Rockstar spent years testing replacements for the GTA weapon wheel before returning to it. Jason Schreier’s follow-up video shares more GTA 6 development details that missed his Bloomberg cover story.
Jason Schreier Shares GTA 6 Development Details Left Out of His Bloomberg Cover Story
Rockstar Returned to the Weapon Wheel After Years of Testing Alternatives
Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA 6) keeps the classic weapon wheel after Rockstar Games spent months, if not years, trying to replace it. The studio wanted a more restrictive loadout system, and the team ended up back at the wheel anyway.
The weapon wheel is the radial menu that lets players pause the action and pick a weapon from their collection. In GTA 5, it gives quick access to an entire arsenal, so a player can switch from a pistol to a rocket launcher in a couple of button presses.
The detail comes from a video by Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier, who covered material from his interviews at Rockstar North in Edinburgh that did not make it into his Bloomberg Businessweek cover story on GTA 6’s development, published on October 14, 2026. He says Rob Nelson, one of Rockstar’s heads of development, shared the story with him.
According to Schreier, Nelson explained that the team wanted GTA 6’s weapon system to work more like Red Dead Redemption 2’s. Players would have to choose a loadout and hold a limited number of weapons at a time, so pulling out a rocket launcher alongside a full set of other guns would no longer be possible.
The wheel itself raised concerns, as the team worried over the fact that a weapon wheel with so few weapons would show many blank spots, reminding players of everything they couldn’t carry. That idea led Rockstar to look for something else.
He says the team spent months, if not years, on the search. They tried trays, webs, and other UI concepts, and they also tried removing the wheel altogether. After all that iteration, the final game still ended up a weapon wheel.
Schreier says anyone in game development will recognize the outcome as "that’s game development," where intense iteration can end back at the original idea. He adds that this can frustrate the people doing the UI work and prototyping. He ties the episode to the difficult stretch in the game’s development, which he says ended around late 2022 to early 2023 as the game began coming together.
GTA 6’s Map Took Over 11 Years of Work and Has Narrower Roads
The weapon wheel was only one of many long-running decisions. Schreier says planning began in 2015, when the team made its first research trip to Miami, and some artists have worked on it for more than 11 years. Bloomberg’s report also notes that the project carried the internal name Project Americas.
Art director Aaron Garbett explained that GTA 6 uses far narrower roads than GTA 5, whose wide streets felt closer to a racing game. The team made that decision from the start, and it rippled through the whole map. Garbett told Schreier, "All these things sort of come to bite you later." Denser traffic and tighter streets meant the team had to build denser buildings and environments around them, which gives the city its more realistic urban feel.
Rockstar’s Miami Research Trips Included Police Ride-Alongs and Aerial Photography
Real-world research shaped that urban feel. The team made extensive trips to Miami, including police ride-alongs and visits to places Rockstar developers described as scary. At one point, artists in a helicopter taking aerial photos of the city accidentally hovered over a Beyoncé concert.
During fieldwork, the team met many colorful characters in Miami. Jonathan Ashcroft, Rockstar’s senior vice president of technology, told him, "As soon as they know where you’re from, they just want to tell you every crime they or their friends have ever done." Those stories suit a game that encourages more robberies than ever before.
The 2019 to 2022 Period Left Rockstar Struggling to Balance Realism and Arcade Gameplay
Back at the studio, balancing realism against GTA’s traditional pace proved harder than the research. Schreier shared that the team spent 2019 to 2022 trying to merge Red Dead Redemption 2’s immersive systems with the more arcade-style feel of a GTA game. Many people felt the game was treading water, and the indecision, along with the idea of having “too many cooks in the kitchen” among three heads of development, led to frustration and tension. Some designers left as a result.
Red Dead 2 also supplied some of the ideas the team was weighing. He recounts a story from Nelson about an early prototype that Mark Tennant, Rockstar’s vice president of animation, built for Red Dead 2 around 2014 or 2015. It lets players press L2 to greet or antagonize NPCs instead of only pointing a weapon at them.
Phil Hooker, another head of development, was reluctant to show it to Nelson at first because Nelson is known for wanting to do everything. Nelson told the Bloomberg journalist, “This is incredible. This will revolutionize the way our games and our worlds work.” That prototype led to the interaction system players see in Red Dead 2. As of writing, Schreier is unsure whether GTA 6 has a deeper version of it.
Rockstar’s Art Production Team Grew From 5-6 People to 65
Managing that creative tension took more structure as the studio grew. Bloomberg’s reporting puts Rockstar at 4,711 employees across 12 offices in 2026, up from 2,441 in 2018. Schreier’s video adds a closer look at how production changed. Garbett told him the art production team went from five or six people on GTA 5 to 65 for GTA 6.
Producers manage schedules with graphs and metrics that help estimate how long tasks will take, adding a layer of bureaucracy that contrasts with the studio’s more organic past.
Rockstar Still Lets Developers Add Their Own Hidden Details
Even with that structure, Schreier says Rockstar protects individual autonomy. Garbett told him, "There’s no one person that has this whole thing in their head." Developers are given a little autonomy to add details and features they think are cool.
Garbett’s example was the famous Red Dead Redemption 2 detail where horses’ testicles shrink or expand with the weather. It was not originally on the list of features to make, and someone chose to add it on their own because they thought it was a cool detail and had the time. His point is that players will likely discover features even Rockstar’s top developers do not know about, and that culture is part of what makes the studio’s worlds feel so detailed.
Schreier’s extra notes show a studio that spent more than a decade refining a single map while testing bold ideas, discarding some, and keeping others. The weapon wheel’s return captures that process well. After months of experiments, Rockstar chose the design that worked best. Fans who want to see how these systems come together can check our coverage of the extended look with 26 minutes of new gameplay.
Grand Theft Auto 6 launches on November 19, 2026, for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Rockstar’s official summary says the story follows Jason and Lucia, whose easy job goes wrong and pulls them into a criminal conspiracy across the fictional state of Leonida. We have also covered how Jason and Lucia took 8 years of work to make their relationship possible. The launch date has already affected other releases, with developers saying GTA 6 caused the Danganronpa 2x2 delay.
Sources:
Jason Schreier, Bloomberg Businessweek cover story on GTA 6 (published October 14, 2026)
