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Jacek Bourne

Combat Puzzles vs. Slaughter Gameplay

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I’ve noticed the terms “slaughter” and “combat puzzle” can be used interchangeably and the doomworld 25 years of doom Roots of Doom Level Design chapter 10 paragraph 2 mentions that it is another term for slaughter. However, there was a thread about the definition of a combat puzzle a while back in which many people said they thought a combat puzzle was far different than slaughter, exactly the same, or somewhere in between. Personally I believe that slaughter and combat puzzles are the same thing.  What’s the difference between a slaughter encounter and a combat puzzle. 
(Be Respectful. Don’t use this thread to rag on slaughtermaps. That was already done many times before and this should be a discussion, not a war zone.)

Seriously, don’t use this thread to say that slaughter sucks. That isn’t the purpose of this thread so post it somewhere else or just not at all.

EDIT: If this turns into a war zone then lock it immediately.

Edited by Jacek Bourne

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Both are different things in my opinion. Many slaughter maps qualify as combat puzzles, when you have to make use of infighting and/or the environment. So that you need some strategy and not simply shoot everything as fast as you can until it's dead. But there also are slaughter maps where you have enough space to maneuver and can simply kill all monsters with copious ammounts of ammo, blasting away with rocketlauncher and BFG, then it's no combat puzzle.

 

Then there are maps that involve combat puzzles that aren't slaughter maps in any way. Tricks and Traps from Doom 2 comes to mind. Or Cyberdreams. If you look past Doom/Doom 2, many FPS include boss fights I would count as combat puzzles.

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A combat puzzle (imo) is an encounter unlikely to be solved by brute force or random chance, which requires the player to perform in ways that could be considered counterintuitive or unexpected for normal Doom play. Slaughter maps can include combat puzzles, but not all of them do - if the strategy boils down to run around, dodge, and shoot until everything is dead, then it's only a combat puzzle in the broadest sense of the term (and certainly the most commonly encountered one). Any time ammunition is limited in a meaningful way it presents an open-ended combat puzzle to the player, but some are more rigid in their parameters (like Tricks and Traps, as Tetzlaff mentioned).

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I agree with the above definitions.  Many slaughter-encounters are combat-puzzles, and combat-puzzles can have slaughter gameplay, but it's not a perfect 1-1 relationship.

 

Like all mapping tropes in Doom, there's no hard and fast definition, and everything is a spectrum.  But if I had to try to define a combat-puzzle, I'd say it's any encounter where the obvious approach to killing the enemies (shoot it until it dies) isn't immediately apparent.  Instead the player must puzzle out a solution to make combat more feasible than initially presented.

 

A classic example, albeit simple by today's standards, is Doom 2 Map20 - initially a Spidermind and Cybderdemon seem too much to take on at once, but when you realize you can get them to infight, it becomes more feasible.  

 

However, that combat encounter could just involve you and small numbers of enemies, or doesn't involve any kind of AI manipulation, both typical tenets of slaughterfights.  And likewise some slaughterfights do literally just involve shooting stuff until it dies, so wouldn't count as full combat-puzzles.

 

But again, for every example there'll be others that blur the line, and none of it should be taken as absolute definitions.

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You can make a combat puzzle with a couple of enemies and architecture. You cannot make a slaughter encounter with a couple of enemies. 

You can make a combat puzzle that involves a slaughter of hundreds or thousands of monsters. Not every slaughter encounter involves combat puzzle solving.

I get where you're coming from about how these terms are used sometimes interchangeably, but it's just a venn diagram. 

 

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4 hours ago, Jacek Bourne said:

What’s the difference between a slaughter encounter and a combat puzzle.

Well, I suppose I disagree with what was written in the cacowards then, because to me there are some differences... I'm not going to go out of my way and say that my way of looking at it is the only view that should matter, but I'll certainly try and make a case for why I think it does not make sense to use "slaughter" and "combat puzzle" interchangeably...

 

When the vast majority of people talk about slaughter, they first think about lots of monsters. I think we can agree that nuts.WAD is basically a meme, but anybody who has been around for a few months would probably put it in the slaughter category instinctively.

 

If we now consider the term "puzzle", and by extension "combat puzzle", how many pieces does a puzzle need to have? Thousands? A couple hundred? A dozen? Is a scenario in which the player has to drag revenant rockets onto 5 other monsters in a particular order to be able to make progress slaughter..? I don't think anybody would look at that and say it's clearly and undoubtedly slaughter...

 

So, following that logic, slaughter and combat puzzles are not necessarily the same thing. There is certainly overlap, because some slaughter fights require good tactics paired with an overarching strategy, and that strategy itself can often be broken down in several, individual steps, which the player has to figure out, clearly, but similarities are not a basis on which to argue that two things are the same. Villas and hangars might both have roofs, but nobody would argue they're the same...

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Based on answers from this thread I’m going to go with the belief that while there is overlap between slaughter and combat puzzles, they are not the same. Now, this begs the question, what is the difference between a puzzle map and a combat puzzle map. What would a mapset such as cyberdreams fall into. Personally I’d say it falls into the category of a puzzle map rather than a combat puzzle because it doesn’t involve you actually fighting any enemies. What about Noye?

EDIT: I’m very pleased that we’ve managed to be very civil so far. I hope it stays that way.

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1 minute ago, Jacek Bourne said:

Based on answers from this thread I’m going to go with the belief that while there is overlap between slaughter and combat puzzles, they are not the same. Now, this begs the question, what is the difference between a puzzle map and a combat puzzle map. What would a mapset such as cyberdreams fall into. Personally I’d say it falls into the category of a puzzle map rather than a combat puzzle because it doesn’t involve you actually fighting any enemies. What about Noye?

Well a puzzle map at a extreme is The Given of course

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1 minute ago, 1Destro3456 said:

Well a puzzle map at a extreme is The Given of course


I haven’t played that so I have no authority to judge it. I’ll see what it is when I have time to play doom often again.

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1 minute ago, Jacek Bourne said:


I haven’t played that so I have no authority to judge it. I’ll see what it is when I have time to play doom often again.

Basically it's a giant map with only puzzles, not a single enemy or hazard, only puzzles 

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Just now, 1Destro3456 said:

Basically it's a giant map with only puzzles, not a single enemy or hazard, only puzzles 


It would fall under the category of a puzzle map then.

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1 minute ago, Jacek Bourne said:


It would fall under the category of a puzzle map then.

Yeah, that's why I said to the extreme, by no means would someone mistake it with a combat puzzle map, a thing that in my small time here on the Doom community haven't really tried

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I made a slaughter map a while back, the idea being that it would have two encounters that required a certain method to beat, this in my opinion is a combat puzzle.

 

I've also made and played D16/DE style arenas with tons of enemies, where resource management and target priority are the most important aspects, this in my opinion is a slaughter lite.

Combine the 2 elements and you have slaughter or a version of it.

Edit: So what I'm trying to say is, combat puzzles are a part of slaughter, they're not separate but a element of slaughter type maps. 

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I just assume combat puzzle would be a general term and slaughter map refers to a map with a particularly high density of a variety of monsters but also with the weapons and ammo to actually thin that density, and that slaughter map could have a combat puzzle element to it, but the same could be said of way less monster density. They really seem like terms which both describe 2 different aspects of maps.

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