In Rust, players are now randomly assigned a gender. Not everyone is happy about it.
50% Dissatisfaction – Before and After
In the multiplayer survival game Rust, there was a new update that significantly polished the character models. With this improvement, female characters were introduced, who will now populate the game world. However, there is a small (or maybe big) catch: The game decides based on your Steam ID whether you will play as male or female from now on. So far, there is no way to change this manually.
“We understand that this is a sensitive topic for some people. We understand that you might have to play a gender that you do not identify with in real life. We understand that this may make some of you uncomfortable and could lead to you wanting to stop playing the game. However, from a technical standpoint, nothing has changed, as half of the player base has had to live with these feelings all along. The only difference now is that it is decided based on your Steam ID and not your real gender anymore.”
Overall, the new models look much more detailed than their predecessors – even for the men. Here you get a small impression of the facial features and details.
Mein-MMO thinks: It is definitely a bold decision to impose a gender on players like this. Although Garry Newman, the creator of the new models, is also brutally right with the fact that the half of the player base (although there will probably be somewhat fewer women) was already forced into a gender before. It remains to be seen how the fans will deal with this topic – it is certainly an exciting and interesting decision.
Rust has already made headlines twice with such “The Steam ID decides this” decisions in the summer of 2015. Thus, the skin color of the player and the length of his King-Ding-a-Lings are also determined randomly and cannot be set manually.
