As more Grand Theft Auto 6 previews roll out, one topic seems to be proving pretty controversial among fans–the realistic need to refuel your vehicle. Some players think it’s a little egregious of Rockstar to force you to hunt down gasoline, while others consider that because of the game’s other realistic mechanisms–like relationships, working out, and escaping the police–that needing to refuel should have been introduced to the franchise a long while back.
While the details aren’t concrete right now, we know there will be at least two types of cars–ones that need gasoline and electric vehicles. There may be some hybrid vehicles, but it hasn’t been confirmed just yet. You’ll have to charge electric cars, of course, but we know more about how fueling a vehicle works. It seems to be a quick time event (QTE) that lasts around 10 seconds. You’ll have to hold the gas pump, hold R2 or RB, and pump gas until the car is full.
However, there’s more of a risk if you’ve stolen a car–if you want to get away but you have to take a detour to a gas station because you’re running out of fuel, it will be less than ideal. That’s made even more difficult if you’re sporting a Wanted level for stealing it in the first place.
This will change the way we behave with our vehicles throughout the entire game. It seems like Rockstar wants you to care about the vehicle you have, rather than in previous instalments where there was no incentive to look after your car. You’d just see a new vehicle, ditch your current one, and steal that instead. If you’ve just spent some hard-earned cash on filling it with gas so that it’s a reliable getaway vehicle, you’re going to be far less likely to ditch it.
Filling a car with gas has existed basically since cars have been in games, prominently in racing games where you’d have to pull over to refuel, or more recently in simulation games like My Summer Car, The Long Drive, and more. In our accompanying video above, you’ll see that at this point GameSpot senior video producer Kurt Indovina holds up around four A4 sheets of lists of games that include refueling cars as a mechanic. In games like Pacific Drive, your car is the main means of survival, so of course you need to refuel it. Sometimes, refueling the vehicle feels unnecessary. In Deadly Premonition, you need to fill your car with gas, but there’s only one gas station, and it’s only open for limited hours. GTA 6 won’t be like that.
Nor will it be like Mizzurna Falls, another weird game from 1998 for the PS1, which was an open-world mystery game that required refueling your car. Gas was free, and the one gas station was open 24/7. If you run out of gas, apparently the main character can put his feet through an opening in the bottom of the car and run it along Flintstones-style. you can just call and have your car recovered, but it’ll be placed somewhere else on the map and you have to walk and find it.
More recently, Final Fantasy 15’s car running out of gas meant you had to push it along the road. The likelihood of that is pretty slim, because you can upgrade to a bigger fuel tank or, you know, fly.
Filling up your car with gas is the antithesis of what video games are all about–escaping reality. All of the mundane stuff that you have to do in your regular life disappears when you play a game, unless you’re one of those people that loves realistic simulations about, I don’t know, running a supermarket. Either way, the inclusion of the mechanic in Grand Theft Auto 6 is a deliberate design choice where Rockstar had to decide how realistic to make the game.
For more on GTA 6, check out our guides hub.
