The zombie player survival game Rust is selling like mega hotcakes for its creator Facepunch, reveals Garry Newman. Their intended ‘low-key’ release has knocked them onto their rears thanks to the sales figures.
They’re working with GSP to get more servers up and running for Rust, and to combat DDOS attacks. Zombies are on the way out, as Rust is more player vs. player shenanigans.
It’s possible the team might replace zombies with another kind of enemy, or maybe not, they’re undecided. Zombies weren’t in fact meant to make it into the Steam release.
“We really have been knocked on our arses by sales,” said Facepunch’s Garry Newman, creator of Garry’s Mod. “Our plan was to release the alpha on to Steam in a low-key way and slowly build up steam until the game was in a decent state. But our player counts have exploded our wildest dreams.”
Players are set to be given more means to defend their personage, and for the shuffling undead to be exiled from Rust. ”…the sooner we remove them the less people will miss them”, remarked Newman, but will they be replaced by something? “It’s not something we want to rush into,” he wrote. “Reskinning them so they’re ‘mutants’ instead of ‘zombies’ goes against the whole point of removing them in the first place (which is: we’re not a dayz clone anymore).”
Facepunch want to reward the craftier type of players for coming up with their own solutions.
“They’ll build stairs over a fence. They’ll put a sleeping bag outside the base so when they die they can respawn there, pick up their weapons and carry on,” he said. “We want to avoid adding systems to dissuade these types of behavior. If anything they should be rewarded – because they’re finding their own solutions to problems.”
“We want to find solutions that allow the defending players to find innovative solutions to attacks. Ideally solutions that don’t involve putting a million doors in your house, or building a maze around it.”
Check out the Status Report #001 blog for more on Rust’s future development, or buy via Steam Early Access.
