Making this a game engine first was a mistake, the whole sandbox element of the game just feels like an afterthought
Wow I am so surprised that a Facepunch production is a buggy clusterfuck mess on launch, certainly there is no precedent for this having ever happened before.
The steam review linked in the article… its rather long so I’ll put my comments in and then uh, sandbox it in a spoiler tag, but uh… maybe note how AI content is really only one of a lot of quite serious problems.
The Review
Quick crash on S&Box in the last few years. COMPLETELY, ignore the “gmod successor” comment.
Absolutely garbage, horrible optimisation (their trailer even features the game dropping below 30fps.) that gate keeps the majority of people ever touching this “game.” 32gb ram minimum recommendation. They’ve had 2 years of closed testing for this and it only gets worse to run.
Limited time cosmetics released in a developer preview over the course of 2 years that now have individual prices of $100+ (probably not for long, considering the “game” is kind of , mediocre at best.)
Worthless documentation until recently, where apparently it’s still absolutely terrible.
AI infested, NFT/Crypto bro community who are 95% of the official S&box discord and reddit and forum. Literally every, single, damn day is ai slop vibe coding arguments and anyone who doesn’t specifically want to use AI art etc is treat like garbage.
Toxic as hell community who actively bully / review bomb games, for example the Tycoon game that was popular as hell in the dev preview, was both targeted by a dude who decided “black hat for fun” and mess with the saves / gameplay ONTOP of the dev discord going out their way to specifically link it and review bomb.
Every game mode that has seen any fraction of success here, is a copy paste of other games prior. The only game that could be worth buying made with this engine, is going to release stand alone.
“Develop and publish straight to steam, for free” is extremely misleading- there’s still a $100 publishing fee involved.
Since the exported game HAS to be published on steam, it’s probably a good idea to mention the extra $100 behind it.
To explain, this game engine specifically says under their publishing section “Publish and export your games, Completely free, to steam”. After coming to a deal with valve.
This is straight up untrue.
I’m completely fine with the price, but when your game engine has a mandatory publishing fee yet your website is stating, in it’s publishing section that it’s completely free to publish to steam, that’s misleading.
Limited cosmetics that weren’t even announced to have an expiration date at launch.
The entire “games” premise, is Roblox 2.0. This is not a joke or exaggeration, the entirety of this game is almost a 1-1 of exactly what Roblox has. Except in this you pay to play poorly optimised, unfinished games most devs haven’t worked on for the last year.
Unoptimised maps and downloads, some maps are 7gb, some are 10+gb. Good luck playing a mode with multiple maps for the first time.
Server filtering, finding games in progress, seeing lobbies etc is an utter nightmare.
The party system is, giga jank and has a tendency to drop half your lobby in a game while the others get left behind.
Did I mention they published a “paper crown” that they priced at $100? Or did I mention servers can literally toggle it so you can wear whatever the hell you want so you don’t actually have to spend anything?
The Playfund was being hard botted before the release, for those who aren’t familliar - the more popular your game is / played, the more developers get from the playfund. This is the exact same format Fortnite uses, and Epic TO THIS DAY is struggling with the exact same pitfalls of a billion bots generating garbage games content.
If you’re wondering how bots can be that prelevent when the game is $20. If you bought a $0.75 skin in the dev test, which you could just click and be allowed in on, you owned the game. We had “3k” players at a point during the dev preview, and only 80 total on servers.
Ai slop galore also. And I’m not particularly sure what audience they were catering for with Terry.
One thing that helped Gmod boom was Lua being a more simple language. This time it’s c#, which is wayy more rough for newbies.
This one’s just a guess, but I feel like if a big game did come out of this, and it’s released as standalone - then S&box itself wont actually grow its players from it.
Lastly, there’s a LARGE portion of reviews that are from “Devs” for this game who have never created a single thing, yet have an extremely vested interest in selling their limited cosmetics at high prices, one of the reviews here is even by the infamous mod who was banning people for genuine criticisms that didn’t break any rules (he has “5k” hrs in two years…)
To cap it off - one of their devs just said that’s there’s nothing they can do vs ai. And that they can’t prove games used ai. So the Ai slop game list of right now is permanent.
So in all honesty, run, avoid, flee or whatever. If I didn’t get this game buy buying a cheap skin, I’d feel like I was stolen from, and would have refunded.
So basically its just like Garrys Mod… horrrendously designed and optimized, 32 gb RAM min requirement … for a Source Engine game… supposedly it exists for people to build things in, but the documentation is horrendous, and the community is toxic as fuck… and its kinda technically arguably a scam in fun and new ways.
Yep.
Just like Garry’s Mod.
… theres a reason Garry nuked the Facepunch forums, and that reason was to destroy all evidence of his immense and constant clownfuckery.
Garry nuked the Facepunch forums
How in the FUCK is this the first time I’m hearing about this? It’s been over a decade since I browsed them last, but those were a massively important component of the whole Garry’s Mod community.
I think a big part of the failure, beyond the absolutely massive amount of mismanagement, is that a lot of the stuff that made GM awesome has had it’s “lunch ate” by other development engines and sandbox game systems. Facepunch was never going to be big enough to fully challenge Second Life, or Roblox, or Unity, etc. They had a niche that they should have focused on.
On top of that, there’s a problem that commonly happens with games that have deep modding communities that get “sequels”: All of the awesome stuff that the community spent years building on the last game won’t work with the new one, so there’s not any real reason to switch until the amount of content in the new game (from the devs or the community) passes a critical threshold.
And then changing the underlying creation tools so drastically from the last game by jumping from Lua to C#? Yeah, let’s just throw away most of the skills the community built up!
What a shitshow.
Oh yeah, he nuked that massive repository of technical information, memes, artwork, addons… etc… like, … over a decade ago now?
EDIT:
Sorry, just realized this is a high enough level comment that I shouldn’t wall of text the entire thread.
Commentary!
There are now you know, new Facepunch forums, and I am 99% sure if you talked with Garry or a dev or a forum mod on the new ones, they would just gaslight you and act like the old Facepunch forums never existed, or weren’t important, or that happened eons ago why do you care, etc.
And yes, yeah, Garrys Mod did completely get passed up by other platforms/games.
Back in the early-mid 201x’s, you had a large number of GMod servers, running gamemodes, that also talked to some kind of mySQL server, that then also talked to a website/forum/storefront.
You sign up on the website, give your SteamID, and then either through paypal on the website or something, purchase access to some kind of on server in game content or ability or player class or whatever.
People made all that shit on their own, I helped a few people with their own / my own API layers amd DB configs … my initial idea was to just use a secondary SQL database to be able to have like uh, a bunch of items on the map or in container objects in the map, or player inventories and stats… it just made more sense to handle dormant but potentially usable/interactable items … not actually constantly in the main server think loop (especially not as physics objects JFC).
It was basically an optimization, from my point of view, to run a large/complex map/gamemode.
But others quickly figured out that you could literally monetize in game items via basically further developing a bridge between the game server and not the game server.
(Hilariously, you could maybe say that this constitutes a precursor to the NFT-ingameitem paradigm that would later at least be ‘theorized’ by a bunch of even less technically competent people, lol, as very often, those in game items could be stolen from a player in game, or traded for some other in game item, via basically rp or a runescape-esque player trading system, etc)
I’m… still pretty sure that was all illegal, running a server that accepts real money… you don’t own the rights to the game in that way, but oh well I guess!
Anyway yeah, Garry hated that other people were making money this way, but then eventuslly decided that… he wanted to do that!
So everyone with a pioneering method is now either part of his clique and working with him… or all their shit gets nuked.
He is a massively unscrupulous incompetent hypocrite asshat.
Garry is fundamentally a troll.
Like… he’d very often spend more time in flame wars on his own forum… than doing actual development.
Just to clarify, it is a 16gb min ram requirement, not 32gb, at least according to the steam page
It’s open source so I don’t know if you can really call it a scam.
Use the same method Steam uses to push AI off their platform: Let people vote.
Literally just a simple thumbs up/thumbs down that tracks both numbers separately, or does what reddit does and shows you a total with the downvotes subtracted from the upvotes.
Maybe even add a system where if something receives so many negative votes, after some time it just gets removed from the platform?
Maybe even add a system where if something receives so many negative votes, after some time it just gets removed from the platform?
Please no! Do not remove games. Just let people know what the rating and opinions are, let people choose if they want it or not. We are fighting so games do not get removed from stores and you suggest doing that? There are games the majority of users don’t like, but some do. And sometimes games with bad ratings become good games with good ratings.
I could have expanded on that a little more. I just meant to not clutter up their storefront or whatever. I’d make it so it could be re-published
That can be achieved with an algorithm instead. No need to remove games from a store, no matter how bad or unpopular they are. Also removing and republishing a game would render any links to the game unusable, and remove bad ratings and reviews of the game, so there is nothing won with this, only lost. It would only add to the confusion.
The problem with pure voting like that is often that it can be gamed. It helps to know the number of downvotes, for sure, but bot farms will game ratings real quick. Of course, that’s a problem with any metric, but it means that public voting doesn’t solve the problem.
It’s just a roblox clone for kids, since Garry confirmed anything even remotely adult will be banned.
That is a promise he is literally incapable of keeping.
If he has 0 strategy for filtering out AI gen content… how on Earth is he going to decide what constitutes adult content, and then block that?
Army of content reviewers, like mainstream social media?
… An AI filtering system?
Just him and his crew making random decisions based on who annoys them vs who supplicates themselves to them?
I bought and played the game a couple of hours. It has a ton of potential, but yeah, I ended up giving it a downvote on Steam. The AI slop isn’t as big of an issue as the rest honestly, the game has terrible performance even on lowest settings and connecting to servers often fails. There’s also a lack of good games which is a little expected since it’s relatively new but still disappointing, because there really isn’t that much you can play.
I get what they were trying to do with this, but after playing around in the editor for a bit. Its a janky, slow, pos. Just learn a free open source engine.
Godot 4.7 will probably be out of beta sometime in May, btw, judging from their pace of dev to beta builds.
