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.
A week after his long Bloomberg feature on the making of Grand Theft Auto 6, Jason Schreier has put out a video 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 piece of interface.
The wheel that would not die
Rockstar wanted GTA 6 to borrow Red Dead Redemption 2's approach to weapons, where you carry a limited set rather than an armoury. The problem was the weapon wheel from GTA 5. A wheel with slots for everything, most of them empty, is a constant reminder of what you are not 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.
That is a small story and a revealing one. It is the kind of problem that only exists when two good ideas collide: Red Dead's realism and GTA's speed. A system that makes you think about what you are carrying is a good fit for a slow ride across the frontier and a bad one for a car chase through Vice City, and Rockstar apparently spent a very long time finding that out.
2019 to 2022
The wider point Schreier makes 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 period, roughly 2019 to 2022, where it was not 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 does not 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 described no single crisis but a great many parts that took longer to come together than planned.
What this tells you about the game
Mostly, that the weapon wheel is staying familiar. If you have played GTA 5 or GTA Online, the way you switch guns in GTA 6 will not need learning again, even if what you can carry may be more limited than before. How limited is one of the things nobody has shown yet.
It also says something about where the delays came from. A studio that spends years on an interface question is a studio that does not ship the first version that works.
What is not known
How many weapons you can carry, whether the wheel has changed beyond being a wheel, and who left. Rockstar has not commented on the video.
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