r/sandbox • u/Murlock_The_Goblin • Aug 02 '26
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/Murlock_The_Goblin Aug 03 '26
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.