How the Weapon Wheel and Combat Are Changing

GTA 5’s weapon wheel was simple and a little absurd in equal measure, a single radial menu holding literally every weapon you’d ever picked up, with no real limit on how much firepower one character could physically be carrying at once. GTA 6 is doing away with that entirely, and the changes go deeper than just a visual redesign.

The wheel itself now works as a tabbed interface rather than one flat radial menu, with separate tabs for weapons, gear, and equipment that you cycle between using the shoulder buttons. Individual slots are labeled by role, sidearm, for instance, rather than by the specific gun sitting in them, and each slot shows its own ammo count directly on the wheel, so checking how many rounds you have left doesn’t require pulling up a separate screen. It’s a small interface change, but it reflects a broader shift toward giving players more readable information during combat rather than less.

The bigger structural change is that carrying capacity is now genuinely limited. Rather than GTA 5’s effectively infinite pockets, GTA 6 caps players at two rifles and two pistols carried on their person at once, with anything beyond that needing to be stored in a vehicle trunk or back at a safehouse. That’s a meaningful design shift. It means loadout decisions before a mission or heist matter, rather than being a formality since you could always just carry everything anyway. Expect more real tradeoffs between a heavier rifle setup and something more concealable, depending on what a given job calls for.

Movement during combat has reportedly gotten more natural too, with a cover system that supports leaning and peeking around corners and smoother transitions when moving between different pieces of cover, rather than GTA 5’s stiffer, more binary in-cover-or-not approach. Reporting has drawn comparisons to Red Dead Redemption 2’s refined gunplay specifically, suggesting Rockstar carried some of that game’s combat feel forward rather than treating GTA 6 as a clean break from it. Additional details floated in coverage include one-handed reloading while carrying loot bags and more destructible environments during firefights, both of which point toward Rockstar wanting combat to feel more grounded and consequential rather than purely arcade-style.

Put together, these changes suggest Rockstar sees combat as an area where GTA 5 had genuinely aged, not just visually but mechanically, and where borrowing directly from what worked in Red Dead Redemption 2 made more sense than reinventing gunplay from scratch. Whether the limited carry capacity ends up feeling like meaningful strategy or occasional inconvenience is something only real play sessions will settle, but it’s a clear signal of intent either way.