Rockstar Tried “a Million” Ways to Replace GTA 6’s Weapon Wheel, Then Kept It

Every magazine story leaves a pile of good stuff on the floor. On October 19, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier swept his up and put it on YouTube: “Some New Things I Learned About Grand Theft Auto VI And Rockstar,” leftovers from a full day of interviews at Rockstar North in Edinburgh for his cover story.

The headline scrap is almost comic. Rockstar spent, in Schreier’s words, “months, if not years, trying a million different things that would replace the weapon wheel.” Then it shipped a weapon wheel.

The Wheel That Wouldn’t Die

The plan came from realism. “They wanted GTA 6’s weapon system to be more like Red Dead, where you couldn’t just carry an unlimited number of guns,” Schreier said, as quoted by TechRadar. In Red Dead Redemption 2 the spare rifles live on the horse. In GTA 6, the idea was a limited loadout on your body and the rest in the car (Reported).

That raised an awkward design question. Here’s Schreier again: “If we use a weapon wheel, is that just going to remind people of all these blank spots in it? It’ll remind people of what they can’t actually do, what they can’t carry.”

So the team tried “trays and webs and all sorts of different things in the UI.” “They tried not having one,” Schreier said. “After all that, they just wound up back at a weapon wheel, and in the final game it’s just a weapon wheel again.”

Somewhere in Edinburgh there is a folder of rejected weapon webs. Nobody will ever see it, and the wheel won.

Narrower Roads, More Buildings

Art director Aaron Garbut told Schreier that GTA 6’s roads are “significantly narrower” than GTA 5’s (Reported). Schreier admitted he hadn’t noticed until he was told. GTA 5’s Los Santos had wide streets that made traffic easy to dodge, which Schreier said felt “a little more like racing game-ish.” GTA 6 went the other way: narrower roads and denser traffic, decided from the very beginning.

That choice cost the artists. Narrower streets mean more buildings packed around them. “All these things sort of come to bite you later,” Garbut said. Some of the people building those blocks have been at it a long time. Schreier says a few artists have worked on GTA 6 since 2015, kept on the map while most of the studio moved to Red Dead Redemption 2 (Reported).

Nobody Holds the Whole Map

Garbut’s other line is the one fans will quote: “There’s no one person that has this whole thing in their head.” Schreier added his own guess that “not even the top developers of this company know every single thing that’s in the game,” as Yahoo Tech reported.

His example is from Red Dead Redemption 2, the horse anatomy that shrinks in the cold. Per Schreier, that “was not something that was on some big list of features to make.” One person, or a few, decided it was a cool detail and had the time to build it (Reported). Expect players to keep finding GTA 6 details like that for years.

The Dark Stretch

Schreier also put dates on the slump. From about 2019 to 2022, he says, the team struggled to square Red Dead’s realism with GTA’s arcade pace. “It wasn’t actually making progress for a long period of time and that was frustrating for people,” he said, as quoted by Dexerto. Some designers left (Reported). The weapon wheel saga, he suggests, belongs to that period. Things came together around the end of 2022 and early 2023, and Trailer 1 in December 2023 showed the team what they were making.

What We Don’t Know

• How many guns you can carry on foot, and how the car trunk works at launch (Not confirmed).
• What the scrapped trays and webs looked like (Not confirmed).
• How narrower roads change chases and police pursuits (Not confirmed).
• Rockstar’s own comment on any of this. There isn’t one.

Eleven years on the map, a million menus, one wheel. Some ideas are just round.

More: Schreier’s Bloomberg story, GTA 6 weapons, how GTA 6 got made and the development team.

Sources: Jason Schreier on YouTube, TechRadar, Dexerto, Times of India, IGN, Yahoo Tech.

Official Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 2, Rockstar Games.