I was in the beta for Roma Victor.
Its a shame that I never really gave that game a bigger chance then i did however.... What made me run away really fast was the overall look of the game. The grapichs was...well, ugly imo. The client looked like some old ultima online client...
We all know not to judge a game on the gfx.... but after i had been running around in a ugly looking city for a little while with no idea on what to do i gave up.
Imo it was a bad move of them to make their own engine. They have said that there was no engine that gave them the control over the game that they wanted and that was why they made their own. But i think that was a bad move as it must have taken a lot of dev time to complete.
The good things about RV would be: mature playerbase, a decent RP setting, pretty advanced skill system if i remember correct (both good and bad, but i would rate it good in most cases ), the plan is to have a huge gameworld