The game developed by Facepunch, positioned as the spiritual successor to Garry’s Mod under the name s&box, officially released on April 28 in accordance with its development timeline. Before the official release, many players who had access to early builds lost the ability to play and were required to purchase the game at full price.
The game went through a long nine-year development cycle, during which it switched its engine from Unreal Engine 4 to Source 2 and repeatedly emphasized raising the quality standards of development. The creator of Garry’s Mod, Garry Newman, believed that s&box would become the same Garry’s Mod but with past mistakes addressed, new technologies, and closer cooperation with Valve.
Despite broad marketing efforts and calls from the developers to support s&box, the game was heavily criticized by the global community after release. It reached a modest peak of around six thousand concurrent players and roughly half of its reviews on Steam were negative. The game is mainly criticized for its raw state, art style, microtransactions, and a large amount of community content generated with artificial intelligence.
It is worth noting that The Alium Community predicted the unsuccessful launch of s&box in its forecast published on April 25.
On April 29, a planned Garry’s Mod update was released, intended to signal to the community that the development of Garry’s Mod will continue despite the release of s&box.
The update expanded support for ultra-high monitor resolutions for HUD elements. HUD elements were also adjusted for better player comfort, fixing issues that were not present in the original Half-Life 2.
Model color settings for Alyx were updated, the ability to recolor the Arctic Avenger model was added, and eye color customization was introduced for Nova Prospekt guards and shotgun soldiers. Render limits were added to prevent color-based exploits.
Support for installed content from Black Mesa and Military Conflict: Vietnam was added. There had been ongoing speculation around Black Mesa content for several years, but it is now official. Content from Half-Life 2 episodes and Counter-Strike: Source was likely added to the spawnlists of the base game for improved navigation.
The update also adapts many in-game systems to a more modern networking system, which should help servers avoid restarts and improve the overall gameplay experience over extended sessions on the same map.
The Combine APC has been added as a separate vehicle that players can use.
