You might have heard of the bizarre open world survival game known as Rust. First announced last year, the popular indie effort has finally introduced female characters into the game.
The only thing is that you have literally zero say over whether you’re a man or a woman. Rust will assign your character’s race, gender, general appearance, even genital size based on your Steam ID – then that’s you forever.
Developer Facepunch Studios talk more about the decision on their blog. Naturally, a lot of people may be unhappy about playing as a gender they don’t identify with. In an odd bit of logic dodging, Facepunch argue that nothing has changed because half the Rust population were already living with those feelings. Okay…
Eurogamer spoke to Garry Newman (not that one), one of the developers on Rust, who explained the controversial change.
Newman said:
We were talking about how we hate how players are recognizable by their names floating over their heads. How, in an ideal world, players would be recognizable by what they look like. And this would be consistent and follow them around permanently.
To be fair to Rust, you never had a choice in what you looked like anyway. You were just a bald naked white guy. At least now there’s more variety, even if you don’t get to revel in that variety.
It should also be pointed out that your character model, race, and gender have no impact whatsoever on your stats. You’ll be just as shit at Rust regardless of whether you’ve been assigned a man or a woman. Equality.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.