Welcome to FOV 90, an FPS column from staff writer Morgan Park. Every week, I'll be covering a topic relevant to first-person shooter enjoyers, spanning everything from multiplayer and singleplayer to the old and the new.
I can't think of a time when I was solely obsessed with a singular FPS. Even at the height of a 2,000+ hour, multi-year relationship with Rainbow Six Siege, I still regularly played some Call of Duty and Overwatch with friends. That lack of focus probably explains why I was good but never great at Siege, but it's all part of a healthy FPS rotation.
That's a thing we all have, right? A handful of shooters we bounce between throughout the year? Maybe you do it for your favorite singleplayer campaigns, or perhaps it's not even a conscious exercise, but it's natural to ebb and flow between familiar shooters that scratch different itches.
Earlier this year, I started keeping track of my FPS rotation. I used Backloggd—a journaling site that's basically Letterboxd for games—to make a living list of the shooters I'm always playing, but never at the same time.
Right now, my FPS rotation is at 10. Here's what I got:
- Hunt: Showdown
- Halo Infinite
- Team Fortress 2
- Battlefield 2042 (surely Battlefield 6 will replace it)
- Quake Champions
- Halo: The Master Chief Collection
- Rainbow Six Siege X
- The Finals
- Straftat
- Left 4 Dead 2
A nice mix of FPS flavors: Extraction, co-op, class-based, arena, tactical, and whatever you call the madness that is Straftat. Some I play a lot more than others (Left 4 Dead 2 is definitely a once or twice a year deal). I stuck to PvP and co-op shooters that I've picked back up in 2025, but if I were to include solo stuff, I'd throw the excellent Echo Point Nova in there, which I've played off and on for a year now because there's just so much in it.
For me, it's almost always an update that triggers a reinstall: new events, modes, or the rare good battle pass can end a months-long drought. Once I'm back in, I'm good for at least a week of heated passion as I remind myself why it rules so hard. It's all vibes—I never plan to stop playing one FPS and start up again on another, but once I do, it goes back to the bottom of the mental rotation.
Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Quake Champions are outliers that don't get huge updates anymore. They make the rotation because I've been on a classic kick: Arena shooters, server browser culture, co-op campaigns, and really anything that resembles FPS gaming before live-service has been making me happiest. They're also just really good, even by 2025 standards.
The FPS rotation is a fun exercise because it's also an accurate snapshot of my FPS tastes at the moment. When I was playing games with friends more often in my early 20s, my rotation was a lot smaller. As everyone got busier, shooters that I only enjoyed with friends cycled out. Now, over half of my rotation is games I play primarily alone. The best solo shooters? Halo and Battlefield by a mile.
What didn't make the list is also telling. Looks like I'm fully out on battle royale, huh? I consider myself a Call of Duty fan, but I haven't picked up Warzone in years and haven't returned to Black Ops 6 since late 2024. Maybe I've outgrown the create-a-class grind: CoD has more guns and attachments than ever, but customizing them is a dull exercise in moving sliders up and down. These days, I'm automatically more interested in smaller weapon pools that all serve a role, like Halo 3's finely-tuned weapon sandbox.
What's in your FPS rotation? I'd love to hear what's keeping your attention in 2025, because I bet I'm missing something that I should be playing more. Comments are open below.
