GTA 6 Features a Controller Change That Flips a 25-Year-Old Trend

Grand Theft Auto 6 is mere weeks away from being released. In November, we’ll finally have our hands (well, our digital hands?) on the game of the century, diving deep into Leonida and experiencing the fruits of Rockstar Games’ labor for ourselves.

In recent weeks, some of the world’s biggest content creators were invited to preview Grand Theft Auto 6 behind closed doors, ahead of the launch of the Netflix special that uncovered almost half an hour of raw gameplay. Now, those creators are dropping tidbits of information about the game, including one important piece about GTA 6’s control scheme.

Rockstar Games is Doing Away With ‘Tap to Sprint’

For years, and I mean twenty-five years, Rockstar Games has applied a very familiar mechanic to Grand Theft Auto games. When you want to sprint, you tap X/A. It’s one of the most iconic parts of the game’s control mechanisms, and the faster you tap, the faster you’ve always tended to move.

It’s part and parcel of the GTA experience, encouraging players to furiously hammer at their controllers as they’re chased into a corner by the police, or something like that.

But in Grand Theft Auto 6, that will be a thing of the past.

It was confirmed by MikeShowSha, one of the creators invited to preview GTA 6, that the default controller scheme will see players simply clicking L3 to sprint. That’s typically how it’s done in most games, especially in first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield, and now it’s coming to GTA 6.

In the past, you were able to tweak control systems in games like Grand Theft Auto 5, so there’s a chance you’ve already been using L3 to sprint as opposed to tapping the face button, but in GTA 6, it’s like that out of the box (figuratively speaking, as there’s nothing in the box…).

Here’s the video where MikeShowSha describes the change (excuse the thumbnail):

For some, it’s a minor change, but for many, it’s an accessibility feature that might make the movement mechanics in GTA 6 feel a bit smoother. If you’ve seen the gameplay reveal, you’ll recognize how different they’ve tried to make GTA 6 compared to GTA 5, and this control scheme alteration just feeds into that.

Are you surprised that the default movement selection has changed in GTA 6? Let us know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming Discord server.

For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out my interview with the WARDOGS team from Gamescom. Also, don’t forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter