Rust, the popular survival sandbox game created by Garry Newman's Facepunch Studios, recently got yet another controversial update.
Ever since its release on Steam Early Access, almost two years and a half ago, Rust enjoyed a lasting success. At the end of 2015 the game passed three million units sold, in fact.
The latest update has already sparked a huge debate among its player base, though. It added female character models in the game with a significant twist: gender, among other things like ethnicity and build type, is assigned randomly and permanently by your SteamID. There's no way to change it and the developers actually envisioned it this way.
We understand this is a sore subject for a lot of people. We understand that you may now be a gender that you don’t identify with in real-life. We understand this causes you distress and makes you not want to play the game anymore. Technically nothing has changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings. The only difference is that whether you feel like this is now decided by your SteamID instead of your real life gender.
The excuse, as you can read from the quote above, is that "half of the population" (meaning females) was already forced to play male characters prior to this update. However, many users doubt that females really amount to anywhere close half the population of Rust; besides, it wasn't really up to the players if Facepunch did not provide the option of female characters for almost three years.
Garry Newman, founder of FacePunch and also known for his Garry's Mod, responded on Twitter saying that there's no reason to have a choice and they don't want to provide it.
https://twitter.com/garrynewman/status/720163032802926592
https://twitter.com/garrynewman/status/720171060637863936
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About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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