As someone who played through the entirety of the Starcraft 2 vanilla release and longed, pined even, for custom maps, the ongoing expansion of custom maps in Dota 2 has me salivating slightly.
And then I saw this creation. The potential is utterly glorious, especially considering the capacity for the Source 2 engine to support games like this versus the SC2 engine.
Cheekily, it’s called Slayers of the Ancients and it’s a custom map on the Steam Workshop for Valve’s gargantuan free-to-play MOBA.
It’s a simple capture the flag game where you gain points through kills or capturing the flag, and the winner is the first one to reach 200 points. It supports up to 24 players although a recent update has tweaked things so games can start once 12 players have joined.
Standard mouse and keyboard controls apply, and there are three heroes with different characteristics, attributes, weapons and movement skills. The video below shows where gameplay is at right now.
BMD, the modder behind Slayers of the Ancients, states they will make the source code available to all “once more stabilised or upon request”. “It is not for the faint of heart,” they advised.
I’m immediately reminded of games like Paladins, SMITE and Loadout. I wonder what it’ll be like on Australian servers, or with a full server of 24 players. But it wouldn’t be beyond the pale for a custom map like this to grow into a behemoth of its own. God knows the engine could certainly support it.
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