Apart from the engine improvements which are always positive, the huge changes to how s&box works seems like a huge over correction to the negative voices while also being way too late to make a difference.
There was never an actual issue with how the current asset system worked, and is still leagues above how the steam workshop functions, so removing it and replacing it fully with the workshop is a huge downgrade and will make s&box even more shit of an experience to use.
Removing Terry ("citizen") from the game as well just seems like disservice to the artist who have created him and improved him over the years, and the people complaining about it have no real actual critique apart from "he's ugly". It was all just an extra cherry on top of actual complaints just because s&box never actually had the backing platform quality to give terry a good time to shine so people just shit on him to add fuel to the fire and seem to have no real interest in actually giving the platform a shot if it did improve.
I really wish this isn't a final roadmap on things to come as all of it just seems like more hole digging instead of actual problem solving.
Even then from what I constantly see in the community currently and from some facepunch staff, nobody wants to actually hear valid criticism and the community will continue to worship anything done while facepunch plugs its ears and insults anyone who actually speaks their mind.
I'm saying this all with good intentions and have no ill-will against s&box, but being part of the community for years and seeing the direction it's going just saddens me.
Naw Terry needed to go. But you are right about the existing community for this game being a problem (see reception to my comment about renaming the game). It's like everybody wants this game to be a Garry's Mod successor, but refuse to make that happen via the most obvious and easiest ways.
Apart from the engine improvements which are always positive, the huge changes to how s&box works seems like a huge over correction to the negative voices while also being way too late to make a difference.
There was never an actual issue with how the current asset system worked, and is still leagues above how the steam workshop functions, so removing it and replacing it fully with the workshop is a huge downgrade and will make s&box even more shit of an experience to use.
Removing Terry ("citizen") from the game as well just seems like disservice to the artist who have created him and improved him over the years, and the people complaining about it have no real actual critique apart from "he's ugly". It was all just an extra cherry on top of actual complaints just because s&box never actually had the backing platform quality to give terry a good time to shine so people just shit on him to add fuel to the fire and seem to have no real interest in actually giving the platform a shot if it did improve.
I really wish this isn't a final roadmap on things to come as all of it just seems like more hole digging instead of actual problem solving.
Even then from what I constantly see in the community currently and from some facepunch staff, nobody wants to actually hear valid criticism and the community will continue to worship anything done while facepunch plugs its ears and insults anyone who actually speaks their mind.
I'm saying this all with good intentions and have no ill-will against s&box, but being part of the community for years and seeing the direction it's going just saddens me.
I'm glad Garry realized a lot of mistakes, and it really took many months, better late than never. I can understand the PlayFund, but I don't agree with the alleged copies of the games (this is an incorrect rule, it's not clear what it's about), I can understand the removal of Terry - many people have asked for it, but I love him very much. But I don't understand at all why do it so early for free? When we were waiting for the release from 2021, we were hoping for 50-100k online and there was a dev preview stage, it was justified. After the release, we were hoping for December, and then in 1-2 years for the free version, that the platform would at least reach 10k players online, but this would not happen in December, and then how to calculate the score? What will be the marketing plan for 2027? Will we enter the fog of understatement again, or will Garry tell us this time what he has planned for marketing in 2027?
Btw, I'm not trying to be sarcastic or insult Facepunch, I just don't want mistakes to be repeated. I want s&box to be free but I don't like that it will be very early, because there is still very little content and games.
I have to say: I like this project a lot. But tbh I started coding on Gmod with Lua and I find C# more complicated. Maybe I'm just dumb! But this may explain why there aren't as many games as there should be. I think C# is a great language nonetheless, but Lua is way more beginner-friendly. Visual scripting is good though I personally prefer writing my own code. And what was great about Gmod is that when I didn't know anything about Lua, I just extracted some random addons from the workshop to see how they worked. I wish I could do that on S&box to learn. Idk, I think you guys are great game devs, and s&box really shows the passion you have for it.
im telling you the same things again. when a new player joins, they get lost in the main menu. just put a huge play button right in the middle of the screen and remove the rest of the menu. thats more than enough. when the player clicks it, they should enter the game in sandbox mode and discover the rest on their own. its that simple.
if you cant see this coming, find a young kid, ask them to play the game, and just observe what they do.
youve spent all this time working for developers, but youve neglected new players. i assume youve received plenty of feedback by now, so you have fewer opportunities and resources left to rely on trial and error.
so make smart decisions. you still have a chance. dont get lost in the details....
Facepunch, please add DLSS/FSR frame generation to s&box. There is no point in ruining the experience for players with capable hardware—depriving them of the chance to boost smoothness by 2–4 times—just because of some personal principles. If someone dislikes frame generation, they can simply choose not to use it; personally, however, I use it in every supported game, and it significantly improves the experience for me and many others. Its biggest advantage is the ability to increase smoothness while bypassing CPU bottlenecks—a very common issue in GMOD. If you continue to be stubborn and ignore the community, I don't think the game will ever recover from its rocky launch.
You can patch out the model, but you can't patch out what Terry meant to this community.
And let's be honest about who actually did this. It wasn't just Facepunch. It was us. The community was cruel to Terry for years — his face, his proportions, his whole look became a running joke — and the devs finally caved and deleted him just to stop the noise. We bullied a character out of existence and called it feedback.
So yeah, that's on us. But it's still on you to fix it. Bring him back — remastered, rebuilt, whatever. Just bring him back.
The pace of work is picking up impressively. It's been a while since I've seen this many cool commits.
The game's going free before the end of this year 0_0. That's a huge decision. This news really boosted my motivation to work harder on my project so I can make it in time for this momentous occasion!
And you guys finally started working harder on performance. I hope this trend continues.
Thank you guys, let's hope we're moving in the right direction.
I think that Terry will take his niche and be a perfect fit for some games (see Spank the Terry, Sausage Survivors, etc). It is not a time to say him goodbye. One downside is that he will not receive further updates from Facepunch or clothing creators, but there is still hopium that he will not be forgotten. Also just imagine Facepunch remaking WISEGUYS as s&box game and bringing Terry back LOL.
Hey S&box team, just wanted to say that you guys are doing amazing work! I've loved every minute of making my, crappy, games. The developer experience is so amazing! I hate seeing you guys clearly suffering from the launch feedback, and just wanted to throw some positive love your way. You all are amazing! <3
Why does terry need to be straight up deleted? It would make much more sense to keep him as a side option? After all terry just had a mini rework not long ago with sliders etc, now we are removing him? And replacing him with humans in which humans can only customize height and eye color? And a couple presets? This is a downgrade no? Why not do the smart thing and make the humans the main option and keeping the terrys? Even if hidden in the avatar screen. And where are the source mounts? Overall it’s a great update and somewhat a step in the right direction but for gods sake keep the Terrys in the game. removing them just means less people buying cometics.. uknow the main core monetization system which you guys designed the game around? From the outside it looks like Garry got bullied into pandering to assholes, terry didn’t need to go.. the humans just needed to be the main thing and better.
Welp, the bullies got their way. Without the sausages’ “cartoony” and “fun” vibe, I can’t tell how this is any different from a broken version of GMod running on Source 2.
PS : I'm only here to play, not to ask Claude “I want to make money with Playfund with minimal effort.”
Sounds like a lot of steps in a positive direction. I think the citizen added character... the point about not wanting to maintain two player model types is perfectly valid, of course. You should think about some alternative to differentiate s&box from roblox or fortnite etc. Not that I really play any of either, so maybe there already is more of a distinction than I realize.
Everyone who has paid for the game will automatically get a bunch of exclusive steam inventory items (extra if you bought it at $20 vs $10)
Fair warning some people are going to get mad at this, and see it as a penalty for doing something common (taking advantage of Steam sales) without being warned there would be a penalty. IMO best balance is to give a single extra item, maybe like an exclusive t-shirt that says "I paid full price for s&box and all I got was this stupid t-shirt". An exclusive item that is fun, but hopefully $10 users won't feel like they missed out on too much. Now I kinda want one but I only spent $10.
Another option is to make those $20 only items (and maybe the $10 only ones) non-exclusive, or create slight variants of them that are non-exclusive, and sell them only in a bundle for $10/$20. That way nobody is left behind who wants something.
Wasnt stoked for the sausage guys, but i didnt hate them either. Seemed like a popular opinion to shit on 'em. Youre right, the games leave to be desired but there were many interesting newcomers in the jam. Give it some time i say. I for one been using the editor to make my own game, and its powerful and awesome! Thx!
I think aside from optimization s&box is a fairly well made game. It just doesn't work because it has no base game to steal assets from like HL2, making games from scratch takes too much work so most are unfinished crap.
Holy shit, Garry reached post-nut clarity 🗣️🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 but seriously tho I have a question.
Because I understand and like being able to download different textures and sounds while I want to play one of the games, and then them being deleted, so that in comparison it doesn't take away all of my storage space, like for example Garry's Mod does with 100 GB of addons, which I don't use and then they take away my space on disk, and I need to remember to go and check out which addons I don't use anymore and uninstall them.
But still could we get some kind of ability to download them and keep them on disk, because all the download times getting reduced are great, but I think personally that being able to keep already downloaded once textures and such for games that I want to keep or that I know I will be coming back to (or if possible some of the whole games to be able to be played offline, but I know and understand that might come when the full ability to export the games comes).
Because even though there are great reductions in download times being done I still know people that could struggle with having to constantly download like 5GB of game every single time they want to play in comparison to downloading it once and then only having to check if textures and such are up to date, or if something is missing instead. And even though (Here comes the joke) I am studying programming in school and in theory should be a programmer I'm stupid enough to not know if it would be possible so that's why I am asking.
I’ve been following the game since the Unreal Engine days. It really matters to me that the project succeeds, because I see a future in it and I see the developers’ effort. On my channel, ever since the closed beta, I talked about s&box’s problems, and years later I noticed the focus on them in this post. I’m glad there was a turn “from left to right.” And it’s right. People like me will keep being interested in the game, but to draw in an outsider, retention needs to be improved. s&box needs to be made presentable first and foremost as a game. The interface and sandbox gamemode are its calling card. Let’s see how it turns out
When most GMod players first heard that GMod was coming to Source 2, it was exciting news. We expected more realistic physics, better performance under heavy loads, advanced effects, and many new possibilities for improving the sandbox experience.
However, after its release, s&box turned out very differently from what many of us had imagined. We expected the same GMod experience, but on Source 2. Minor changes to the menus would have been fine, but what we got was disappointing after years of anticipation.
One major issue was making the goofy, sausage-like characters the default. The game also seemed to focus more on other experiences than on sandbox gameplay, making it feel like GMod had been redesigned to resemble Roblox. Even after the default character was changed to a more realistic one, the game still didn't meet many players' expectations.
The game browser also feels very Roblox-like, displaying many games with preview videos and other content that can consume a lot of internet data. Yet it doesn't clearly show each game's download size, making it difficult to check whether you have enough storage before launching it.
In short, s&box has become something quite different from what many GMod players expected. I'm not saying it had to be called GMod 2; the name was never the problem. The problem is the game itself, especially its Roblox-like interface and direction, which make it feel almost like Roblox 2.
That said, I genuinely appreciate the developers' efforts to build something better. These improvements take time, and the project needs support to reach its potential. I just hope that one day we'll get the same GMod experience we know and love, with all its familiar features, but running on Source 2.
In the context of the modern games industry, facepunch is still a gem, and s&box has unbelievable amounts of potential to be a hit. Thank you guys for being so open about your thoughts, creating all these unique and cool things around the development of the game like the playfund and even the public git commits.
