Black Ops 6 devs reveal ‘Sprint Assist’ setting that could completely change movement

Black Ops 6 is going to feature a new ‘Sprint Assist’ setting that could give players way more customization over how they play — and may make the new omnimovement system even more drastically different from what they’re used to.

Omnidirectional movement is already guaranteed to make Black Ops 6 a huge step away from what we’ve ever known in Call of Duty before, with players able to sprint, slide, and dive in whichever direction they choose.

With that, developers Treyarch will also be adding in a setting called Sprint Assist, and spoke a little about it on the first episode of Activision’s ‘COD Pod’ podcast.

“An example of the customizable aspect is Sprint Assist, which is the sprint aspect of intelligent movement,” said Matt Scronce, Associate Design Director at Treyarch. “By default, right now, it will have zero delay, so when you push forward you’ll start sprinting. But, we have a setting in there that lets you add a little bit of time.”

He explains with a specific example, where a player may have auto-mantle on when they sprint into a ledge. With sprint assist, you can slightly change the delay time to prevent the auto-mantle from kicking in, and nudge up to the ledge instead and hold the position.

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Despite the explanation, it’s not completely clear how Sprint Assist will feel and play out when the actual game launches.

We do know, though, that there are three different Sprint Assist settings from the multiplayer reveal. They are:

• Off: Sprint is activated manually with the Sprint button.
• On: Full input movement will activate Sprint after the Sprint Assist Delay time.
• Tactical Sprint Assist: Forward movement input will activate Tactical Sprint after the Sprint Assist Delay time. Sideways and Backward movement will activate Sprint after the Sprint Assist Delay time.

These settings sound similar to the current Auto-Sprint settings that have been in recent Call of Duty titles, but the settings tab shown at the reveal suggests Sprint Behavior will be its own thing once again.

This may be something that needs some fine-tuning once the game launches for players to fully understand and get the most out of it.