Multiplayer survival game Rust continues to get bigger and deadlier with each passing patch. This month's update, called Road Renegades, adds new vehicles like motorbikes and bicycles, a traveling vendor in an armored truck, and…
Oh, no. Oh, no no no. The update also adds handcuffs.
Rust players can take each other prisoner now. Excuse me, sorry, I'm just going to have a vivid and traumatic flashback to playing DayZ in 2014.
- Rust goes medieval with the Primitive update: siege weapons, swords and shields, and maybe a few jewel-encrusted assault rifles
- Rust's crafting update gives the survival sim real-time food cooking and pies to rival Monster Hunter, but the tastiest treat is the ability to make and throw 'bee grenades'
There I was, having just spawned on the beach with barely enough time to even look around, when three heavily geared players suddenly showed up and surrounded me. Spawn camping was nothing new in DayZ, and I didn't particularly care if they just shot me because I could respawn without losing anything, but they had more than that in mind. They told me to put my hands up, then had me kneel down. They handcuffed me—neither the first or last time that would happen to me in DayZ—and then one of them used a blood collection kit on me. The moment my blood was drawn, they executed me with a single shot to the back of the head. It was cold, all the more so because it was so efficiently done.
Not that Rust isn't absolutely brutal, too, and I'm not saying handcuffs aren't a logical addition to the multiplayer murderbox. It's just that being handcuffed and at the whims of other players can pretty quickly progress to a level of ugly that goes beyond just getting beaten or shot to death.
If that wasn't enough, there's also a prisoner hood you can put on a handcuffed player to not only restrict their actions but their vision, as it'll block everything but a small sliver at the bottom of their screen. What can you do with someone who's handcuffed and hooded? Abduct them, of course! Load them onto one of the new bicycles or motorcycles that come in the update—there's a three-wheeled bicycle variant that has a seat you can force a prisoner into, and the motorcycle has a sidecar. Being hooded stops players from looking at their map so they won't know even where you're taking them. Scary!
Prisoners won't be entirely helpless, though, because there's a "minigame" that allows them to eventually break free. It's not much of a game, really: it looks like you just hold down the attack button while a meter fills, and when it does, the handcuffs break. But if someone pushes or injures the handcuffed player, it will reset their escape progress. So if you're handcuffed, be prepared to be shoved around a lot, too.
At least the update adds someone new to Rust who won't try to cuff and abduct you: a traveling vendor. In a truck that broadcasts music like the ice cream man (but has armor plating and laser-guided turrets mounted on the roof) this vendor will appear on roads selling resources and weapons, driving around for 30 minutes at a time, and stopping if you run over to his truck to buy something.
As always, ShadowFrax has a great breakdown of Rust's July update and there's even more information on the Rust devblog.
