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

Doom is coming (eventually)

pre-purchasing

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.

Tone down the monster closets

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 The monster closet is a somewhat archaic concept that felt outdated when we played Doom 3 in 2004, and we're really hoping the developer is able to be more creative than cheap jump scares whenever it decides to make Doom 4.

Give us more ammo

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.

More action, less suspense

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 digital blood and amazed at the experience, not scrounging for ammo and hoping a monster doesn't kick open a door and scare us.

...but still make it scary

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.

Keep it on (or around) 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.

Make the guns feel powerful and allows for upgrades

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.

...but we don't want mystical weapons

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.

John Romero's head should be involved

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.

A completely separate co-op mode

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.

Welcome to hell?

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