Despite the fact that last Thursday’s Grand Theft Auto 6 footage drop and hands-off preview reveals came with an enormous load of information, new aspects of the game are still coming to light this week.

Now, a new change has been revealed that significantly alters a Rockstar control system that’s existed for ages, most recently in Red Dead Redemption 2 and in GTA 5 as well. YouTuber MikeShowSha , who attended the recent preview, reports that GTA 6 has changed the button for sprint from repeatedly tapping X to pressing L3 on PlayStation, and its equivalent on Xbox.

It has long been a tradition in Rockstar games to rapidly hit that button, whereas pressing it would be a jog instead. Now, given this change, players are wondering how that varied speed ability may change. Some are celebrating the switch off of X tapping, given that it can get quite exhausting to jam on the same button so much, and few actions in any other games require such a thing.

However, switching to L3 could come with its own problems, one being the long-standing issue of stick drift on PS5, where worn down DualSense controller sticks start to shift movement one way or the other with frequent use over time. The concern is that pressing L3 every time you want to sprint could amplify that.

The middle ground, of course, would be the ability to use the new or old control scheme, but we don’t have confirmation that’s possible yet. Personally, I think it could be better, as I have been pretty exhausted from X tapping for a long while now, but I can also see the potential downsides. I have already gone through at least 2-3 controllers due to stick drift, which has been extremely annoying.

The change to sprint is not the only control alteration we know about for GTA 6. Reportedly, car drift is now mapped to X instead of R1, with the idea being that you can now free-fire from vehicles. This seems like less of a big deal once you get used to it.

I’m a bit surprised it took this long for this information to emerge, but I remember that the GTA 6 previews were hands-off, so it makes sense that most people wouldn’t know about it. There’s no word on whether there might be a hands-on preview before release, nor do we know when review copies go out or when the all-important review embargo might be lifted.

I’m all for the change, even if it’s not remappable. I’ve never liked tap-to-sprint, and clearly there’s a reason Rockstar thought it should do this. We’ll see how it works in practice on release.

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