Opinions of slaughtermaps?

Agentbromsnor said:

I completed all slaughtermaps I played thus far. Am I hardcore enough now? I'm not impressed of any slaughter map, sorry.

Let's see a demo.

TimeOfDeath said:

Let's see a demo.

Care?

Agentbromsnor said:
I completed all slaughtermaps I played thus far. Am I hardcore enough now? I'm not impressed of any slaughter map, sorry.

Which ones did you play/beat then? I want to know as you're forming an argument around them and it'd help me reply more properly.

I'm not trying to be 'less' hardcore, what kind of argument is that? Haha.

I'm not saying that. Less hardcore as in casual as in acceptable. What you said sounded like generalizing and I don't like generalizing.

I'm trying to encourage people to bring innovating gameplay...

Already said it but I like repeating myself so :
Gameplay in them is probably one of the most complex you can implement in doom and requires extensive testing to get right.

...and to put some feeling into what you're making.

Authors of slaughtermaps do that. Cut the nonsense.

And before you or somebody else complains that Doom is too limited for that; most modern sourceport bring plenty of features that allow you to make interesting levels with idem gameplay. But it requires time and effort to make that sort of mod.

Which? Zdoom & friends? Are you trying to imply you need that for innovative gameplay? I really hope I understood wrong.

Do you think Half-Life would be playable if someone created a map with 5000 headcrabs and combine? Would it be challenging? Probably, but its simply unplayable no matter how you put it.

So your idea about slaughter genre is 5000 monsters in a room that infight?

Agentbromsnor said:
I completed all slaughtermaps I played thus far.

I can complete some of the ones I can't complete, too, if I rely on saves and cheats. That's probably best replied by Phml's post, in any case, where he notes how some people can only complete them painfully. Others can make an art of blasting all the monsters in minutes, and sometimes almost immediately (as opposed to after many attempts.)

Agentbromsnor said:
Care?

It's the best way to back your argument. You already made it clear this is about "maps being too hard to complete" with your Half-life example. Others do not find these levels too hard to complete. If you don't believe me, there are plenty of demos and Youtube videos. Like here, where one guy destroys over a thousand monsters per minute.

Do we have to like slaughter maps? No, appreciating the more elaborate and harder ones takes genuine effort, and dedication takes time we might want to place elsewhere for various reasons, but that doesn't make weak sweeping statements, like some you made in your earlier post, any smarter.

It's okay to admit we aren't as efficient and competitive as some of the guys here. Some play at frightening skill levels and have very high standards of what playing well is, since they have huge expectations when they play, at least compared to what we may be able to achieve. Dismissing that skill and the maps built around it as "just some boring maps stacked with monsters" is the wrong way to go.

i enjoy slaughtermaps from time to time, although i get sated fast and i'll want to move to faster progressing gameplay or survivalist maps. specialized slaughterwads or challenge maps relying on excellence in repetition don't appeal to me, but i respect them and enjoy watching demos of slaughterfans tackling them.

slaughter is a whole genre with good and bad maps from good and not-quite-there-yet mappers, erm. claiming all of it is bad and bland is kinda like saying there were no good movies after 1995.

i don't like one particular approach to slaughter though - overly predesigned large arena fights which murder you repeatedly in a frustrating fashion until you finally find the One Intended Strategy. but then again, that can be said about "regular" maps as well, it just tends to stand out more in slaughter arenas.

Khorus said:

There are some good slaughtermaps. And there are some shit ones.

^^^


Seriously though, Alfonzo's answer more or less sums up my thoughts. I don't really have the patience for something of Sunder's scale, unless a certain Russian weapon mod is employed. :P

myk said:

I can complete some of the ones I can't complete, too, if I rely on saves and cheats. That's probably best replied by Phml's post, in any case, where he notes how some people can only complete them painfully. Others can make an art of blasting all the monsters in minutes, and sometimes almost immediately (as opposed to after many attempts.)

It's the best way to back your argument. You already made it clear this is about "maps being too hard to complete" with your Half-life example. Others do not find these levels too hard to complete. If you don't believe me, there are plenty of demos and Youtube videos. Like here, where one guy destroys over a thousand monsters per minute.

Do we have to like slaughter maps? No, appreciating the more elaborate and harder ones takes genuine effort, and dedication takes time we might want to place elsewhere for various reasons, but that doesn't make weak sweeping statements, like some you made in your earlier post, any smarter.

It's okay to admit we aren't as efficient and competitive as some of the guys here. Some play at frightening skill levels and have very high standards of what playing well is, since they have huge expectations when they play, at least compared to what we may be able to achieve. Dismissing that skill and the maps built around it as "just some boring maps stacked with monsters" is the wrong way to go.

Where did I say that I found slaughtermaps hard? I don't generally think they're hard, just tedious and boring. Why is this is so hard to grasp? Does it really make that much of a difference if I lay out my credentials for playing a Doom WAD? Forget it, I'm too old for that. Its not like you HAVE to believe me, just like I don't have to play hundreds of slaughtermaps to come to the conclusion that 99% of them suck.

I honestly don't care if a slaughtermap is hard to beat. Eating a rock is pretty difficult, but you don't see people chewing on rocks just so they can grow their e-penis.

Meh. You're annoying. I can't believe I bothered in the first place.

I'll go with... heh.

Well thats like, your opinion man.

I really enjoy most of them (although I despise poorly designed levels, but I think most do).

The appeal of a slaughtermap boils down to a lot of different factors for me. The colossal nature of each map, the feeling of being overwhelmed, deciphering a strategy in the midst of carnage, and the constant close-calls. They've always been something of a wild extension of the original Doom design, similar to what CAVE did to the shoot-em-up genre by forging bullet-hell shooters like DonPachi. It's a really extreme but super satisfying way to play Doom that obviously won't cater towards everyone's tastes. Add in the prospect of speedrunning them to some players and the maps become more like a giant puzzle with some hyper-intensive twitch sections that regular maps only offer in sparse doses.

In my opinion, the best slaughtermaps offer the player a couple ways to deal with each encounter, be it where to take cover, what weapons to use, what infighting to trigger, etc. The player should always be making both small and large decisions while they're playing, weighing the options while trying to stay alive. It's that kind of thrill that you just don't usually get from standard Doom fares, where the focus is more on ammo balance and reacting to traps quickly. Also to the naysayers, Phml's circle strafing:corner sniping analogy is spot on.

Guys, stop liking things I don't like!!!

But seriously, these definitions just keep getting better. While level design is still the #1 factor that affects my enjoyment of a WAD, there are some really beautiful slaughtermaps out there (I'll admit to playing them in Buddha-mode...).

I have noticed that my maps get more-and-more slaughter-y the better I get at Doom. That is they challenge my twitch and fast-puzzling skills, and force me to combine strategies for dealing with different types of groups of monsters. So my favourite element of any slaughter-ish map is probably when a puzzle is presented (either using visual cues, or other map elements) that one only has a set amount of time to solve before being overrun by monsters. >:D

Agentbromsnor said:

Does it really make that much of a difference if I lay out my credentials for playing a Doom WAD?

Yes, it matters. It's hard to believe that someone who's completed every slaughtermap they've played doesn't like slaughtermaps. Facing seemingly overwhelming odds and coming out victorious after slaughtering everything is kinda the main selling point of slaughtermaps.

Reminds me of the guy who beat Demon's Souls with his first character, without dying, and thought it was meh. I just don't understand some people! Oh well...

Plausibility aside, it's stupid to debate matters of taste. Are we going to start a row over what the best colour to map with is next? (Anyway, it's obviously brown.)

Agentbromsnor said:

Well thats like, your opinion man.

Who's with me?

I'd rather we get back to the topic at hand, personally. Heh.

Any tips on making the upper difficult levels of my wad more fun for slaughterers, other than just adding more monsters?

There's a thin ice barrier between 'hard' maps and slaughtermaps. Basically I'd define slaughtermap as a map that feels like slaughtermap. Trying to think of some strict definition just causes headache.

TimeOfDeath said:

Yes, it matters. It's hard to believe that someone who's completed every slaughtermap they've played doesn't like slaughtermaps. Facing seemingly overwhelming odds and coming out victorious after slaughtering everything is kinda the main selling point of slaughtermaps.

Personally, I like to see something for myself before I form an opinion of it. I really don't care if my say so isn't enough for you. Like I said, I'm too old for this childish dick comparing.

j4rio said:

There's a thin ice barrier between 'hard' maps and slaughtermaps.

No there's not. There's plenty of different ways to add difficulty to your maps without making it into a slaughtermap.

Agentbromsnor said:

Personally, I like to see something for myself before I form an opinion of it. I really don't care if my say so isn't enough for you. Like I said, I'm too old for this childish dick comparing.

Problem is, you sound like your experience is vague. You barely go even remotely indepth with what you dislike, you didn't name a single concrete map and an exact part that was bad about it. It sounds like you have little to no idea about what you're talking about nor the genre itself. There's no problem with disliking it, but the arguments you provide are more or less utterly flawed.

Agentbromsnor said:

No there's not. There's plenty of different ways to add difficulty to your maps without making it into a slaughtermap.

Stop understanding me completely wrong. KFTHX.

Agentbromsnor said:

I'm too old for this childish dick comparing.

It's not dick comparing, it's backing up what you said with proof.

And I don't think anyone here is saying that more monsters automatically means more difficult. Difficulty depends on different things.

j4rio said:

Problem is, you sound like your experience is vague. You barely go even remotely indepth with what you dislike, you didn't name a single concrete map and an exact part that was bad about it. It sounds like you have little to no idea about what you're talking about nor the genre itself. There's no problem with disliking it, but the arguments you provide are more or less utterly flawed.



Stop understanding me completely wrong. KFTHX.

For starters I don't feel like going through my WAD map to find a single slaughtermap to point to. And second I don't want to focus on one map or mappack only, since that is not the subject of this topic. The topic is about slaughtermaps in general. I understand that you think that I don't know what I'm talking about, because you disagree with me.

If you've read my posts, I already wrote that I concieved that some slaughtermaps can look pretty good. I'm not dissing any slaughtermap designer's skills in making maps, because I'm obviously mostly criticizing the bad ones (which in my opinion are more prominent then the good ones). Most of them however (again, I write MOST, not ALL) have only one texture style throughout one entire map, and seeing how long some slaughtermaps can take the design gets bland very quickly.

This goes back to my opinion that most slaughtermaps tend to be a borefest IMO. I like games / mods with a little story behind them, even though those are hard to achieve in Doom (I did play a few very good ones though). I can see that slaughtermaps can pose a challenge to some people, but most of the time when I see a slaughtermap, I just think of the potential that the map designer could have with making a singleplayer 'story' WAD.

Agentbromsnor said:
Its not like you HAVE to believe me, just like I don't have to play hundreds of slaughtermaps to come to the conclusion that 99% of them suck.

I certainly believe you don't like them, and don't really have a problem with that in itself, but the answer lies largely in you rather than in the levels sucking in any concrete way.

As for being a good player or sucking, you're way too defensive about it. Maybe you're not so bad, but you aren't very secure about it.

At least at one point you implied you don't like slaughter levels because you're more into port features and what they can do, as opposed to raw deployments of monsters. Had you started with something like that instead of just bashing slaughter maps with generalities and stereotypes, the discussion would have gone smoother.

TimeOfDeath said:

It's not dick comparing, it's backing up what you said with proof.

And I don't think anyone here is saying that more monsters automatically means more difficult. Difficulty depends on different things.

The point of what I was saying wasn't to prove that I beat a slaughtermap, so I don't have to 'proof' anything to you.

I think you will find that alot of people do believe that more 'slaughterish' maps equal more difficulty. Even though it depends on the map.

myk said:
I certainly believe you don't like them, and don't really have a problem with that in itself, but the answer lies largely in you rather than in the levels sucking in any concrete way.

As for being a good player or sucking, you're way too defensive about it. Maybe you're not so bad, but you aren't very secure about it.

At least at one point you implied you don't like slaughter levels because you're more into port features and what they can do, as opposed to raw deployments of monsters. Had you started with something like that instead of just bashing slaughter maps with generalities and stereotypes, the discussion would have gone smoother. [/B]

I'm insecure about my Doom skills because I don't want to post a demo to proof some uninteresting point on the internet? Please, just give it a rest already.

From what I can tell (and don't take this too personally), it's mostly the modders and leveldesigners that are insecure when it comes to criticism, and I'm not just talking about the Doom community here. Everytime when there is SOME form of criticism, some designer goes ape shit about how "unfair" it is to judge his work and how I shouldn't play it in the first place, blabla. People really need to man the fuck up in this regard.

If you want to be taken seriously as an artist, you embrace every form of criticism, and not filter out all the praise and bawl when there's one person expressing his honest criticism. I know this is kinda offtopic, but I've seen several people over at ModDB go on a rage over somebody who dareth to question his prestige mod... But I digress.

j4rio said:
There's a thin ice barrier between 'hard' maps and slaughtermaps. Basically I'd define slaughtermap as a map that feels like slaughtermap.

Feels how, hard? Hard could imply a shortage of ammo or health, practically unreachable annoying sniper monsters, continuous tight traps, or even monsters edited to be faster, more dangerous, tougher or hard to see. Slaughter mean you kill lots of baddies, so you need a lot of enemies for that. Some make these levels to have an easy time blowing up a lot of monsters, others, on the contrary, to create a huge challenge. I've heard some define slaughter levels only as the easier type with lots of heath and ammo, but it seemed silly to me because the hard ones are mostly meant for max demos, where the aim to to kill everything, classifying them also as "generating a slaughter".

Agentbromsnor said:

The point of what I was saying wasn't to prove that I beat a slaughtermap, so I don't have to 'proof' anything to you.

You said this:

Agentbromsnor said:

I completed all slaughtermaps I played thus far. Am I hardcore enough now? I'm not impressed of any slaughter map, sorry.

TimeOfDeath said:

You said this:

Yep, I did. And?

myk said:

Counting only the id IWADs,* maps like Suburbs (level 16) and Mt. Erebus (e3m6) already start to draw an incipient slaughter map idea because of how many monsters can get bunched together, giving the impression you're fighting an enemy horde. But, conceding slaughter levels are mostly the work of the community, they were something many fans would feel the need to add given the nature of the game, and a good part of the reason we didn't see greater numbers of monsters in DOOM narrows down to technical limitations back then.

<small>* I'd classify the Final DOOM WADs closer to PWADs notwithstanding id's publication because they were made by community people independently of id.</small>

But neither Suburbs nor Mt. Erebus have the common characteristic of many slaughter maps, that is, large-scale arena battles or spacious hallways replete with monsters and often a lot of chances to incite infighting.

I'd say Suburbs could have been the predecessor of the knockabout Plutonia style rather than slaughter maps. It has monsters strewn over the whole map, a bunch of nasty traps combined with a very tough pistol start. It all adds up to a gameplay style where some level of quickness and dexterity is required, rather than careful planning or patience. As for Mt. Erebus, I don't really think that level has much in common with the average slaughter map, to be fair.

After all, I think id were able to make the IWADs much more crowded in spite of technical limitations. But for some reason they didn't.

Agentbromsnor said:



For starters I don't feel like going through my WAD map to find a single slaughtermap to point to. And second I don't want to focus on one map or mappack only, since that is not the subject of this topic. The topic is about slaughtermaps in general. I understand that you think that I don't know what I'm talking about, because you disagree with me.

It's a little soon to do generalizing regarding this genre IMO. It's a new trend and focusing on single maps does matter. They tend to differ per each author so much that it's like talking about separete sub-genres of slaughtermaps. Even different maps by the same author can be so different it'd be difficult to compare.

If you've read my posts, I already wrote that I concieved that some slaughtermaps can look pretty good. I'm not dissing any slaughtermap designer's skills in making maps, because I'm obviously mostly criticizing the bad ones (which in my opinion are more prominent then the good ones). Most of them however (again, I write MOST, not ALL) have only one texture style throughout one entire map, and seeing how long some slaughtermaps can take the design gets bland very quickly.

So if a slaughtermap looks good then you'd like it?

Nitpicking about looks in gameplay oriented maps is pretty low, if you ask me.

This goes back to my opinion that most slaughtermaps tend to be a borefest IMO. I like games / mods with a little story behind them, even though those are hard to achieve in Doom (I did play a few very good ones though). I can see that slaughtermaps can pose a challenge to some people, but most of the time when I see a slaughtermap, I just think of the potential that the map designer could have with making a singleplayer 'story' WAD.

There's no problem with disliking a genre, as I said. But judging from what you said, you've completely missed the point. If you like games with story behind, it's quite surprising you're actually on a doom forum at all. I think you're so far with your personal requirements that there's no real reason to continue with this debate.

myk said:
Feels how, hard? Hard could imply a shortage of ammo or health, practically unreachable annoying sniper monsters, continuous tight traps, or even monsters edited to be faster, more dangerous, tougher or hard to see. Slaughter mean you kill lots of baddies, so you need a lot of enemies for that. Some make these levels to have an easy time blowing up a lot of monsters, others, on the contrary, to create a huge challenge. I've heard some define slaughter levels only as the easier type with lots of heath and ammo, but it seemed silly to me because the hard ones are mostly meant for max demos, where the aim to to kill everything, classifying them also as "generating a slaughter".

Actually, not at all. It's not a difficulty related feel for me, rather a mix of many factors which does also include difficulty, although it's not that important factor. I'll try to name them, although usually when I wanted to think of some definition, my mind kept getting numb from too much thinking.

- It should have either RL or BFG and ammo sufficient enough for at least one of those to allow for more than enough missed or inefficient shots.
- Monsters usage should consist of higher than regular amounts of mid-tier projectile monsters (Imp, Demon, Hk, ... ,Archvile) and slightly to higher than regular amounts of bosses (MM, cyb). Light hitscan monsters are prone to taking out each other so their amount doesn't necessarily have to be higher and depends on situation.
- Infights possibilities, powerups, health, additional ammo, misc.stuff like jumps are distributed based on how difficult author wants the slaughtermap. The less/more - the harder/easier overall difficulty.
- Infighting shouldn't be mandatory to instigate to beat a map, but that's debatable. It can be a point that defines a good/bad slaughtermap.
- Slaughtermap shouldn't take place in 'claustrophobic' enviroments, or it can gain the status 'hard map' from me even if all above points are there.

For example, I find almost all of death-destiny maps to be hard maps rather than slaughtermaps. They are excruciatingly difficult, but they don't have too high monster counts, don't offer almost any additional ammo to spare and battles take place in closed cramped rooms more often than not. The only exception would be no chance which I'd consider as a excruciatingly difficult slaughtermap.

Agentbromsnor said:
I'm insecure about my Doom skills because I don't want to post a demo to proof some uninteresting point on the internet?

I was referring to your rhetoric in general, even before the demo request came up. (At first by comparing my own less hostile attitude toward skilled players and slaughter maps). We all agree it doesn't matter specifically whether you're a great player or barely better than a noob. The "uninteresting point" is actually your own point, since you said you had beaten slaughter maps and people wanted to see what you meant by that by seeing you play.

and don't take this too personally

Why should I? I didn't release any levels and don't really plan to focus on slaughter levels if I do. Your "critiques" here could only go to people like TimeOfDeath, and he makes maps with an aim so unlike anything you prefer that you could hardly provide anything he could use to improve his levels. Well, except maybe a demo showing how you can beat all his maps while polishing your nails!

Feniks said:
But neither Suburbs nor Mt. Erebus have the common characteristic of many slaughter maps, that is, large-scale arena battles or spacious hallways replete with monsters and often a lot of chances to incite infighting.

Now we need hallways and arenas to have a slaughter map? The plot thickens!

I'd say Suburbs could have been the predecessor of the knockabout Plutonia style rather than slaughter maps.

Maybe Plutonia level 32, which you called an early slaughter level.

After all, I think id were able to make the IWADs much more crowded in spite of technical limitations. But for some reason they didn't.

Just try the games on UV on a 386 or a 486.