Garry's Mod - A New Look at An Old Game

[Arnox]

After talking about GMod in passing on Discord, it got me curious as to whether Facepunch made any real improvements since I last played it. I have seen news about constant updates for it in my Steam feed and I know that when I last powered down the GMod server, they were working on a major 64-bit update to the game executable. I'm sure they must have done some cool stuff by now. So, I installed and started the game up again. And as I was going through the game and finished inspecting it, a somewhat irrational anger suddenly filled my breast...

This game is still the SAME GAME AFTER OVER 15 YEARS OF UPDATES.

And you know what, maybe this wouldn't be such a big deal if the original game was already at least mostly built out, but IT'S NOT. Let's go over just a few things, shall we? Just to start this off right, let's talk about how there's NO OPTION for unlimited ammo EVEN NOW. Such a basic ass option for a SANDBOX GAME should be in this game yesterday. Last year. Last DECADE. Facepunch, tell me something. Why did I have to script my own dead-ass simple Unlimited Ammo add-on and why couldn't you have added a simple little checkbox and a quite literally 3-line chunk of code for it?

15+ years of updates, guys...

Oh, but it gets better. You know, GMod is built straight off of Half-Life 2. Cool! So where's Deathmatch mode? Or maybe the original HL2 DM maps? Maybe just a way to keep track of frags??? Nope! All removed. Why? Who the fuck knows. So we got HL2 enemies, weapons, items, vehicles, and characters. But NONE OF THE MAPS OR EVEN THE IN-BUILT GAMEMODES. Because they were all removed. And never added back in. Even after 15+ years... Fine. So what DO we have? Sandbox mode and... Trouble in Terrorist Town.

15+ years of updates...

Fine. Maybe they heavily improved the stability and functionality of the prop tools. Back when our server was running, we actually had to have a dedicated add-on running that would make sure that the server didn't insta-crash with props and/or dupes going crazy. So I went ahead and spawned a dupe that I knew was pretty intensive. And oh, look, check it out! The game still bugged out with the framerate going into single digits with the props madly flying everywhere and glitching out. But maybe they added some convenience tools! Maybe you can now easily attach anything to a prop... Hahaha... No. Same fucking tools. Same functionality.

15+ years, guys...

Fine. Maybe they added in better admin and player management tools. Wanted a tool to simply make others players admins? Garry's Mod originally didn't have any! Yep, you only had the garrysmod/settings/users.txt file and that was it. Don't like it? Too bad. Download an add-on, pleb. But hey, it's 2023 and I'm sure that are... Hahahaha... Hehehe... No.

15+ FUCKING years, guys.

FINE. Maybe they at LEAST added in more maps- Hahahahahahahaha...

15+ big ones, guys.

There is at least one thing that it looks like they did finally finish (Maybe???) and that is the 64-bit build. It definitely ran kinda better, but not massively so. In the end... I don't know. It's not enough. The rest of the game is still so bare of improvements that it's hard to get excited about this, even if it is, in fairness, a subtantial update. I mean, holy fuck. Even UT2004 got a major ping compensation and DX9 update through the Ballistic Weapons Pro team. And that's a game that Epic Shit Games is trying to actively kill. Halo 3 even got almost completely reverse engineered and retooled for El Dewrito. And what did GMod get in all this time? Well, it runs a new version of Chromium, guise...

Maybe I'm so damn mad because all of this shit is such an incredible and utter waste of potential. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that when we had the GMod server up, I didn't have some good times with it. In fact, during those rare times when GMod came together, it was truly something beautiful and incredibly fun. But fuck me if I didn't have to practically wrestle around with the game via installing and configuring a ton of third-party add-ons just to force it to do what we wanted. Even just for basic ass things! And even THEN, there were some things that just either could NOT be fixed or would be way too much of a pain in the ass to fully implement without native support for it.

The gaming industry needs another Unreal Tournament. It needs a vastly improved Garry's Mod 2. Hell, if they just wanted to leave the first GMod alone and work on a second, I wouldn't even be mad. It might have even been the best way to go. But they didn't want to do that and instead made the decision to further update the game. Fine. Then UPDATE THE GAME. Make it better. You guys had so much opportunity to make GMod truly something special. I mean... The Hammer editor fucking sucks, but whatever. We could have worked through that somehow. After 15+ years though, I think it's pretty clear to me that you're all not interested in the slightest and just want to sit around releasing security updates for the rest of time.

 

[Battousai]

Were you actually expecting a game that is basically a massively broken sandbox with a lot of potential to actually get any of those things? Almost all the stuff you are talking about was added by modders via the workshop on Steam or external mods, Gmod was always carried by its community never by Valve except when they do random small fixes or Garry himself except at the beginning.

It has been over 16 years since the release of this thing, Valve is pretty much done with it except to get some royalties, Garry left long ago, the game is ridiculously cheap to buy even without a sale, and nowadays most people don't even know about this game. The majority of people who played this are grown up and left to greener pastures. The younger gamers don't know and don't care about this game since its old and they still would need to buy it in order to experience it, unlike the only other old Valve game TF2 which is F2P and they can dive straight into that. Point is that Gmod is old news and the powers that be are not willing to invest in it in order to make it relevant like you would like.

 

[Arnox]

Were you actually expecting a game that is basically a massively broken sandbox with a lot of potential to actually get any of those things? Almost all the stuff you are talking about was added by modders via the workshop on Steam or external mods, Gmod was always carried by its community never by Valve except when they do random small fixes or Garry himself except at the beginning.

It has been over 16 years since the release of this thing, Valve is pretty much done with it except to get some royalties, Garry left long ago, the game is ridiculously cheap to buy even without a sale, and nowadays most people don't even know about this game. The majority of people who played this are grown up and left to greener pastures. The younger gamers don't know and don't care about this game since its old and they still would need to buy it in order to experience it, unlike the only other old Valve game TF2 which is F2P and they can dive straight into that. Point is that Gmod is old news and the powers that be are not willing to invest in it in order to make it relevant like you would like.

Yeah, but Valve doesn't actually have much at all to do with GMod's development. Not even in the beginning. It's all Facepunch Studios who run its development. And for 15+ years, Facepunch has been doing fuck all and leaning entirely on add-ons for the most basic shit.

 

[Battousai]

Yeah, but Valve doesn't actually have much at all to do with GMod's development. Not even in the beginning. It's all Facepunch Studios who run its development. And for 15+ years, Facepunch has been doing fuck all and leaning entirely on add-ons for the most basic shit.

Same answer though, the community always carried that game, Facepunch probably doesn't want or feel that they even need to lift a finger because they know that the people playing and modding the game will do it for them eventually.