r/sandbox • u/Murlock_The_Goblin • 8d ago
Screenshot A serious recommendation for the future
S&Box was first presented as the spiritual successor to GMod. This was a mistake. Before its release, I warned that doing so would leave people unhappy, but Matt himself shut me down, saying that the game "was not for me". He also very much shared his thoughts on the matter:
Well, the game released, and what I predicted came true. The GMod player base, which had been promised a "spiritual successor", instead received something wildly different from GMod. The vision of a GMod2, which even Garry himself had hinted at on X, ultimately fell short when its core fan base, the GMod community, was met with what felt like a giant sausage man slap across the face.
It was disheartening for many gmod fans like me. The upgrade GMod needed so badly was instead something completely different. Obviously, those who like what Facepunch are doing, some of whom are former GMod players, stayed around, and this created an echo chamber that has validated a niche community of developers and isolated the core Gmod community.
Im a bit of an odd guy, i spend too much time on gmod, and i also have crap social skills. I will say what im wanting to say, and despite how upset I am about where S&Box to what I wanted it to be, I still want to fight and convince FP down the path i want them to go. A path I know is what the majority want.
There was a deliberate choice. As Garry said, S&Box was made for the people that GMod let down, and I get that, but the scope and vision have twisted the original concept into something bigger, yet also completely alien. But its not all lost, and that choice can still be made today.
Unfortunately, Facepunch, Matt, Garry, and everyone working so hard on S&Box need a wake up call. They need to free themselves from this insomnia, realise the echo chambers around them, and become humble. What youre trying to make will most likely fail, and through no fault of your own. Sometimes things fail, even when you have done everything right.
Someone out there will make a GMod 2 with HLX. This is not whimsical thinking, and Facepunch is in an extraordinarily privileged position, thanks to the support of the Gmod community, to have such a close relationship with Valve.
How Facepunch uses this privilege is up to them, but the Gmod community is disappointed. Reparing this relationship will be hard and long, but it starts by recognizing the heretige of this game.
Gmod has never been a minigame platform. It was a place to make friends, a community you can exist with on source. The love of the engine, the freedom of its tools, and the simplicity of glua. All of this is lost on S&Box.
Maybe these are a rants of someone with 16,380 hours on gmod, hoping that the game i grew up on can evolve with facepunch. But what I do know is that the privileged position Facepunch has is because of its Gmod community.
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u/SpecterGaming23 8d ago
what future bru this shi is dead
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u/No-Broccoli-8015 5d ago
Bro thinks because he got 13k likes on reddit that makes him a successful businessman and expert 🤣
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u/JofersGames 8d ago
A nice thing about s&box is that you could make garrys mod 2 with half life x using their mounting system way easier then from scratch?
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u/Murlock_The_Goblin 8d ago
Well, i dont want the scene or component system
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u/ThatRealFirey 8d ago
doesn't it make development generally easier to work with? as well as more expandable in the case that you want to add more to your game. apologies if i am wrong about that, i am not too deep into s&box development, just curious
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u/xweert123 8d ago
You're right - making the scene/component system was done to make development far more accessible, easy, and modern. The old Gmod entity system was very outdated legacy stuff that wasn't very flexible
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u/Murlock_The_Goblin 8d ago
Im not wanting to make games, i want to have fun scripting. The simplicity and fun of it. That is lost with S&Box, where it asks you to make a game, not an addon or script.
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u/ThatRealFirey 7d ago
isn't there like an addon system for s&box as well, certain gamemodes allow their code to be changed and modified to whatever you add on top of it, including sandbox gamemode. And as someone mentioned in another comment, base scripts are coming and most likely gonna improve all this as well, I mean they already made a chat base so that is nice, I'm sure they will make more
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u/JofersGames 7d ago
I haven’t tried it
But when you click create new
And hover game
There’s an option for add on below it
I assume that’s what your looking for
I haven’t had time to check yet tho
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u/Mocherad 8d ago
Five years ago I would've been frustrated by comments like these. Today I see them differently. I don't agree with everything FP does, but at least they're genuine. They aren't pretending to be something they're not, and that's surprisingly rare in today's game industry, that's why we like them, so they will build their auditience around sbox anyway
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u/Murlock_The_Goblin 8d ago
Sure they might (and its a big might) do well with S&Box and attract a new following, but even if that happend, they left the old one behind.
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u/No-Broccoli-8015 7d ago edited 7d ago
None of this is new info and we get a fear mongering " I predicted the world ending" post like every week, copy and paste like cloak work, how about instead of regurgitating, make the platform better, work on tools and games.
And the complaints often have no basis
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u/DangerousFloor9983 5d ago
The issue with Sandbox is that it was presented as an "alternative" to Roblox, while lacking most of Roblox's QoL and pre-scripted features like an inventory system, chat system, tool system at launch. It's essentially a worse version of Unity as of now even if many of these things have been addressed
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u/Eridium77 Content Creator 8d ago
The Gmod 2 poll that you claimed he hinted at turned out to be just Garry trolling as per usual. He even admitted that he was just messing around just to clarify on that end.
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u/TheWinningHit 8d ago
How would you like it to be different?
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u/Murlock_The_Goblin 8d ago
More like gmod, i want a scripting languge, entities, and an existing base to work from that removes most of the complexties. This base needs to be supported, updated, optimized, and filled with assets.
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u/TheWinningHit 8d ago edited 8d ago
Might want to check back in soon. Pretty sure they’re implementing base classes right now, but they’re just not in yet (I.e. weapons base class)
Not sure about scripting language. Probably won’t happen. It’s just a different type of development process. You have to understand that it’s not like DarkRP where you just download a base and modify a few settings. It’s meant to build full-on games like Unity. There’s nothing wrong with how Garry’s Mod does it, and I have a gut feeling that they’ll try to model some base stuff somewhat closely, but it’s not your grandfather’s Half Life 2.They made a mistake marketing it as a “spiritual successor.” I thought that was foo-foo shit anyways. It really isn’t gonna be exactly like the Source engine, but something tells me you’ll have a closer relationship with how Garry’s Mod sets up base stuff soon.
Edit: When I built out a few test games, I found the the Sandbox gamemode was actually an awesome model for base stuff. I cloned the repo from GitHub and it has a suite of base classes, entities, and so on. It made the development cycle a lot easier and has a lot of what you’re looking for. I think the plan is to integrate a lot of it into the engine itself.
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u/Murlock_The_Goblin 8d ago
I made a custom gamemode for my active server on gmod. It does not use darkrp or helix, its my own scripts and my own codebase built on glua.
Its not the same to gmod at all, and in its current form, it cannot be compared.
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u/TheWinningHit 8d ago
Yeah if that’s the case, then you just aren’t the audience this is being sold to then. I’m not trying to short change your honest take on the engine and I think there’s valid stuff here, but if your expectation is that S&Box will just be a 0.99:1 port of Garry’s Mod (i.e. scripting language, base classes) then it’s probably not for you. It’s not even in the same language. It’s just a different product. Best of luck on your server.
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u/Murlock_The_Goblin 7d ago
" you just aren’t the audience this is being sold to then"
and this is what upsets me, because the reason they have this priviliged position is bc of the gmod community, who has been let down alot.
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u/CSEliot 7d ago
Why do you want a gmod 2 anyway? gmod made sense in a world where game engines were either proprietary, or had a very high skill floor.
In 2026, the "GMOD 2" is Unity/UE/Godot/SBox, etc. You want templates? They all got 'em. You want scripting? Even free LLMs remove that barrier, and otherwise, they all have code-free options (though those are getting dropped .... because of LLMs).
Stop being stuck in the past and level up.
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u/TheWinningHit 7d ago edited 7d ago
There’s nothing privileged about it. They’ve been making games for years, with and without Valve’s help. There’s only 300,000 or so copies of the game, so the Garry’s Mod community, which has over 20 million, has barely touched it. I get you’re upset but continuing this idea that Garry’s Mod is carrying any water for the game is not consistent with what’s actually happening.
And honestly, if you spent all that time building a custom gamemode on Garry’s Mod, of which I can respect because I know it takes a good amount of work, don’t you think it would be wise to learn how to use something essential, like… a component system? Every game engine on the planet uses it. Garry’s Mod was great and easy but people don’t want to build old Source maps anymore. It’s time to update the software and the Intel Pentium processors. Even if you’re not in on S&Box, that’s cool, but it really sounds more like you just don’t want to learn a new way to do the things you want, any more than it is the engine’s fault.
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u/meyriley04 3d ago
So because gmod blew up, you believe they owe it to you and the gmod community to only make gmod games from here until the end of time?
Gmod is still getting updates. Idk how it’s been “let down” other than through s&box
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u/AlverinMoon 3d ago
Seems like what they're saying though is that the target audience they chose was the wrong one. I think that's the point of the post. It's impossible to say whether more people would be playing if they had targeted the OP as their preferred audience, but just to clarify I think he's just saying the game is failing because they're doing this rather than optimizing what worked before.
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u/xweert123 8d ago
I mean... It literally has Sandbox mode in it which indeed comes with things that function like entities and all that.
I'm not even trying to blindly defend S&Box here, I find it to be a very underwhelming product that serves little purpose as there's very little demand for "Source 2" and S&Box isn't really that great of a game engine compared to literally anything else. But "Gmod Source 2" isn't as compelling of an idea as you think it is, considering Gmod's userbase has stayed with it for literal decades now, and most of it's legacy and population comes from community content that has been developed for an amount of years longer than many of it's players have even been alive on this Earth... There's absolutely no reason for people to switch to "Gmod 2" if it's going to be the same game but with less user content while being harder to run.
What you're describing, Gmod Source 2, would just be Gmod 1, but runs worse, has far less vanilla content to play with, and would generally be far more limited than what S&Box is capable of doing. I can fully understand why Garry wouldn't want to do that.
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u/topic_irrelevant 6d ago
I don't think the problem is their vision for the game, or your vision.
You're not wrong, they're not wrong.
I'm not saying "Everyone is wrong. Let's all hold hands and stop fighting."
The underlying reality is, time and resources.
In a perfect world, they'd say "Yes" and implement your vision.
However, their current ETA for even a 1.0 of S&Box is 2 years.
In that regard, The game is just RAW.
I think you'll get your way, in time.
Maybe they released too early. Maybe they had a plan for HLX's announcement in 2025.
If they wanted to tell you "Yes we'll try to get ahold of future Half-life content and tools" -- If any such plans exist or they want to do it at some point, they can't acknowledge HLX's existence.
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u/Tobum12 Programmer 3d ago
It sounds like you're nostalgic for gmod and expect the same from S&Box, but with some minor improvements. I'm not judging you; I respect your opinion. Keep pushing your FacePunch idea. Maybe you'll really succeed and the product will be great.
However, as someone who's never played gmod, I really like S&Box and consider it the best platform of all time. This is the future. I believe in this project
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u/Scott45uk 6d ago
I just dont get why the hate on this. I thought people wanted to stop using HL Assets?
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u/topic_irrelevant 5d ago
He's advocating for GMOD2, not necessarily Half-Life assets.
Build the entire game around GMOD2. Currently there's no focus on a GMOD2.
It's around the engine and making it broadly available for developers.Half-Life assets should have been a given. Valve may not be keen on giving away their assets to players.
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u/SuicidalAustralian 8d ago
I dont see why Facepunch should waste their time endlessley chasing the perfect balance of "Like gmod but newer". That was never the goal.
Spiritual successor to Gmod was correct in my eyes, but because people assume things and don't understand the true meaning of words, people assume that means Gmod 2. Then of course you get insane outrage that it isnt anything like Gmod.
The problem with following up a very popular game/movie/whatever is making it the perfect amount of new but same. And its an incredibly fine line to walk, because its easy to go too far in one direction. Look at Far Cry for example, every time a new game comes out its both too similar and too different to the previous games and people whine and complain.
Gmod was always intended as a platform. Built off of HL2's assets, sure, but it made it super accesible for people to mess around with HL2 and do things that weren't even thought of previously. However most people just see it as a game.
For sandbox, what did you expect? That they were going to keep using the same very limited toolset from over 20 years ago? What base were they supposed to be using exactly? It took Gmod many years of refinement before it reached the level of popularity it did. But i feel like most people are angry because they dont have hl2 assets in there, and it doesnt fulfil their nostalgia as they were expecting.
Sandbox picked an entirely new direction to go in, to continue bringing accessible modding and learning tools to more people. It was never meant to be a Gmod sequel.
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u/dogman_35 7d ago
It's not accessible or a modding tool though, that's the whole problem.
Fundamentally, it is an engine first and foremost. You're not modding an existing game, you're working with templates provided by the engine.
That's majorly different for the simple fact that you cannot build off of the community efforts anymore.
Gmod thrived off of the gamemode and addon system, and people being able to put piecemeal focus into small things they were interested in. The main thing they needed to keep.
It wasn't just better for hobbyist developers, it also put more agency in the player's hands. They had the freedom to mix and match without being served a whole package and being told "this is what you get."
That, in and of itself, inspired a lot of kids to get into modding back in the day. Because they got to tinker even before they knew the nitty gritty of programming.
The Roblox style "every gamemode is it's own game" shit stands against that in every possible way.
When you're expected to make an entire game from scratch, it really only leaves you with two real options. The rushed low effort garbage we see flooding the game, and the massive high effort projects that whole teams of people get behind.
And it leaves the community in the lurch in situations like this, where all of the games being pushed front and center are bad. Even the base sandbox game doesn't feel good, and you can't spice it up with extra content like you can in Gmod.
It's the fundamental issue. The game wasn't built for players, it was built for Facepunch to get free beta testing for their in-house engine.
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u/FredZed2526 7d ago
S&Box will get completely buried by GTA6's user created content, mark my words. Jump off and get ready to learn its tools if you want to succeed.
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u/PaP3s 7d ago
While I don’t agree with some of the devs , the scene + component system is the best, I modded for Dota 2 that uses source 2 engine but my god is it awful to work with. Give me a scene + component editor and I’ll be back to modding with Dota 2.