The weapon wheel and vehicle storage

The bottomless armoury's gone, but the wheel isn't. Footage from the Extended Look shows larger weapons living in your vehicle and coming out when you need them, with what you can carry on you cut down to something closer to believable. And by the most detailed account available, you still pick between the weapons you do carry with a weapon wheel.

Those are two separate questions, and it helps to keep them apart. The carry limit's about how much you have on you. The wheel is the interface you use to pick from it.

Rockstar tried to replace the wheel

Jason Schreier, drawing on the Rockstar North visit behind his Bloomberg feature, said in a video in October that the team spent "months, if not years, trying a million different things" to replace the Grand Theft Auto V wheel. By his account those included trays, webs and versions with no weapon interface at all, before the studio "wound up back at a weapon wheel." This is Reported: Rockstar hasn't commented on the video. Our news piece has the full account.

As Schreier tells it, the carry limit itself was why they tried. A wheel with slots for everything, most of them empty, keeps reminding you what you aren't carrying. You only get that problem once you stop letting the player carry everything.

The car is now equipment

This change reaches further than anything else on this page. In Grand Theft Auto V your car was transport and cover. Here it's also your armoury, so every decision about the vehicle becomes a decision about your loadout. Park badly and it costs you. Lose the car during a chase and it costs you more than a walk home. Turning up on a bike means choosing what you can bring with you.

It also gives the evidence system real teeth. Your weapon's a tracked item and so's your vehicle, and now the two travel together. Ditching a car the police have a description of means ditching what's inside it, or spending time at the boot out in the open while they close in.

What Edge saw: the boot, and a police shotgun

Edge's cover feature (issue 430, 29 October), written from a demo Rockstar North ran for the magazine, fills in some of this. The weapons live in your car's boot, and you go back to the car to get them.

It works on other people's cars too. In the demo, police officers left their cars unattended while they arrested someone. Jason opened a boot, took a shotgun out and slung it on his back, and the officers didn't react straight away.

People on the street do notice, though. Edge says pedestrians can tell a gun slung on your back from one in your hand, and they might move away, run, or square up to you. Carrying a weapon doesn't automatically get you a wanted level, and you may be able to put it away before things go further. Rob Nelson told Edge that Grand Theft Auto V's pedestrians ignoring a big gun wouldn't be believable here, and that walking around holding an automatic shotgun should get a reaction.

Red Dead did it with a horse

Carry limits aren't new for Rockstar. Red Dead Redemption 2 limited you to what was on your horse and on your back, and the horse turning into a real piece of equipment was one of the things people remembered about it. This is the same idea rebuilt around a car, in a game where cars get stolen and abandoned all the time. You raised and kept a horse. Nobody does that with a stolen car.

What isn't known

Rockstar hasn't shown how many weapons a vehicle holds, whether the storage belongs to each vehicle or follows you around, or what happens to weapons in a car the police impound. It also hasn't confirmed how big the on-person limit is, or how the wheel's changed beyond still being a wheel.

We don't know either whether every police car has something in the boot, or whether taking from one counts against you once the officers notice.

Related: weapon condition.