What defines a good slaughter map?

[DoctorNuriel]

See title. Slaughter maps seem to revolve, for the most part, around space management and smart maneuvering while maximizing damage output. What methods in horde makeup and placement, map geometry and pickup distribution are most conducive to a fun and exhilarating slaughter experience?

[LegendaryEevee]

@DoctorNuriel I will make this case using examples from Eviternity.  Both Map 15 - Cryonology and Judgements final mass fight are high energy Slaughter fights both give plenty of ammo to deal with the unbelievable amount of enemies popping in.  Can destroy you in an instant if you let yourself get pinned or stop moving.  But are extremely satisfying since both contain weak and strong enemies cyber demons, spider masterminds Etc.

 

Compare this to what I consider the worst Slaughter of Eviternity Transcendence and the final map (no spoilers).   The trouble with Transcendence is you have large open areas where you can run away from the fights with way too little ammo many times forcing you to use your fists before 100%ing and the boss level gives you plenty of ammo in an arena however you're able to be hit with Archvile style attacks without knowing where they're at to be able to dodge them (once the map gets full) much less fun and more irritating (my first playthrough I legitimately had to break down and use god mode the map got so full I couldn't even see what direction they were coming from anymore and kept getting blown up not even knowing how I was getting killed) these are the best examples I can give of the same wad giving great and bad examples of Slaughter

Edited May 5 by LegendaryEevee

[Firedust]

A good slaughtermap is the one you enjoy playing. People's mileage varies depending on their level of skill as well. I'm sure there are some madmen who enjoy stuff like Grindfest out there.

Edited May 5 by Firedust

[akolai]

i've wanted to talk about this fight for a while.

Spoiler

 

 

ode2impslayer is a shitpost megawad made almost entirely over the course of a few hours by dozens of contributors. all* maps were required to use map01 as a template, with no ability to add or remove lines - only move vertices and edit line/sector information. this is one of the most punishing set of restrictions ever devised, so it genuinely blew my mind to find such an interesting, nuanced, and dissectable fight slotted randomly in the back half.
 

you have to start working on the cacos before they completely steal your platform space, but you can't focus on them safely while the revs are alive - so the challenge is to deal with them as efficiently as possible. there is a lot you can do to optimise this, but staying alive is already quite difficult. dodging the revs consistently necessitates that you constantly cross the gap, which means avoiding situations in which you're forced to dodge, since that's not an option while lining up the fairly tight jump. there's a fun contradiction here, moving quickly enough to outrun the revball, while spending enough time at each wing for the caco projectile spam to move away from the crossing so you can safely jump without losing half your health, or missing the jump due to knockback. something else that's not immediately obvious is that you have to move slightly towards the revs at each wing to allow enough room to dodge the revball on the way back.
 

once the revs are dead, pick a side and go to work. finding a moment to get rid of the revball can be awkward and you risk losing control of the space if you're not careful, so i like to use it to my advantage and bait it into cacos for extra dps.
 

space management if one of the most important aspects of a good slaughter fight, and this map pulls it off in a complex fashion. you might also notice i don't spend much time dodging individual projectiles in this run - many slaughter fights (but not all - up to preference) do this, to place focus on macro-scale strategy, making broad decisions about how to handle the situation, rather than solely on a more conventional skillset.

all this is to say, you can find slaughter in unexpected places. as a rule of thumb, if you find yourself suffocating to death rather than getting pelted and losing to atrition, it's probably a slaughter fight - and if you like the way that fight feels mechanically, take it apart. see what each piece does, try to think about what would happen if you got rid of each piece, or if you added one of your own.

Edited May 6 by akolai
realised i should link wad (and added paragraph to round out my point)

[kalensar]

Im not a big fan of slaughter maps but some are really fun too. My opinion is that Sun Lust offers a really good example of how Slaughter can be handled, balanced and be fun to explore. Often slaughter tends to be a favorite and attracts some of the most talented mappers to mix incredible Doom engine architecture and fun combat. The main downside to Slaughter maps is they tend to be the best on Boom style ports rather than the graphically chunky GZD port due to the CPU resources necessary for the various differences. 

 

Probably the only thing I can recommend is difficulty balancing so that ITYTD can be enjoyed by less advanced players whom prefer sight seeing over nail-on-chalkboard combat. Use of lower tier monsters on the easier difficulties that still fulfill the same tactic as the harder tier monster on UV. Other than that I would say the next best advice is build for Pistol start and plan a basic route of weapon upgrade in the map, even if that weapon upgrade is a chaingunner. Use of almost stationary Barons makes for good door path progression as well since you need the firepower to get through rather than finding a switch or a key. 

[Yousuf Anik]

Speed of Doom and some kinds like this WAD has really good slaughter maps so check them as well 😉

[Wahrnehmungskrieg]

On 5/5/2024 at 11:14 AM, DoctorNuriel said:

[...] a fun and exhilarating slaughter experience? 

Just going to speak in a very general sense about some things I like when I play slaughter (and by 'like' I mean the sort of stuff that makes you go 'ooh, that's really cool' or 'oh fuck off' when you play it):

- A concern with absolute spatiotemporal control as the focus of the fight; one's attention (spatially) is expanded to the entirety of the encounter as it extends over the entirety of the geometry within it: and (temporally) with the monster flow; and how through pickups (especially timed powerups), the way the fight has been staggered, and one's own progression through the fight, the map will be manipulated and therefore one's own perception of it. In the best slaughtermaps I've felt that, in the heat of battle, I was at times playing 'as the map', the entire arena as my body, rather than being 'just some person inside it'.

- I like fights that seem impossible until you discover the weak point from which a grander, totalising strategy can be formalised.

- I like fights that do a quick-change into 'oh-fuck' moments by suddenly applying some particular pressure whether through adding some monsters or changing the level geometry, forcing you to go back to the drawing board and come up with something new very quickly. The fact that arch-vile flame occludes the entire screen if you're in danger makes them really good at doing this.

- Most importantly, the catharsis after it's all done, with the kill count at 100+%: when that initial imposing force is reduced, after much struggle, to a mass of silent debris you trample over whilst you recompose. Imagine if mountains flattened themselves into rubble after you'd summitted them. Same idea -- you're essentially tackling the very concept of the sublime head-on

[Celestin]

@LegendaryEevee Transcendence isn't a slaughter map - while it has large groups of imps, the goal is to provoke infighting against bigger demons rather than fighting them up-front. As for the final map, yeah, I agree, this is a completely unreadable mess.