Massive League of Legends gameplay change as WASD control scheme is introduced

League of Legends is almost two decades old and is considered a classic multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game. This means its control scheme is more in line with what other classic MOBAs, like DoTA, have. However, that might change soon as League of Legends may soon offer an alternative control scheme: WASD.

The new option to move to WASD movements in League of Legends was uncovered by dataminer SkinSpotlights. They posted several screenshots of the keybinding options.

The first one labels the current control scheme as "Classic Controls," where you have to right-click to move and use QWER to cast your abilities. The news WASD Movement is labeled as "Modern Controls."

Abilities are now bound to Right Click, Shift, E, R, while your first summoner spell moves from D to... Space.

There's also an option called "Flash Handling Type," which has three choices: Cursor, WASD with Cursor Enhanced, and WASD with Cursor Fallback. SkinSpotlights said that they were unsure as to what they do. It seems this will modify how much influence the cursor position and WASD keypresses have over Flash direction and distance. Many abilities in the game function similarly to Flash (Hexflash, Ezreal E - Arcane Shift, Kassadin R - Riftwalk), but we don't know whether this will affect those abilities too.

The second screenshot shows the keybind set. Each directional input appears twice, for some reason. We can see that there are keybinds for the actions "Select Object" and "Interact with object" bound to left-click. More on these in the next section.

Auto Attacks are also bound to left click. The third screenshot shows toggles under Advanced Keybinding Options. We do not know where auto attack move is bound if the first toggle is off, but Q is a viable option. The "instant cast spells use the character move direction" is something that Riven players will be familiar with.

Abilities that are cast instantly, like most basic attacks, will be cast where your champion is facing. Riven's Q - Broken Wings already works this way, even under the "classic" control scheme — she will dash in the direction she's facing if you're not targeting an enemy unit with your mouse.

Currently, no other sources for this new control scheme can be found. We've already seen a WASD movement scheme within League of Legends during the Swarm game mode. That could have been a testing phase for the eventual implementation in the main game months later.

The theorized reason for this implementation is to attract new players. General sentiment towards the additional option has been negative.

"Who‘s gonna tell riot that the control system isn’t the reason nobody wants to start playing League of Legends," wrote content creator and streamer Naayil. "I don‘t think roblox kids are gonna enjoy this cause they can walk with WASD."

It's good to note that this is an option, not a forced change. It does pose a problem since certain movement techniques like stutter-stepping, which takes a lot of mechanical effort on the mouse, will be considerably easier to do on WASD.

As of the time of writing, the option is not available on the Public Beta Environment (PBE) server. This means, if were were being added into the game, it wouldn't be in the upcoming patch 25.11.