A 21-second video of a hand ignites a sizzling debate over the FPS 'tac sprint'

"Walking. Sprinting. That's all we need," declared the prophet JoovYT, a YouTuber with a bone to pick with how we sprint in shooters these days.

In the 21-second video captioned "My Battlefield 6 wishlist," Joov makes a fierce case that Battlefield 6, and any other FPS for that matter, need not offer two different sprint speeds.

Well, "makes a case" might be an overstatement: he just insists that tac sprinting is bad while waving his hand around, but he brings such an unexpected fervor and heat to a minor topic that, yeah, I actually know exactly what he means, and he's right for saying it. That might explain why the X post has reached over a million views in a day with hundreds sounding off in support (and some naysaying, too).

"Tac sprinting" is when you can press the sprint button twice to run even faster than a normal sprint—characterized in Joov's video by an erratically oscillating vertical hand to symbolize a gun. The mechanic first showed up in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019 and has since been adopted widely, most notably in Battlefield and Delta Force.

"This (waving his hand steadily left and right in a walking motion), and then this (waving his hand downward in a sprinting motion), and we're good," Joov continues in the video. "But as soon as I see this, and then this, and then THIS (waves his hand vertically upwards), I don't wanna play the fucking game."

The passionate responses to Joov's video are surprising, considering I've never heard much chatter at all about this specific and sort of minor feature before.

"Tac sprint is the greatest feature added in FPS in the last few years. What is this man talking about?" wrote Warzone player SICKYCOD on X.

"No he's right, you guys are booing him but he's 100% right…" added ItsJabo.

"Someone finally said what I've been trying to say about Cod/Battlefield," wrote Caseypolitan.

With no follow-up from the great messenger to explain his stance, I can only infer what irks Joov and others about the tac sprint.

There's the argument that the tac sprint was originally created to accommodate Call of Duty: Warzone's humongous battle royale maps, but outside of that context, it needlessly speeds up games that are more fun when they're slower, like Battlefield.

I subscribe to that: The availability of a superhuman speed burst at any time can make close-range firefights more erratic and random, which works out OK for CoD but feels goofy in Battlefield, a series that still attempts to be grounded. Battlefield maps are also huge, but if you wanna get around faster, that's what vehicles are for.

Then there's the fact that tac sprinting exacerbates an already terrible FPS habit: sprinting when you don't need to, and getting killed because of it. Call of Duty (and the tac sprint by extension) programs us to be in a rush to hunt down another target, but you can go far in Battlefield by taking a beat and jogging instead.

More than anything, though, Joov and the wider public could be reacting to the tac sprint's rapid adoption. It's like Activision and EA got together and changed a fundamental aspect of FPS movement without checking with all of us first. They were so caught up in whether they could double the speed of sprinting that nobody asked if they should, etc.

The good news for Joov and his followers: Early leaks of Battlefield 6 playtests have a lot of normal sprinting, but no tac sprinting that I've seen.

Is this whole thing low-stakes? Sure, but it's the sort of minutia that's fun to debate, and Battlefield's not the only one going through it. Last month, Halo Infinite made the excellent case that FPSes don't always need a normal sprint or ledge clambering either.