Upcoming Welcome To The Fps Vibe Shift

At the end of 2025, it's clear that casual shooters are back in a big way.

The FPS is once again in transition. It's a change that's been percolating for a while, but 2025 was the year a number of developing trends in PC gaming's favorite genre finally boiled over.

The time of extreme skill ceilings and the pursuit of metallic ranks defining every new multiplayer FPS is behind us. The escalation of gaudy, overpriced cosmetics created a distaste so palpable that Call of Duty had to desperately change its game plan. The two biggest shooters this year cost money, and there were no major free-to-play releases. The theme of this new era, as I see it developing so far, is remembering that shooters can be both casual and thrilling. High fun, low emotional investment.

An old guard of life-consuming live-service games remains a vibrant and popular part of this genre, but they're once again sharing the space with—and even adopting the attributes of—a more casual breed. Games that don't mind if you only play them once in a while. Games that let you make your own fun, encourage cooperation, or earn our respect by not bombarding us with ads.

Welcome to the FPS vibe shift. Here's how it happened:

I don't think any single event encompasses the changing attitudes of FPS fans more than the triumphant release of Battlefield 6, a game about large-scale chaos featuring zero ranked modes. The series that hasn't been truly relevant for nearly a decade came out swinging with guns, maps, and modes that appealed to the skillful yet unserious fun that the FPS genre once produced like every other week.

Flashback to 2018—the year Battlefield 5 released to indifference amidst the battle royale boom and continued dominance of hero shooters—and it's wild to watch sentiments swing back the other direction.

Battlefield Studios deserves plenty of credit for BF6's enhancements on the series, but I'd argue the appetite for Battlefield comes down to people burning out on the competitive games they've been playing for years and gloming onto something more casual and immediately rewarding. That, and a bunch of Call of Duty fans jumped on board, culminating in the best-selling FPS of the year.

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Arc Raiders is not a first-person shooter, of course, but its unexpected popularity was more evidence of a vibe shift. Arc Raiders' slick shooting, surprising enemy AI, and fantastic maps make it go

Source: PC Gamer