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.
That doesn’t even have anything to do with what casual game even means.
There are no story lines in Fortnite, afaik. They do sometimes have special events, like in-game concerts. But again, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a casual game. Destiny 2 is exactly like you’re describing and it’s still a casual game.
Using ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ in the traditional gatekeep-y, “filthy casuals” way that e.g. Dark Souls players often do, isn’t really what the article is talking about.
CoD and other battlepass-ridden live-service games don’t actually require high skill levels, they require high time investment. Destiny 2 stopped being a casual game in this sense once they started removing content, because it now places demands on the players’ time, rather than allowing players to engage with it casually/ at their leisure. Also, Destiny 2 has raids. No game with instance raids is casual. I don’t play Fortnite, which is why I asked whether they have time-limited events, and I don’t particularly care about where it falls versus others, I just tend to see most live-service games as inherently less casual due to this.
My ‘hardcore’ game for many many years was Eve Online, and let me tell you, there’s nothing casual about leaving work early or setting alarms for 4am and coordinating with several hundred people around the globe to all be online when a POS timer is finishing. It’s a hardcore game, but it’s not about twitch-aiming or dodge-timing gameplay.
@Kolanaki @t3rmit3 The linked article is using “casual” to refer to a number of different traits - competitiveness is one of them, but also how demanding they are for your time and attention. Casual was probably the wrong word to choose, since it already has a different meaning for most gamers, but the thesis is more about the return of low-stakes FPS games that you can pick up here and there to goof off without being milked for every minute and dollar you can spare.