fancy without offering much, like a witch doctor-like mask, but truly fancy helmets, like a brass lion's head or a feathered centurion helm, are crowdpleasers and highly protective. And have a cost to match.
• Improvised Weapon: The crowds often provide random assortments of tree branches, planks, jugs and rocks for the gladiators to swing around for their entertainment when weapons break. Or just because — they love it when you grab a random jug and smash a guy on the head with it.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shields are an excellent option for survival, as they block much more easily and widely than weapons do. They do have the disadvantage that the crowd deeply dislikes Boring, but Practical options, so bigger shields will cut into your Fame.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Gladiatorial arenas are full of down-on-their-luck desperate schmucks and Leeroy Jenkins extraordinaires in over their head... and so, some of the most formidable opponents you will face in them are actual soldiers, unremarkable in an actual army. Simple conscripts will kick your sorry ass by dint of just having actual training and actual equipment.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Two, actually: Stamina and Stamina Recovery. While having higher weapon skills means more damage and faster swings, and higher movement skills means faster movement and dodging, Stamina is your primary concern at all times: without Stamina, you can't attack or block or even move effectively. Taking damage reduces your maximum stamina, which is dangerous if you don't have good Stamina to begin with. Higher Stamina means more attacks and more blocking. Stamina Recovery (determined by your armor) is also important, as you will run out of stamina in combat, and the faster it recovers, the sooner you can attack and defend once more.
• Produce Pelting: Displeased crowds will throw assorted produce and other garbage into the arena, often aiming for the least favored gladiator of the fight. It's an unwelcome distraction when you're trying to survive.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Valerius is getting on in years, and a few of his events show it. One is him introducing himself to you as a patron and giving you an early donation as he is inspired by your promise...which is a word-for-word recreation of your actual introduction to him, which your character politely avoids bringing up.|
• Throwing Your Sword Always Works: No, it does not. Throwing weapons at opponents is great for inflicting damage, but there's not "throw" action: you have to swing your weapon and then hit the "drop weapon" button at the right time to let go of it. Some weapons are intrinsically better for throwing (spears, pilums, etc), but you can throw anything.
• Training "Accident": Downplayed. Joridius, one of your patrons, has great sway over the Arena trainers. Displease him enough by snubbing his events and he will organize for your trainers to be extra-rough, and beat the hell out of you for an HP reduction.
• Unstable Equilibrium:
  • Due to the way Stamina drops when you're injured, it can be very hard to turn a fight around for whoever eats the first couple of big hits.
  • Almost of the aspirant backgrounds have some sort of modifier that makes their goal much harder to achieve.
    • Slaves have to earn their freedom by getting 20,000 fame, which is fantastically easy, but also have to get 80% favor will all four patrons. Because fighting will increase favor with the sponsoring patron, but decrease it with the other three, it's almost impossible to do this without extensive bribery, which is expensive bribery.
    • Criminal Scum start off with almost nothing in terms of equipment. All they have to do is win 100,000 fame, which is not necessarily difficult, but they have a penalty to crowd favor (no one wants to cheer for the criminal), and they don't have any fame boosting gear to start with. To make matters worse, their Scollo takes 50% of any money they earn (including from selling gear, fundraising, and random events) making it hard to earn enough money to buy better gear.
    • Thrill-Seeking Civilians have a relatively easy time of it: their goal is just to kill a certain number of people. However, this means that you're likely to go into 1 vs Many, Many vs Many, and Pit Fight battles, which have a high chance of getting you surrounded and killed.
    • Retired Soldiers start with decent gear and skills, but their goal of earning 100,000 gold is difficult simply because you need that goal to pay for healing, repairs and equipment. In addition, Soldiers have a penalty to Stamina at the beginning, which can be crippling with their heavier starting gear.
    • Aspiring Champions only need to get to rank 12 (out of 18) to reach their goal, which just means they need to fight and not die. But their Scollo takes 50% of their fame earnings, meaning that they have to fight twice as much as anyone else to get to that rank.
• Win Your Freedom: Slave Aspirants aim to gain enough fame and sway with the city's Patrons to be set free. Of course, this is easier said than done, even if the crowd tends to love them if they survive the first few matches, enjoying unlikely champions. Criminal Scum Aspirants also seek the same, though find it harder since the populus doesn't have a good first impression.