Rockstar Tried for Years to Replace GTA 6's Weapon Wheel, Schreier's Follow-Up Reveals

Jason Schreier's 18-minute follow-up video, posted on 19 October, collects the material from his visit to Rockstar North in Edinburgh that did not fit into his Bloomberg feature on how Grand Theft Auto VI was made.[2][4] The most consequential of those leftovers concerns weapons.[1]

Rob Nelson, Rockstar's co-studio head and head of development, told Schreier that the team wanted GTA VI's loadouts built closer to Red Dead Redemption 2 than to GTA V, so that a character could not walk around with an unlimited arsenal and would keep the rest stowed in a vehicle.[1] That choice then forced a second question: how players would pick among the few guns they were actually carrying.[1]

The weapon wheel, the radial menu the series has leaned on for years, became the obstacle. A wheel holding only a handful of weapons leaves blank slots, and the team worried those gaps would do little except remind players of what they could not carry.[1][4] Schreier says Rockstar spent months, possibly years, on replacements, building trays and webs and other interface concepts, and even trying a version of the game with no wheel at all.[1][3]

The result is what ships: a weapon wheel.[3] Schreier describes the outcome as the kind of loop anyone in games will recognise, where a long search ends at the original idea, and as the sort of process that frustrates the people doing the interface work.[3]

The episode sits inside a harder stretch. He dates the difficult years to roughly 2019 to 2022, when Rockstar was still working out the balance between Red Dead's realism and GTA's more arcade-like systems, a period he calls the dark moments in which some staff felt they were treading water.[2] The project shed some designers before the vision began coming together towards the start of 2023.[2]

The same video explains why the world is so dense. Art director Aaron Garbut told Schreier that no one person "has this whole thing in their head", because individuals are given room to add details they think are worth having, an autonomy that produced Red Dead Redemption 2's weather-reactive horses as an unscheduled extra.[4][2]

Roads are the other concrete example. Garbut said GTA VI's roads are significantly narrower than GTA V's, and that the change had a knock-on effect, because denser, tighter streets meant more buildings to construct around them.[4] He summed the pattern up as "All these things sort of come to bite you later."[4]

None of this is a Rockstar announcement. It is one reporter's account of conversations inside the studio, published as a companion to the feature, and every detail about the weapon system is attributed to Nelson rather than to a company statement.[1][4] What it adds is context for a launch now less than a month away: GTA VI arrives on 19 November for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.[4][3]