At least once a year, the stars align perfectly and all multiplayer shooters get a big update at the same time. This year, the stars have decided that the time is March. Everywhere I look, the FPS I'm passionate about or want to resume beckons me with the promise of new gadgets, maps, exclusive betas, or overpowered guns that will be nerfed in a week.

Some of the biggest hits, like Call of Duty: Warzone 2 and Apex Legends, missed all the March notes and gave their first major update of 2023 in mid-February. Season 3 of "Overwatch 2" is also in full swing, but with no new heroes this time around, there is not much to get excited about. I'm busy enough checking out the latest operators for "Rainbow Six Siege" and "Valorant" and the closed beta of "The Finals," a destruction-heavy FPS from former DICE developers, so there's that.

Another theme for March is redemption. This week, both Battlefield 2042 and Halo Infinite begin new seasons, classes are officially back in Battlefield, and Halo can finally solve its map pooling problems in Forge; the shooter that was heavily criticized in the fall of 2021 is finally getting a favorable enough to regain its sensitivity?

Here's the full rundown of this week's big FPS update.

2023's highly anticipated FPS will hold a closed beta this month. We played The Finals for a few hours (open in a new tab) during a press preview session to try out the fully destructible map. It's still early days and you have to be prepared for performance issues, but it's worth playing if the authorities allow it.

In addition to the Forge mode added last year (which technically includes the possibility of all maps in the known universe), this may be Halo Infinite's biggest update yet. Lots of new maps, new guns (!) ), a gun game-like mode, and a 100-tier battle pass with no expiration date. I still think the map pool for big team battles is too shallow, but one step at a time.

Yes, "Battlefield 2042" sneakily released its latest season just before March, but you probably know that now. I enjoyed it at launch and have been impressed with the maps and specialists that have been added since then. But by far the biggest change is the (re)introduction of classes. Specialists and the gadgets they can use are now hard-locked by class. In addition to operator-specific attributes, classes also have passive bonuses associated with their role.

Kicking off Siege's eighth year on a fairly small scale with no new maps or notable reworking, Brava's ridiculously funny Kludge drone is enough to get me excited. Her Kludge drone can sneak into bomb sites and hack the defenders' gadgets from a distance to swap allegiances. We've already seen some really impressive plays (open in new tab) with this.

It's a light update compared to other games on the list, but that's how Valorant does it. Sometimes you get the map, sometimes you get the agent, and sometimes you get both. It's been almost six months since the release of Agents, so the arrival of Gekko is a pretty big deal. Their kit is mostly what I expect from Valorant at this point: stun grenades, smoke grenades, and a slight variation of grenade grenades. But their wingman capability is fascinating: the geckos deploy small aliens that can carry and plant spikes.