How do you switch weapons in GTA 6?

The weapon wheel is the frame this site keeps returning to, because one screen of the Extended Look holds more of the game’s interface than any other. This page is the wheel as a way of switching weapons: what is drawn, what is not, and how the last game did it.

What the footage shows

At 17:50.60 the wheel is open on its WEAPONS tab. It is not a radial dial but eight slots set round a centre, linked by thin lines into an octagon. A pistol sits in the top slot with 20 and 80 under it, the 20 in white and the 80 in grey, so a magazine over a reserve, with a band of cyan light across the foot of its card. A fist is selected in the slot to the right, its card enlarged and outlined in white. A pair of binoculars sits at the lower right, barrels, eyecups and focus wheel drawn. The five remaining slots are empty and carry a plus sign. The centre reads UNARMED in white with SIDEARM under it in grey; what SIDEARM names, the slot, its category or something else, no frame settles. The weapon wheel page carries the crop and the rest of the screen.

Along the top runs a tab switcher with an R1 glyph above it: WEAPONS in a white box, ITEMS beside it. What the ITEMS tab holds is in no frame. The same screen carries three meters top left, a heart, a lightning bolt and an eye, two consumables on square and triangle bottom left, and two money balances top right, $15,150 and $700 with different icons; none of that is the wheel, but it is what you see while the wheel is open.

Where the weapons come from is the other half. At 2:11 of Trailer 2 the wall behind the Ammu-Nation counter carries around ten long guns in one frame of a television commercial, carbines, shotguns and a wood-furniture rifle, enough to count and not enough to name; the buying is on its own guide.

What nobody knows

• The button that opens the wheel.
• Whether time slows while it is open.
• Whether a slot holds more than one weapon, and how you cycle within it.
• What SIDEARM refers to, and what the ITEMS tab holds.
• What the eye meter measures.

How Grand Theft Auto V did it

This is the reference, not a prediction. GTA V’s wheel had eight slots too, sorted by type, which the GTA Wiki lists as handguns, machine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, melee weapons, shotguns, heavy weapons and throwables. Within a slot “the player can cycle between purchased and picked-up weapons of the same class”, each slot showed the current ammunition and a coloured line for the weapon in hand, and while the wheel was open “the game slows down, being useful during missions or wanted levels”. The wiki also records the limit it lifted from GTA IV, where you could not carry an SMG and a Micro SMG at once. Which button opened it, that page does not say, and neither does this one.

What this page becomes on launch day

From 19 November 2026 this guide is rewritten from the release build: the button, whether time slows, how a slot cycles and what the ITEMS tab holds, each with the date it was tested. Until then the short answer at the top stands.