The first thing to be aware of vis-à-vis Deus Vult is that it’s massive. Deus Vult may resemble nuts.wad in terms of the sheer monster count, but, thankfully, the usage of said monsters bears little resemblance, if any (my apologies if you actually like nuts.wad). He also mentions B.P.R.D.’s nuts.wad, which was a tad more concerning to me, I’ll admit, since I’m not really a fan of the kitchen sink school of encounter design, but, without getting too far ahead of myself, that ended up being a false alarm.

So clearly he is a man after my own heart, or rather one with similar tastes in his Doom maps. As far as launching points go, you can’t get much better than these two WADs, but he also goes on to specifically praise MAP20 of Alien Vendetta, which, if you were to ask me right now to pick a favorite Doom map, would probably be my response. Pham lays out his inspiration for the map via the WAD’s text file, where he cites Hell Revealed and Alien Vendetta as his primary muses. It becomes abundantly clear even before playing the level that it is as much a product of the past as it is of the present. Pham borrows architectural elements from Alien Vendetta's MAP29 in a few places. Though it is the author’s first map, it is a product that simply could not have existed without the years of effort that had already been poured into Doom. And in 2004, very few could lay claim to utilizing these two things quite as effectively as did Huy “Converted Doomer” Pham with Deus Vult. You had, in one hand, the collective experience of ten years of WAD-making to guide you, and in the other advanced source ports that allowed you to make, more or less, whatever your heart desired. In other words, it was a good time to be making maps. Furthermore, the source code had been freely available for over half a decade, allowing most of the baked-in limitations of the engine to be broken or at the very least significantly curtailed. With years of mapmaking experience to draw from, design sensibilities were, by and large, pretty sophisticated by this point in time, and many authors were producing levels one might call professional… if one was inclined to use such words to describe hobbyist pursuits. 2004 was a pretty solid year for Doom WADs, which is not exactly a surprising development given the state of things.

Deus vult 2 doom