What is the appeal of Slaughter maps?

[SpaceCatCommander]

Why actually play these kind of maps, where is fun in them? Never played one, and especially after seeing Okuplok, i dont want to. But this question is more to people who play these maps or maybe someone who makes them.

 

Edit: Thanks for the discussion, but starting it was a mistake because i can see it slowly getting loose, it was redundant, and anything was said before me anyway, plus i should have phrased question in more friendly manner, but it was still very much insightful for my agnorant arse. And i now know about some good slaughtermaps, probably this would have been better, if dissussion had question like this: "what fun and good for a newbie slaughtermaps you know about?", but me being impressed(in a bad way) by Okuplok failed me in the term. I should probably stick to Wads n' mods forum only. 

Admins should probably close this discussion due to having similliar threads already.

Edited April 19, 2023 by SpaceCatCommander
typo

[Klear]

[SpaceCatCommander]

1 minute ago, Klear said:

I presume me asking this question was a mistake? (Im kinda of scared now)

 

Edited April 18, 2023 by SpaceCatCommander

[dasho]

 

[SpaceCatCommander]

1 minute ago, dasho said:

 

Oh so i should delete this topic, because its redundant right? Oh wait, i cant delete the topic, im doomed, and i shall pray that administration will have mercy on me.

Edited April 18, 2023 by SpaceCatCommander

[Andrea Rovenski]

I hate slaugher, personally.

[dasho]

Just now, SpaceCatCommander said:

Oh so i should delete this topic, because its redundant right?

 

The idea is to search for a topic, especially a pretty surface level one like 'slaughtermaps' beforehand to see if this has all been discussed before, yes.

[Klear]

 

3 minutes ago, SpaceCatCommander said:

I presume me asking this question was a mistake? (Im kinda of scared now)

 

 

This topic crops up all the time and seems to regularly descend into a flame war. I mean, I've been on the boards for a little over a month and saw it happen more than once...

[Catpho]

Quote

The idea is to search for a topic, especially a pretty surface level one like 'slaughtermaps' beforehand to see if this has all been discussed before, yes.

That, and slaughter discussion tends to get a lot of unproductive strong reactions out of people (for whatever reason, it's just a gameplay genre). Now, banning slaughter discussion is not what I'm saying here, but just be prepared to not take some posts to heart if it gets heated.

Anyways, Okuplok is a bit of a meme wad and definitely not representative of the slaughter people actually enjoy popularly. Take a wide sample from the "creative progeny" section of this chapter of Roots for some good recs, and remember to use difficulty settings when necessary. Slaughter is just a genre that takes advantage of specific gameplay mechanics (in this case, how monster dynamics changes when turned into a group instead of dealt with individually) that might not be obvious if you are only IWAD familiar, but it only takes playing a couple to get the hang of it, because it is all still Doom under the hood. As it is a genre, it can go from easy to hard, just like any other.

Edited April 18, 2023 by Catpho

[SpaceCatCommander]

4 minutes ago, Catpho said:

That, and slaughter discussion tends to get a lot of unproductive strong reactions out of people (for whatever reason, it's just a gameplay genre). Now, banning slaughter discussion is not what I'm saying here, just be prepared to not take some posts to heart if it gets heated.

Anyways, Okuplok is a bit of a meme wad and definitely not representative of the slaughter people actually enjoy popularly. Take a wide sample from the "creative progeny" section of this chapter of Roots for some good recs, and remember to use difficulty settings when necessary. Slaughter is just a genre that takes advantage of specific gameplay mechanics (in this case, how monster dynamics changes when turned into a group instead of dealt with individually) that might not be obvious if you are only IWAD familiar, but it only takes playing a couple to get the hang of it, because it is all still Doom under the hood. As it is a genre, it can go from easy to hard, just like any other.

Interesting, thanks for an example, i would check it out on holidays!

[Yousuf Anik]

I like playing slaughter maps, mostly from Slaughterfest series and some other famous WADs that has actually some good slaughter maps, that are fun and challenging. But I don't like it when it is far beyond my limit, that is too long or just too difficult, the one like Okuplok slaughter map or so on, which basically takes ages to complete. When it is repetitive, long and just too overwhelming (even TASing is difficult), it's not fun anymore.

Edited April 18, 2023 by Yousuf Anik

[cannonball]

Every wad is a slaughter wad, because you, the player, single handedly slaughter every monster you can find before you leave every level. :)

Don’t like slaughter? I heard Tetris is pretty fun.

Edited April 18, 2023 by cannonball

[ReaperAA]

4 minutes ago, cannonball said:

Every wad is a slaughter wad, because you, the player, single handedly slaughter every monster you can find before you leave every level. :)

Don’t like slaughter? I heard Tetris is pretty fun.

 

This is a complete lie! A lie I tell you!!!!

 

Are there any monsters in The Given, or in platform only maps? I think not...

[kaleb.]

they're like puzzles kinda. they seem overwhelming but eventually you figure out what you're supposed to do, then it gets (slightly) easier. also yea Okuplok is an extreme example that even most slaughter enthusiasts don't even find fun lol

[Doomkid]

52 minutes ago, SpaceCatCommander said:

im doomed, and i shall pray that administration will have mercy on me.

you're fine lol. Use the search function before starting threads, that's all. (doomworld's search is also kinda shit to be fair)

 

On the topic, I like slaughter in small doses or with a powered up arsenal of some sort, it's not my main genre by any means though.

[PsychEyeball]

The only thing I know is that the last slaughter WAD thread ended up being locked, so hopefully this one will get less toasty.

 

Personally, I find slaughter gameplay hit or miss. I like my slaughter gameplay better when you get thrown into an arena and then it floods with a giant group of baddies to kill, preferably of different types and hoping it's not just a giant Revenant horde. I know they are the most efficient enemy to have in a giant enemy horde, but to me it just feels like a huge cliché.

 

I also like my slaughter maps short and to the point. Whenever they get long I just start feeling fatigued and my interest turns itself off. If there's gonna be a huge fight, I want a similarly huge payoff.

 

To give exemples of what I like and dislike... I liked most of Eviternity's slaughter gameplay because it knows how to pace itself well and doesn't fully feed you to the wolves all the time. I liked Alien Vendetta's Lake Poison because the meat and potatoes of the map is that gigantic fight at the end that acts as a big climax to the crescendo of encounters you must go through. Staying in AV, I liked Dark Dome because the map knows what it has in store: it throws you immediately in the lava hot bathwater in a seemingly insurmontable scenario but you dismantle it methodically piece by piece until there's no more, and once you prevail... you win the map. Scythe's MAP26, Fear, also works with the same concept and works as well.

 

But on the flip side, BTSX Episode 2's super secret map is a slaughter map that had way too much volume and it never felt like there was an end in sight. You win the huge fight at the beginning? The one that must have took 20 minutes to go through? Have 8 more similarly butt kicking fights in other arenas! Alien Vendetta's Demonic Hordes is spacious enough to consist of 3 levels and it feels like a crushing wall of stone pressing against you relentlessly and never lets go. Fire and Ice from Scythe is another case where no matter where you go, you face insurmontable odds and it feels that going anywhere in the map is the wrong decision. There is no way you'll convince me that fighting off 375 revenants in a single map is fun.

 

And yet, despite everything I said, someone might go through my dislikes exemples and tell me they love the maps for the reasons I don't like them. So to each their own!

Edited April 18, 2023 by PsychEyeball

[mhrz]

kill many monster

[Ravendesk]

It is said that the slaughter maxer brain during BFG spam achieves a 1:1 copy to patterns of "slow brain waves" Delta and Theta found in humans During sexual orgasm

[Mr. Alexander]

Welcome to the forum! I'm going to guess you saw Okuplok thanks to Coincident's recent videos about it on YouTube, including his single-segment run of it on ITYTD. The strategy videos actually do a pretty good job of answering your question, I'd think: It's fun to develop strategies and tactics to overcome seemingly impossible challenges. As Catpho says, though, Okuplok is not representative of the genre as a whole. It's very, very long and it's not balanced for consistent mastery, to put it mildly. Coincident getting a demo represents a really high achievement.

 

In addition to the colossi name-checked in Catpho's link, there has been a recent flowering of interest in smaller maps that still play on slaughter tactics and strategy, like Micro Slaughter Community Project, which happens to work as a neat tutorial for how to play these kinds of maps, or Haste, which was definitely not made as a tutorial, but is still more accessible than a lot of slaughter wads by virtue of its levels' concision. The Doomworld Megawad Club played them as a double feature last year. Ribbiks himself published a good wad of short but very tough maps called Crumpets in 2015. They probably aren't "slaughter," per se, but they're still good challenge maps. As far as more obscure wads go, I personally liked New Year's Eve Slaughter 2022, which is more on the MSCP level of difficulty and is a lot of fun. 

 

There are a lot of threads with recommendations for "entry level" slaughter, and Rush appears in a lot of those, because it's pretty forgiving in a way that your Sunders and your Abandons often aren't. TimeOfDeath's maps are very difficult - I can't beat them - but he balances them for consistency, and he packages them with demos of himself & others beating them, which can help you find some strategies. SlaughterMAX ran on a similar ethos, requiring each mapper to provide a demo to ensure the maps were, if not balanced, then at least theoretically possible to beat in one go.

 

All this is to say that there's a lot more to slaughter than Okuplok, and there's a lot to like in the steep challenges the genre offers. Give some of them a try! Try Okuplok, even! You will not be killed in real life if you die in a slaughter map, and having them on your hard drive won't give you a terrible virus.

Edited April 18, 2023 by Mr. Alexander
Added some recommendations threads.

[Billa]

I don't mean to be rude but you would have a lot more fun if you dived into a wad yourself, rather than basing your opinion of a whole mapping genre on a single YouTube video you watched of an infamously tedious and grindy map. I'd recommend NoSp3, Haste and Rush if you don't want something too difficult (though they still get brutal later on). Many modern wads also implement difficulty levels that are just as rewarding and well-balanced on HMP as on UV, such as Sunlust or Stardate 20x7.

Edited April 18, 2023 by Billa

[baja blast rd.]

As I mentioned in another one of these threads (or wait was it another another thread?! nah I remember now it was some other thread), slaughter has this thing where some people only stop to mentally file a map as "slaughter" if it is big and huge. The average slaughtermap is a lot closer to the few-minutes-long Machete map20* than Okuplok lol. Sunder is not representative either.  

 

You 100% have played many maps in regular sets that would be in slaughter sets too, and you probably even liked them! 

 

*

 

[Endless]

My problem with slaughter is that it is hard to pronounce it as an Spanish speaker, and I find that to be pretty anti-Spanish.

 

There, I said it.

[Deadwing]

If Machete is slaughter then I love slaughter lmao.

[baja blast rd.]

2 minutes ago, Deadwing said:

If Machete is slaughter then I love slaughter lmao.

 

Most of it no, but it has some maps (around a half-dozen iirc) that definitely count. :>

[Devalaous]

1 hour ago, ReaperAA said:

 

This is a complete lie! A lie I tell you!!!!

 

Are there any monsters in The Given, or in platform only maps? I think not...

 

The monster is Doomguy

[Horus]

There isn’t even agreement in the community on what a slaughter map is, let alone whether they are any good or not

[Treehouseminis]

Fun combat puzzles.  I got addicted to difficult fps gameplay when doom eternal came out.  Certain slaughter maps can scratch the same itch for me.   

 

Also the spectale.  Huge incredibly detailed areas are fun to play in and imagine youre going through a weird alien, liminal world than Just a random techbase or hell castle.

[Deadwing]

12 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

 

Most of it no, but it has some maps (around a half-dozen iirc) that definitely count. :>

 

Oh yeah, definitely more the later half, but it's fantastic stuff indeed :D

[Not Jabba]

32 minutes ago, Endless said:

My problem with slaughter is that it is hard to pronounce it as an Spanish speaker, and I find that to be pretty anti-Spanish.

 

There, I said it.

On behalf of all of us native speakers, I would like to apologize for the entire English language.

[continuum.mid]

Over-the-top "combat puzzles" a la Sunder and Okuplok aren't my thing, but playing a map like The Plutonia Experiment's Go 2 It or Struggle: Antaresian Legacy's The Antaropolis can be very fun, so long as you're decent at dodging attacks and exploiting infighting. The monster spam in maps like that serves more to keep you moving, pumping adrenaline, and thinking on your feet, and that's my idea of fun in Doom.