Rockstar spent years trying to get rid of the weapon wheel in GTA 6. It is back
Trays, webs, no interface at all. Jason Schreier says the studio tried them all before going back to the wheel, and that the long stretch from 2019 to 2022 cost it some designers.
By Wes Calloway
A week after his long Bloomberg feature on the making of Grand Theft Auto 6, Jason Schreier has a video out drawing on the same visit to Rockstar North and his conversations with its head of development, Rob Nelson. It adds one very specific story, about one very familiar bit of interface.
The wheel that wouldn't die
Rockstar wanted GTA 6 to borrow Red Dead Redemption 2's approach to weapons, where you carry a limited set instead of a whole armoury. The problem was GTA 5's weapon wheel. A wheel with slots for everything, most of them empty, keeps pointing out what you aren't carrying.
So, in Schreier's words, the team spent "months, if not years, trying a million different things" to replace it. He describes trays, webs, and versions with no weapon interface at all.
And then: "they just wound up back at a weapon wheel." The final game has one.
The trouble came from two good ideas running into each other, Red Dead's realism and GTA's speed. A system that makes you think about what you're carrying suits a slow ride across the frontier, and it's a bad fit for a car chase through Vice City. Rockstar apparently spent a very long time finding that out.
2019 to 2022
Schreier's wider point is about those collisions in general. Bringing Red Dead 2's immersive systems into a game built on GTA's pace caused friction for years, and by his account the project went through a long stretch, roughly 2019 to 2022, where it wasn't visibly moving forward.
"It wasn't actually making progress for a long period of time and that was frustrating for people," he says. Some designers left. He doesn't say how many, or who.
Things reportedly turned in late 2022 and early 2023, and the first trailer in December 2023 did a lot to settle what the game was. That timeline fits the Bloomberg feature, which didn't describe one single crisis, just a great many parts that took longer to come together than planned.
Switching guns should feel familiar
If you've played GTA 5 or GTA Online, the way you switch guns in GTA 6 won't need learning again, even if what you can carry may be more limited than before. How limited is one of the things nobody's shown yet, along with whether the wheel has changed at all beyond still being a wheel.
It also says something about where the delays came from. A studio that spends years on an interface question doesn't ship the first version that works.
Rockstar hasn't commented on the video, so for now there's no word from the studio on how many weapons you can carry, or on who left.
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