The Way You Fight in GTA 6 Is About to Completely Change, New Leak Suggests

While Rockstar Games has kept details surrounding Grand Theft Auto 6 tightly under wraps, especially following the series of leaks it has suffered in recent years, it hasn’t stopped industry insiders from giving us a glimpse of what to expect from the upcoming sequel.

One such feature, in particular, is a major overhaul of one of the franchise’s fundamental gameplay features.

The feature has been synonymous with modern Grand Theft Auto games, and it has undergone minor tweaks in each iteration. In a discussion about potential gameplay improvements on the GTA Forums, trusted dataminer Tez2 mentioned that Rockstar has experimented with different weapon wheel designs over the past year, including the possibility of introducing smaller wheels or sub-wheels within the main weapon selection interface.

While Tez2 cautioned that these experimental features may have been scrapped or modified since testing began, the fact that Rockstar is actively exploring alternatives to the current system is noteworthy in itself.

The weapon wheel made its debut in Grand Theft Auto 5, allowing players to quickly select from eight categories of weapons including handguns, machine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, melee weapons, shotguns, heavy weapons, and throwable items. When you acquire multiple weapons of the same type, you can navigate to that category and switch between your available options.

The current system displays useful information such as ammunition counts and magazine capacity for each weapon. Players can also access snacks and body armor through the same interface, making it a central hub for combat preparation. It’s great, but it could use certain improvements. Like, for example, the introduction of sub-wheels.

Having additional organizational layers will make it easier to find and equip specific firearms. Instead of cycling through numerous similar weapons in a single category, sub-wheels could group them by additional criteria such as range, damage type, or customization status.

Another possibility is that Rockstar is planning to expand the weapon system itself. If players can customize their firearms with different scopes, grips, barrels, and other accessories, having a more detailed interface would become necessary to better manage these options.

Early leaked gameplay footage showed various weapon wheel prototypes that bore some resemblance to the Red Dead Redemption 2 style. However, the same footage also revealed that Rockstar was testing multiple different approaches, some more restrictive than others. For example, certain versions appeared to limit how many weapons players could carry at once.

Given that GTA 6 still hasn’t been released, the current version might still not be final. We could even see Rockstar return to not using the weapon wheel completely. After all, it's a feature that originated in Red Dead Redemption before appearing in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and later, GTA 5 and Grand Theft Auto Online.

Then again, the system was later retrofitted into the remastered versions of Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as part of the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, so it’s more likely that we’ll see an improved version this time around.

With that said, there’s no guarantee that these experimental designs will appear in the final game. While some features might seem promising in isolation, they don’t always work well as part of the overall experience. Rockstar’s reputation for revising or removing features that don’t meet their standards suggests that this could still potentially join a long and growing list of cut content.

As Rockstar’s most ambitious project yet, with nearly a decade of development time put into it and billions on the line, whatever feature we’ll see in GTA 6, players can expect it to feel polished and purposeful once it’s launched on May 26, 2026.