Indie developer Facepunch Studios Ltd had already angered some players in its survival game Rust when it decided to randomly assign race for every character, and now those same developers have made another controversial decision by randomly assigning gender as well.

“We understand this is a sore subject for a lot of people,” the developers wrote in a blog post. “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 [Rust] 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 gender update has been in the works for a while, but now that it has finally arrived, some of the Rust player base has reacted about how you would expect.

A large number of players are also fine with the change, however, as character appearance had always been randomly assigned, so adding gender into the mix is just one more superficial feature over which players have no control.

In addition to randomly deciding race and gender, Rust chooses other physical characteristics as well, including genital size. No, I’m not joking.

While many arguments can be made against Facepunch’s attempt at forced diversity, there is one gameplay related justification for forcing randomized character appearance on players: Small, dark-skinned characters have a distinct advantage over their enemies due to the fact that they are hard to see and attack. Essentially, they’re like Oddjob from Goldeneye 64.

Although many players may be annoyed at the change, Facepunch does not seem likely to change its stance on randomly assigning race and gender anytime soon.

Image courtesy of Facepunch Studios LTD