How to Change FOV in CS:GO Explained

CS:GO offers up a lot of ways to customize your experience, from changing your resolution, all the way to individual parts of your heads-up display (HUD). It’s very customizable, though that isn’t to say it’s the most customizable of any game. There are a lot of quality-of-life settings that are omitted for one reason or another, though there tends to be a good reason for that. Here’s how to change your FOV in CS:GO.

Can You Change Your FOV in CS:GO?

When it comes to changing your FOV in CS:GO, it is technically possible, but there’s one massive caveat that comes with it. You can freely change your viewmodel_fov value in the console (accessed by enabling the console in your settings and pressing the tilde button by default), though this isn’t standard FOV. This instead changes the distance of your hand models from you, and can only be changed between 54 and 67.

You can also change your standard FOV, though only for servers you own or private matches such as against bots. If you want to have a look for fun, hop into a private match and type into the console sv_cheats 1. From there, type in fov_cs_debug followed by the FOV value you want. This can be changed as small or as big as you want, though values past 150 tend to break the game entirely (setting it to 200 turned the entire world upside down for us). When entering actual online matches, your FOV will default back to 90 though.

Related: How to Play CS:GO in Stretched Resolution

It’s a shame CS:GO doesn’t have a built-in FOV slider, though it makes sense why. High FOV would inherently give a competitive advantage while highly limiting the framerate, seeing as more must be rendered on the screen at once. That is against some of the game’s core values, so it’s likely we’ll never see it implemented. Still, it’s a fun setting to experiment with.