Rust devs pleasantly surprised when players don't kill on sight

One of the weirdest and nicest feelings in Facepunch Studios' Rust comes when players don't kill each other on sight and instead become friends, said Facepunch founder Garry Newman in an interview with PC Gamer.

According to Newman, players in the open-world survival game often kill someone as soon as they see them because they're fearful. This is something endemic to Rust's design — Facepunch rejected the idea of creating 'good' and 'evil' characters in favor of letting players create their own roles.

"People should be nice to each other because they get a nice feeling from being nice. There shouldn't be a system hanging around forcing people to be good. It removes a lot of gameplay fun," said Newman.

Instead, Facepunch built a basic feature into Rust that facilitates communication between players, and thus cuts down on wanton murder: voice chat. That's where the warm and fuzzy emotions come in.

"Being able to talk to the other guy and feel them out that way makes a huge difference. There's a lot of this 'tweaking' we can do, kind of social engineering to make people more comfortable with each other," Newman explained. "Every time another player comes up to me in game and doesn't bash me to death with a rock I'm impressed."

Rust is now available for $19.99 on Linux, Mac and Windows PC in an Early Access alpha on Steam.