Schreier: Rockstar spent months, if not years, trying to replace GTA 6's weapon wheel, then kept it

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier said in a YouTube video about the time he spent at Rockstar North that the studio tried for a long time to replace GTA 6's weapon wheel and ended up keeping it, TechRadar reported on October 20, 2026. TechRadar relayed the account from the video; its report carries no separate statement from Rockstar.

According to TechRadar's write-up, Rob Nelson, Rockstar North's co-studio head and head of development, told Schreier the team wanted a loadout closer to Red Dead Redemption 2, where players cannot carry an unlimited number of guns. Schreier said the worry was that a weapon wheel might remind players of the slots they could not fill.

Schreier said the team spent "months, if not years" on alternatives, including trays and webs in the interface. In the end, he said, they went back to a weapon wheel, and the final game has one. He linked this to what he called dark periods of development, when prototypes were reworked repeatedly.

A second TechRadar report on the same video, published later that day, covered how the team researched Miami. Schreier said developers, including artists and leadership, made group trips, with police ride-alongs and visits to some scary places. He said artists taking aerial photos from a helicopter ended up hovering over a Beyoncé concert.

TechRadar also quoted Jonathan Ashcroft, Rockstar's senior vice president of technology, who told Schreier that people in Miami who learned the team worked on GTA wanted to share crimes they or their friends had committed. Both accounts come secondhand through Schreier's video and TechRadar. Rockstar has not detailed the weapon wheel's design or the research trips in its own channels.