Doom 4 - What we want from id Software's next FPS

id Software confirmed work on Doom 4 nearly four years ago, but hasn't released a drop of information yet. Instead, it opted to spend this console generation working on the tech to make RAGE work - and for as much as we enjoyed the game's high-resolution textures, we definitely would have rather some good, old fashioned shooting. On Mars. With big guns. And demons. Are you taking notes, id?

The next-generation of consoles is in the works and E3 is right around the corner, so it felt like the right time to talk about all of the things we want to see in the inevitable Doom sequel.

You know what we're talking about. You walk down a quiet hallway, turn a corner, open a door, and BOOM! Out of the silence come the beady yellow eyes of a zombie. You jump, scream like an idiot, kill it, and then... nothing. No reward. No feeling of success. No... nothing. You've just experienced a monster closet. It's a cheap, lazy thrill, and we don't want to see them show up that much in Doom 4.

We'd love to see id think up some new ways to introduce monsters into the environment, instead of just shoving them into empty rooms. The monster closet is a somewhat archaic concept that felt outdated when we played Doom 3 in 2004, and we're really hoping the developer is able to be more creative than cheap jump scares whenever it decides to make Doom 4.

In the first two Doom games, the protagonist was basically tripping over ammunition - which was good, because he would frequently have to blast it at the faces of his horrifying enemies. In Doom 3, id decided to make the mood more tense and, for some reason, that included limiting the amount of ammunition scattered around the Mars base.

It worked...kinda. We never had enough ammo, so that sort of forced tension on us, but it was more frustrating than moody. Let's make sure we're never scrounging for ammo - Doom isn't a survival horror game, and cutting the amount of ammo in half isn't going to make it one.

On that same note, we'd love to see a return to form when it comes to ramping up the number of enemies we're fighting at once. Larger battles means more action, and more action is more gooder. Everyone knows that.

We're not saying that every encounter needs to have the protagonist fighting back dozens of enemies, but we'd sure appreciate a few more experiences like that. Let us clear entire rooms of enemies with occasional giant setpeice battles - something Doom never really did all that well. We should be breathless after every big encounter, covered in blood and amazed at the experience, not scrounging for ammo and hoping a monster doesn't kick open a door and scare us.

Being action-packed doesn't mean the game can't be scary. While it might sound like we're ragging on Doom 3, we actually loved some of the thrills it provided. FPS don't often go for frights, and Doom 3 was full of them. The ones that stuck with us, though, weren't the zombies bursting out of windows, but the crazy encounters with horrifying, otherworldly beasts.

Let the frightening creatures do the scaring. Have unbreakable glass be smashed by a giant fist, or have a seemingly unbeatable foe shrug off our machine gun fire. Doom is a series about fighting hell's minions - make them more hellish, and go even crazier with the enemy design. Make us fear our foes, not the dark.

Doom is about killing hell's minions on Mars; that's the plot of Doom. We don't want a crazy scenery switch, we don't want to be battling undead through the streets of New York City, we don't want to discover that the Mars base was actually a recreation of a base in Atlantis we need to explore or anything like that. We want the Doom plot to remain the Doom plot - about killing hell's minions on Mars.

"Except in a city!" has become a trope this generation, and early leaked images show Doom 4 making just that leap. But id has already said that the leaked stuff was old, and that it wasn't representative of the final game; we're hoping at least part of that was an abandonment of Earth in favor of something more Martian.

It's the future, and we want every weapon to feel at least a little futuristic. Seriously, why should pistols 100 years from now look and feel exactly like the pistols from 2012? It doesn't make sense. Every weapon should be properly futuristically awesome.

The pistol needs to hit like a truck, the shotgun should tear faces off, and the machine gun should fire shots so powerful they can punch a hole in a demon's chest the size of a baseball. The BFG? It should make past games' BFGs look like a derringer by comparison. Give us a wide assortment of awesome futuristic weapons, and let us upgrade the crap out of them.

Though the plot of Doom definitely delves into the supernatural, we don't like when our character goes too far down that rabbit hole. We like it when he's using real, tangible, relatable machinery to fight back said supernatural beings. Let us go to town on the demons with the weapons our great, great, great grandparents used when they were fighting demons.

Once we're carrying around a mystical egg or a magical box, we're suddenly less connected to the story. We're the force of science working against the impeding mysticism, and once we're constrained to using hell's own weapons against it, we feel like we've already lost. Plus, it's not really that fun.

Doom developer John Romero had his head impaled on a spike in Doom 2, creating one of the first Easter Eggs that people actually remember. We want that impaled head to be in Doom 4.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, we want John Romero to be involved in the development of the game, too, even if it's just consulting or something like that. He hasn't been at id for a long, long time, and we think that Doom 4 would be the perfect excuse to bring the old gang back together. Pull in American McGee to do some level design and it'll be a full-fledged id reunion tour!

No, we don't want a second player forced into the campaign of Doom. That would be silly. Doom's singleplayer should be just that - a solo endeavor. What we would like, though, is a prequel or side campaign that lets us blast apart enemies with friends.

It's similar to what we want from Dead Space 3, because we think it's the best way to handle multiplayer in a dark, potentially-frightening shooter. Let us play as the Marine corpses that the main character will come across during the campaign - it'll add more background and get obligatory multiplayer on the checklist in a meaningful way.

Don't reboot the franchise by calling the game Doom. Don't get cute and call it like, "Doom: Awakening" or "Doom: Origins." Just call it Doom 4. It's the fourth Doom game, just... call it Doom 4.

Our wishlist for Doom 4 could go on forever, but these are definitely our main desires from id Software's upcoming sequel. That said, we've been surprised by off-the-wall sequels before, and if anyone can reinvent the FPS, it's id.

If you want to see more futuristic wish lists, check out what we want from Dead Space 3 and what we want from Resident Evil 6.