Next-gen Doom confirmed! Here's what we want from our next trip to Mars

id Software confirmed work on Doom 4 nearly five years ago, but little else official had been said about the game since. That changed this February, when publisher Bethesda revealed that pre-purchasing Wolfenstein: The New Order would grant players access to a beta for the next Doom adventure (though no one mentioned when that would be). Surprisingly, this last generation came and went without a single Doom game--instead, id opted to spend that console generation working on the tech to make RAGE work. 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 are in the wild and convention season 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 The monster closet is a somewhat archaic concept that felt outdated when we played Doom 3 in 2004, and we're really hoping the developer is able to be more creative than cheap jump scares whenever it decides to make Doom 4.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. You never had enough ammo, so that sort of forced tension on you, but it was more frustrating than moody. Let's make sure that future entries never force you to scrounge for ammo--iconic Doom isn't a survival horror game, and cutting the amount of ammo in half isn't going to make it one.

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 over the last decade, 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 2014? 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.

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! Though it looks like Carmack won't be a part of that.

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 wanted from Dead Space 3 (but didn't really get), 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.

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 more Doom in your life, check out the 10 weirdest Doom mods and our celebration of Doom's 20th anniversary.