Call of Duty: Warzone Isn’t Getting a FOV Slider on Console, and Warzone 2 Might Not Get One Either

Call of Duty: Warzone has a big problem: field of view. You can't adjust your field of view (or FOV) on console in Warzone, getting locked to the default 80 FOV, while you can freely adjust your FOV on PC which crossplays with console. Unfortunately, Warzone isn't getting a FOV slider on console, and what's more (and maybe worse) is that Warzone 2 might not get one on console, either. In this article, we'll tell you everything you need to know about CoD Warzone's console FOV problem.

CoD Warzone's Console FOV Problem

Credit: Activision

Field of view is a setting in games that adjusts how much of the game is actually viewable onscreen at any one moment. The effect is like that of zooming out or zooming in on a camera. In a first-person shooter, a higher FOV will show you more of your surroundings horizontally, allowing you to better keep track of any enemies nearby.

However, a higher FOV doesn't do just that. A higher FOV significantly decreases the amount of visual recoil a weapon has when being fired. The actual recoil of the gun isn't changing, but since you're further away from your weapon, in terms of CoD's first-person view, with a higher FOV it will naturally appear to kick less when you're looking at it from more of a distance.

As you might expect, being able to see more and fire weapons more accurately on a PC is not especially fair when PC players also overwhelmingly use a mouse and keyboard, which is a superior input method to a controller in terms of raw accuracy. While CoD has relatively few PC players comparatively, this massive advantage does not sit well with the community.

FOV sliders are a basic expectation of a PC port, so their inclusion in PC CoD is very unsurprising. Almost every first-person shooter on PC has a FOV slider. It would be strange, and likely upsetting to the community, to see an FPS without a FOV slider on PC. FOV sliders are less common on console, and this is the case often because of technical reasons.

As you'd expect, a wider field of view means there's more onscreen, so there's more being rendered. That will, naturally, require more processing power. On console, developers usually take up about as much power as they can, leaving little on the table (outside of optimization, of course), so there's not likely to be much headroom for players to increase FOV beyond what was intended without sacrificing performance.

So, Why Isn't Warzone Getting a FOV Slider?

On PS4 and Xbox One, according to the developers, a FOV slider would be quite literally a 'decrease your framerate' slider, so adding one in feels like it would do more harm than good, incentivizing console players to play with a setting that tanks performance.

This is probably true. Warzone is a big, highly detailed game that sees tons of players all placed together on the same map in realtime, and the game runs at 60 FPS (or 120 FPS) on top of that, too, so there really isn't a lot of room for Warzone to take up extra resources on these consoles, but it's a different story for PS5 and Xbox Series S|X that also aren't getting a FOV slider.

Of course, these consoles can unequivocally handle a FOV slider. However, they're not getting one because, according to the developers, it would be unfair to PS4 and Xbox One gamers who won't get one. See, the majority of the CoD fanbase plays on console, something like 75%+, so implicit in the words of the devs is the idea that, well, it's okay for PC gamers to have an unfair advantage because there's not a lot of PC players and you can turn off crossplay if you want.

This doesn't make a lot of sense. First, CoD is designed to be crossplay, and turning it off restricts you to your platform, so Xbox, PC, or PlayStation, and not console or PC, so console gamers (unless they want harder times finding lobbies) can't just choose to play with each other. Then, it doesn't really make a lot of sense for a competitive shooter to be crossplatform at all when certain platforms are given major advantages by the developers over other platforms.

Warzone 2 and FOV Sliders

Credit: Activision

While the FOV slider situation with Warzone is frustrating, Warzone 2 is coming this year, so many reluctantly are waiting for the sequel to drop with the slider on console instead of continuing to ask for a change to a game that's going to be old news soon enough. Not the best outcome, but one many who care can live with, more or less.

However, recently the news broke that Warzone 2 would be coming to PS4 and Xbox One as well as PS5 and Series S|X. This came as a surprise to most fans because Warzone 2 is being marketed as a thoroughly new, more advanced 'next-gen' CoD but it's still coming to 2013-era consoles that can't handle FOV sliders in original Warzone, too? Well, then it must not be that different from the first game if it can run on the same old system, right?

This line of thinking is what has fans worried about FOV in Warzone 2. If Warzone 2 is running a more advanced, graphically impressive version of Warzone's engine, then how is a FOV slider in Warzone 2 on PS4 and Xbox One going to be possible when the less advanced, less beautiful engine of Warzone can't handle one?

Then, if Warzone 2 won't be getting a FOV slider on PS4 and Xbox One, won't it just not get one on PS5 and Series S|X either? Many are disheartened by the idea of another generation of Warzone where they're forced to play zoomed in all the way at the default 80 FOV, especially as a FOV slider in Warzone 2 is an inevitability on PC.