The weapon wheel in An Extended Look looks like the one we've always had. It very nearly wasn't there. According to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, Rockstar "spent months, if not years, trying a million different things that would replace the weapon wheel" before giving up and going back to the classic design.

The account comes from a video Schreier posted on YouTube on October 19, Some New Things I Learned About Grand Theft Auto VI And Rockstar, collecting material from his Rockstar North visit that didn't fit into his long-form Bloomberg feature. Dexerto and GTA Boom picked the video apart; VGTimes ran a summary of the humour he saw in closed-door presentations.

The empty-slot problem

The whole thing started with a design decision inherited from Red Dead Redemption 2. The team wanted Jason and Lucia to carry a limited arsenal, like Arthur Morgan, rather than GTA 5's bottomless one. Rob Nelson, co-studio head at Rockstar North, explained this to Schreier, according to GTA Boom. GTA 5's wheel, though, was built to show everything you own. With only a handful of weapons, it would be full of gaps — a constant reminder of what you can't take with you.

So they tried other shapes. "They tried trays and webs and all sorts of different things," Schreier said in the video, as quoted by Dexerto. At one point the team even tested having no interface at all. Nothing worked better. "After all that, they just wound up back at a weapon wheel and in the final game it's just a weapon wheel again."

The weapon limit stayed. What changed is everything around the wheel: Dexerto points out that besides the smaller inventory, NPCs react to anyone openly carrying a gun, a change that sits alongside the criminal profile that changes how police respond.

Exactly how many weapons fit in the inventory isn't confirmed on any of the pages we opened. A number is floating around in search snippets, but we couldn't find it in any article we could check, so we're leaving it out until Rockstar shows it.

2019 to 2022: the years the game stood still

The wheel is the most concrete example of a bigger problem. Schreier describes 2019 to 2022 as a rough stretch: Rockstar was still working out what game it wanted to make, pulled between Red Dead 2's realism and GTA's arcade-style chaos. "It wasn't actually making progress for a long period of time and that was frustrating for people," he said, per Dexerto. Some designers got frustrated enough to leave — the video gives no names or numbers.

Things turned around, Schreier says, in late 2022 and early 2023, when the game started coming together. The first trailer, in December 2023, reportedly gave the developers themselves a clearer picture of what they were building. As we read it, that goes some way to explaining why Rockstar showed so little for so long: until 2022 there wasn't much that was settled enough to show.

Nobody holds the whole game in their head

Another part of the video, highlighted by GTA Boom, is about how Rockstar decides on details. Schreier says "individuals are given a little bit of autonomy to put in details." His example is an old, famous one: the Red Dead 2 horse anatomy that reacts to temperature wasn't on any official feature list. Someone decided to do it and had the time.

Art director Aaron Garbut summed up the side effect in a line GTA Boom quotes: "There's no one person that has this whole thing in their head." Garbut also said GTA 6's roads are significantly narrower than GTA V's — and that "all these things sort of come to bite you later," since narrower, denser streets mean more buildings and more construction.

Schreier made a half-joking prediction that there'll be no shortage of YouTube videos titled "the 99 coolest details you missed in Grand Theft Auto 6." He also noted that some artists have been on the project since 2015 or earlier. "Imagine working on a single game for more than 11 years."

The jokes are still there

For anyone worried about a more po-faced GTA, VGTimes rounded up the examples Schreier gave from the closed-door showings: a shop plastered with photos of feet; a safe combination made of profanity tied to foot fetishists; a police helicopter warning residents over its loudspeaker about a "dangerous furry"; a completely naked man sprinting down the street.

The tone will still differ from GTA V, he says. Schreier's argument is that the real world has become so grotesque that the game can't satirise it in quite the same way. His description of GTA 6, as VGTimes reports it, is "a combination of a very mature story and an extremely childish worldview."

The mature part shows in what he saw of Jason and Lucia. Schreier didn't play: he watched Rob Nelson play as Jason in a session built around the couple, according to ARY News. Jason calls Lucia, they meet with a kiss (one button press), walk hand in hand through a park, hit the gym — squats for him, treadmill for her — case a bank and back off because there are too many guards, and end up disabling the alarm in the back office of a petrol station to take the cash quietly. Having just replayed GTA 5's first hour, where the leads are forever insulting each other, Schreier described Jason and Lucia as "two people who actually enjoy spending time together." It's the same relationship system Rockstar has already confirmed.

What the video doesn't settle

From the sources we read, these are still open:

  • Which alternatives came closest. "Trays" and "webs" are the only clues; there are no images or detailed descriptions of any prototype.
  • The exact inventory size, as noted above.
  • How many people left during 2019–2022, and in which roles.

All of this comes from a journalist who visited the studio and spoke to its leadership, not from a Rockstar announcement. It's well-sourced behind-the-scenes reporting, but it's the finished game, out November 19 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, that will show how much of Red Dead survived the wheel.