Generally speaking if a game doesn’t follow a set protagonist like Lara Croft, then you can customise and create your own character. Rust however decided they would rather create it for you. Gary Newman decided that he would create his own impression of the gene pool in his chaotic survival game.
Prior to this, everyone in the game was white and looked more or less the same. The changes to race and other physical features were added recently with a simple announcement: “Everyone now has a pseudo unique skin tone and face. Just like in real life, you are who you are—you can’t change your skin colour or your face. It’s actually tied to your Steam ID.”
So Rust decides your appearance for you, more or less randomly. Choosing your race and face leading to a randomised but hopefully fairly even genepool. Newman went on to say: “We wanted a way to recognise people beyond their names, kind of a fingerprint, We already kind of have this; players recognise each other via their voice, and that’s pretty interesting. So we wanted to push it further.”
At the moment, there aren’t many faces or skin tones, so there is still a lot of identical people around. The plan will be to make the variety infinite with randomly generated combinations and tones.
However the addition of race to Rust has not been welcomed by everyone, well not the addition of race more that people can’t choose their race. Most of the upset comes from people who are suddenly playing as race other that their own. I can’t see they issue embrace your newfound identity people.
It’s also lead to a slight increase in the use of racial slurs in game, which to me is ludicrous and also hilarious, maybe it will lead to better understanding if the shoe is on the other foot.