Sandbox game mode being broken is a joke
I unfortunately bought and played this game for about 2 hours without reading any reviews. I just submitted for a refund on Steam just now. I have 3,000+ hours in GMOD and have been very exited watching the development. I stopped watching for the last few years though.
After reading up on most of the bad reviews everywhere. I do find a few things a little odd. Especially with some of the main reasons people aren't happy.
- Wiener Model - I don't mind it myself and actually think it's a unique design that does give the game some character. However it's definitely not the greatest choice. I just don't really care either way. Now the fact that they do provide a human model, which doesn't work with 90% of the customization and basically never seems to load when joining servers is a different and stupid thing.
- Market - This caught me by surprise and was the very first thing I noticed on launch. I opened it up and started to see $1-$10 price tags on models that looked like they were ripped right out of your favorite GMOD server. I clicked around and was hoping it was some in game currency, but it's not. The reasoning for this to be the method to pay modders/developers is also flawed IMO. Gatekeeping a player model to be forced to pay money to personalize a player model in a sandbox first game feels like I was actually just charged $19.99 for Roblox or Fortnight.
Performance This one I really don't care or fault them for. It's just expected for early access and it's nothing new for me. I played the Dayz mod on Arma 2 for years at a whopping 16-30 FPS. I know that's free, but it's goes for lots of other games too. This is also an engine that's fairly new and they take lots of time to figure out the ways to optimize correctly. Especially for the scope they seem to be aiming for. I can't say I wasn't surprised though, as loading the RP Downtown map in single player did bring my 5070 TI 16GB to a crawl in certain areas.
Edit: it’s not technically early access which changes my mind on the performance and lack of features.
- My take - So one of the worst offenders I don't see talked about or focused on a whole lot is Sandbox.
How can you ship a game out, where the single most important game mode is entirely broken and unplayable. Lots of the tools will break anything your building, causing them to have no collision and you can no longer interact with them. Which means you cannot save it with the dupe tool.
Then, because the main menu is jam packed with tabs and panels, if you don't follow the correct flow, you silently create an online server (I think, as I don't know If I created it or joined an empty one). Where I then proceeded to spend a good 45 minutes trying to fumble through the broken tools and make something I would make in GMOD 9. Except while doing so, two random people joined in and spawned some entity that spit out errors all over my screen, blasted some dudes monologue, teleported me to spawn, and displayed effects that brought the whole game to a stall. It forced me to end the games process in task manager while blasting sounds.
So let me get this straight. You can purchase cosmetics perfectly fine, yet the game called sandbox, currently ships with an unplayable sandbox where you couldn't even play it in single player if you wanted to?
At the end of the day, lots of the complaints could be written off a personal preference, but you cannot hide the fact the game at it's very base feels like a college students personal project.