UPDATE (4/11/2016 12:24 PM):
Eurogamer had a chance to speak to developer Garry Newman who said that the reason for the decision was to avoid focusing on the player customization over the actual game, and to make players more recognizable based on appearance.
When we talked about character customization we realized that a lot of games that were coming out went that far into the customization that it was 80 per cent of the game. In interviews they were showing the character customization, not the game itself. Which is a bit f***ed. So we decided we didn’t want to go down that route.
We were also 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…We landed on randomizing player’s appearance and locking them to it, then working on a bunch of different heads and customization attributes that would make players more and more unique.
Newman also went into detail about how players’ SteamID figure into the random generation. According to him, the ID acts as a seed and the appearance is generated from that seed. It also works out nicely that gender assignment works out to a neat 50/50 split.
ORIGINAL STORY:
The popular early access survival game Rust just added a feature that randomly assigns the character’s gender based on the player’s Steam ID. The response has been, less than positive.
The new player models–including females–are now in, and who you are depends on your SteamID. This update wipes the servers and your blueprints. Have fun!
The addition has been in development since July of last year where the decision to make gender random was first announced, with developer Garry Newman saying players “never had a choice” in the matter.
We’re not ‘taking the choice away’ from you. You never had a choice. A man’s voice coming out of a woman’s body is no more weird than an 8-year-old boy’s voice coming out of a man’s body.
The comments section of latest developer blog is littered with comments from players complaining about the change. This isn’t the first time developer Facepunch has added randomness into character generation, according to Destructoid Rust also randomly assigns male player penis length based on player’s Steam ID.
Character generation in Rust has always been random, so the idea to randomly assign gender isn’t too crazy. Perhaps this was done to make the game feel like a real place, as opposed to a generated game world.