So What Is a slaughtermap. Well the definition varies wildly from person to person, but to.me a doom map is a slaughtermap, if it suddenly starts to spam miniboss monsters by 30 or more per map, in big enemy count battles. This means, if it has 2 revenants in it it isn't a slaughtermap, but if you fight 150 in the map and 30 show up at a time in some fights, it is.
I LOVE Slaughter Gameplay. I love it so much that i built 3 free FPS games that use it called Onslaught 1/2/3. That is for another topic. I love the extreme challenge massive hordes of tough enemies provide. In fact I play these kinds of maps a lot.
Now where did slaughtermaps begin. A lot of people trace them back to plutonia map32, but to me that map is just a very hard map. It doesn't have enough enemies. I trace slaughtermaps back to Hell Revealed, a mapset that must have been inspired by plutonia, but took it to a new level of difficulty. Hell Revealed doesn't start with slaughter gameplay, but it sure has it. By map13 you start seeing it a bit, and then by map15 it really comes out. The Hordes of enemies in such maps are legendary, with some enemy fights going up to 30-40 hell knights/revenants/barons/arachnotrons/mancubi per rom, with sprinkling of arch viles thrown in.
Since then Slaughtermaps have evolved, and not always for the better. Some slaughtermaps like sunder, they do amp up enemy counts a lot, till there is THOUSANDS of enemies per level and 50 cyberdemons, but they also throw in too much annoying hardcore "bullshit" platforming, something newer doom games like to abuse. For this reason I lean torward Randomly Generated Slaughtermaps mostly, they WON'T have ANY platforming in them and they are almost as crazy.
I play a lot of oblige/obaddon generated Slaughtermaps, by cranking up enemy counts to hell revealed 2, and by cranking up enemy difficulty to CRAZY, and setting ramping to fast, and turning on "harder enemy setup". I generally play them with rpg mods like nameless RPG lite and randomizer mods too. It is a lot of fun and it makes doom fun for me. I recommend it to anyone looking for a challenge.
Slaughtermaps are a very Doom thing, very few other games even have ONE slaughtermap. Duke3d has 1 but only 1 (compare that to 20+ megawads that have them in doom 2), Quake has a few, but that's it. NO heretic, Wolf3d, Serious Sam Maps are slaughtermaps and that sucks. It's really an unfortunate thing because I love playing them.
Anyway, that is my post on Slaughtermaps, Enjoy.
Since then Slaughtermaps have evolved, and not always for the better. Some slaughtermaps like sunder, they do amp up enemy counts a lot, till there is THOUSANDS of enemies per level and 50 cyberdemons, but they also throw in too much annoying hardcore "bullshit" platforming, something newer doom games like to abuse. For this reason I lean torward Randomly Generated Slaughtermaps mostly, they WON'T have ANY platforming in them and they are almost as crazy.
I play a lot of oblige/obaddon generated Slaughtermaps, by cranking up enemy counts to hell revealed 2, and by cranking up enemy difficulty to CRAZY, and setting ramping to fast, and turning on "harder enemy setup". I generally play them with rpg mods like nameless RPG lite and randomizer mods too. It is a lot of fun and it makes doom fun for me. I recommend it to anyone looking for a challenge.
Slaughtermaps are a very Doom thing, very few other games even have ONE slaughtermap. Duke3d has 1 but only 1 (compare that to 20+ megawads that have them in doom 2), Quake has a few, but that's it. NO heretic, Wolf3d, Serious Sam Maps are slaughtermaps and that sucks. It's really an unfortunate thing because I love playing them.
Anyway, that is my post on Slaughtermaps, Enjoy.
