Praetorians (video game)

2003 real time tactics video game

Praetorians is a 3D real time tactics video game developed by Pyro Studios and published by Eidos Interactive in 2003, based on Julius Caesar's historical campaigns in Gaul and Britain, Crassus' battles in Parthia, and the events of Caesar's Civil War during the 1st century BC. The player controls either the Roman Republic, the Ptolemaic Kingdom (inaccurately represented as the New Kingdom of Egypt), or a generic barbarian tribe based on the Helvetii, Gauls, and Celts.

Skirmish functions can be chosen in which the player first chooses a difficulty level (easy, medium, or hard), then up to one character and up to seven AI players, controlled by artificial intelligence. These can be Roman, Egyptian or an anonymous barbarian tribe. Once this is completed, alliances may be created by joining two forces on the same team, whether set before the game has started, or during the game.

Players may participate as Julius Caesar commanding forces of varying sizes against various hostile tribes of barbarian, Egyptian and, nearer the end of the game, Roman origin. The Campaign consists of four Tutorial levels, which educate the player on how to order troops around the map, initiate combat, and best use the units at the player's disposal, and 20 Campaign missions, beginning in 59BC with Caesar fighting the Helvetii tribe, and ending in 45BC with the final battle of the Civil War. The 20 campaign missions are divided into four sections; each new section is preceded by a short film. The sections, including the tutorial missions, are divided by the time period the missions are in. The first section involves leading Caesar's new legions to Gaul to investigate the recent surge of bandit attacks in Aeduii country. The second is the initial stage of the Gallic Wars and focuses on Caesar's battles against the Helvetii and the Nervii. The third section continues directly from the second section, beginning with Caesar crossing the River Rhine and followed by Caesar's invasions of Britannia and Ambiorix's revolt. The fourth section focuses both on Crassus' defeat at Carrhae in 53 BC and the subsequent retreat two of the most difficult campaign missions, with very challenging initial starting positions whilst being significantly outnumbered by the Parthians along with Vercingetorix's revolt. The final section focuses on the civil war against the Senate and the battles to aid Cleopatra in her succession dispute.

Originally, the game was designed to be played online in Multiplayer mode using GameSpy. The installer for the game includes instructions and gives the option to install GameSpy Arcade. However, GameSpy Arcade no longer offers support for Praetorians game, since they have closed many servers. Instead, players can download and use GameRanger, which offers support for Praetorians multiplayer.

After the Pyro Studios producer of the title, Javier Arévalo, and Eidos' Jason Walker talked about sorting out a flaw in the multiplayer game that was being exploited, an unofficial patch was released in October 2004. This helped catapult the game back up the GameSpy Arena charts. The latest version of an unofficial extension, called MoD 4.1, became available 2004; it adds three new factions and many new maps. MoD 4.1 contains the unofficial patch to fix the multi player game. The next official extension is called MoD 5.0 released in 2013 by Pyro Studios. It sorted out a number of flaws, decreased the hit points of some troops, updated the start screen of the game, added brand new music and sounds, presented 40 new maps for battles. In 2008 an unofficial map editor for the PC game Praetorians was released. The map editor is programmed in the C++ programming language and uses the OpenGL computer graphics API. In the same year, the game continued to sell well, maintaining a place in the Top 20 Budget PC Titles on ChartTrack at the time. On May 31, 2014, GameSpy servers were shut down, thus ending the official multiplayer for Praetorians. However, it is possible to use unofficial third party clients to run and maintain servers for Praetorians.

In the United Kingdom, Praetorians sold roughly 20,000 units during the first half of 2003. Kristan Reed of GamesIndustry. biz wrote that these were "not figures that spell H. I. T." The game ultimately received a "Silver" award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom. It also received a "Gold" award from the Asociación Española de Distribuidores y Editores de Software de Entretenimiento (aDeSe), for more than 40,000 sales in Spain during its first 12 months. In the German market, Praetorians debuted in third place for March 2003 on Media Control's sales charts for full price computer games. It fell to 15th place in April and to 24th in May. By June, it was absent from Media Control's top 30.

The game received "generally favorable reviews" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. GameSpot praised the graphics, tactical depth, and AI; however, the limited camera (lacking the ability to turn 360 degrees) audio (particularly the sound effects, and voice acting) and poor multiplayer matchmaking services were criticised. In 2017, HobbyConsolas named Praetorians one of the best Spanish games ever released. El Economista offered it the same recognition in 2020.

In June 2019, a remastered version was announced by Kalypso Media for a targeted release in fall 2019. It includes higher resolution, better textures, re activation of the multiplayer mode. The game is developed by Torus Games and was released on January 24, 2020, for Microsoft Windows and for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 18, 2020.