Late To The Game: Rust

Rust has been out for two-and-a-half years but late last week my friends finally discovered it. Personally, at that point in time, I couldn’t have been less interested in the game. I knew it was another open-world survival game riding the coattails of Minecraft and DayZ. You start with nothing, smack some trees, smack some rocks, make some rudimentary tools and ten minutes later you’re running around with a shotgun or whatever.

Back in 2012ish, a friend and I spent the year in an on/off relationship with DayZ. Eventually we burned out due to how slow the gameplay can be (you’ll spend far too long just smacking trees in these kinds of games) and the improbability of lasting success due to random players killing you from unseen positions. Years later, my brief stint with H1Z1 proved to me that I was still burned out on open-world survival games.

I love the idea behind these survival-based games, but the anonymity of the internet shines brightest when players have the opportunity to kill you without punishment and take all your gear to make the game easier for themselves. There are some great people playing these games, but it only takes one jerk to completely ruin a multi-hour DayZ marathon.

So when my other friends casually mentioned trying out Rust, I politely declined and went about my evening. As the night went on, every time I glanced at my Steam friends list I noticed more and more friends playing Rust. I did my best to think nothing of it. These were the same guys who, a few weeks prior, convinced me to buy Helldivers, a game we played for an hour and have not touched since. Basically, these guys have a very “game of the weekend” mindset, and I’m not interested in putting my wallet on a diet in order to keep up.

There’s nothing wrong with the “game of the weekend” mentality, of course. I’d just rather sink my free time (and money) into something I can really become skilled at, like Smite or Battlefield, rather than just skim the surface of a game for a half-dozen hours. Thanks to my time with DayZ, I knew how open world games work: you spend a lot of time just barely scraping by and then you’re killed by a random person. Or, if you’re lucky, you get a few neat weapons to use, before you’re eventually killed by a random player. There is no real way to improve at these kinds of games, beyond just knowing where things spawn in to loot.

Eventually, my resistance began to crumble when I’d join group voice chats in Curse and hear them excitedly talk about finding someone’s fort, or building up the group fort. They’d announce seeing a hostile player, there’d be a tense silence and someone would cut in “They got me” or “I got them” and the conversation would evolve from there. Regardless of who was killing who, I could tell that every one of them was having genuine fun playing Rust.

Fate has an interesting way of working and the following evening, as I was contemplating picking up Rust on Steam for $19.99, I got an email advertising that Humble was running a sale and one of the main deals was Rust…for under $7.

If that wasn’t a sign, I don’t know what is.

I snagged Rust, installed it, and loaded into the server my friends had been playing on.

The game spawned me in a field completely naked (there is the option the TV-style censor nudity if you wish), with no instructions whatsoever. No surprises there. What I did find surprising was how quickly my friends converged upon me once we all figured out where I was. Rust’s map isn’t very big; you can probably run from one end to the other in under ten minutes. My group of friends all chipped in some resources, fashioned me some clothes, gave me some weapons and told me to follow them back to their base.

My friends were playing on a modded server which provided players with twice the normal resource loot. So in a regular server, for example, hitting a tree with an axe would give you two pieces of wood; in this modded server, hitting a tree with an axe gives you four pieces of wood. Only the resources were affected, everything else was normal.

In their night of playing before I joined in, they had managed to construct a decently sized base. I was immediately impressed by how Rust allows players to customize forts with various walls, defenses, and decorations. The server utilized a mod that allowed the implementation of static images loaded in from online sources, and my friends chose to adorn the fortress with the ominous flayed man sigil of House Bolton from Game of Thrones.

I quickly got to work constructing my own quarters, building a chest to put any weapons or cool gear I discovered in my scavenging of the nearby railway depot, and we pooled general resources in a common room so at any time any one of use could scoop up resources and go to work improving our base’s defense.

The server’s population was small and the players we encountered were surprisingly friendly. We actually befriended one player and welcomed him into our Curse Voice chat, which was cool.

Hours later, we were all feeling sleepy after four-ish hours of playing Rust. It’s been awhile since I have marathoned a game that intensely. We locked up our base, crawled into our sleeping bags (which are essentially spawn points for when you die) and logged out of the game for the night.

At some point in the night, someone broke into our base, murdered our sleeping characters, and stole all of the resources we’d spent hours collecting. Logging in to discover this the next afternoon was infurating.

But, Rust was still fresh and exciting for us.

“We’ll build a better base! A stronger base!” was the theme of my second night of Rust. And we did just that.

The five of us, undeterred, worked tirelessly to hunt and gather resources, building up a new base at a new location. Over a few days the base grew into a fortress, the fortress grew into a sprawling complex, and that sprawling complex rose up to be an intimidating citadel that could be seen for at least a mile in every direction.

Our towering citadel gave us a commanding view of the acres of land around us. Our massive stone walls topped with barbed wire and well-designed defensives strategies kept players from sneaking in or building a siege tower to get over our tall walls. For about three days, we had no trouble from random players.

Then we log in today to find that someone, somehow got into our base and ransacked it completely.

Even the best defensive items are not enough in Rust. Suddenly I felt like I was playing DayZ all over again. I know how it goes from here: “We’ll build another base, a better one!” and then someone destroys it, and repeat. Always chasing the slim chance that our base will somehow live on in server history as a legendary bastion of manpower. When, by nature, these games are designed to ensure that no player is ever truly at the top of the food chain.

At this point, as I’m sitting here typing this, the day our Citadel was hit and ransacked, I’m feeling pretty burnt out on Rust. I’ve owned the game for less than a week, and knew before I even bought the game that this is how I’d end up feeling. Though, raiding other player’s bases (the ones we suspected were harassing us periodically) was very exciting, and fun…so I don’t feel regretful about having bought another survival game. It had it’s ups and downs, and though they were mostly downs, the ups were good enough to keep me optimistic about Rust’s future.

The game is still in Early Access, and the developers are still saying Rust is still in Alpha development stages, even though the game runs better than most games do at launch. I look forward to seeing how Rust progresses in the weeks and months ahead. Who knows maybe I’ll be back into it again this weekend.

Until then, here’s a screenshot of my friends torching a building that two enemy players had barricaded themselves into.

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This is not a final review of Rust, consider it more along the lines of an Early Impressions write-up. An Early Access retail copy of Rust was purchased by the author for the purpose of this post. Rust is currently available for $19.99 on Steam. The Humble Store sale mentioned in this post can be found here, but sale prices may vary.