Rust On PS4 & Xbox One: What You Need To Know

Rust, the post-apocalyptic PVP survival game from Facepunch Studios, was initially due for a release on PS4 and Xbox One sometime in 2020. Since the port’s reveal back in November 2019, those involved were very quiet about what to expect before it eventually got delayed.

In January 2021, Rust was rated for PS4 and Xbox One, given an M rating by the ESRB. That means that an announcement on Rust’s console release date could come pretty much any day now. The game will also work on PS5 and Xbox Series X through backwards compatibility.

Rust is currently in a bit of a purple patch, having just recently had its most popular day in its history with a record amount of players, as well as featuring consistently in Steam’s top 10 most played. Considering the amount of console players who want a slice of the action, you have to expect that the ports will only make the game even bigger than it already is.

At its essence, Rust is a game about crafting yourself a sturdy base to protect it from other players’ raids and also collecting all of the loot to do your best Smaug impression. There are survival elements, such as a need for food and water as well as dangerous wild animals to contend with, but Rust is all about taking on other players for their fortunes, whether alone or as part of a group.

Here’s everything we know about Rust on PS4 and Xbox One so far.

 

A Brief History of Rust

Developed by the minds behind Garry’s Mod, Rust began life as an eerily similar game to DayZ when the survival genre boom was really kicking off. Zombies were part of early plans, but were scrapped.

Rust released into Early Access on Steam on 11 December, 2013 and would stay there until 2018 when it was finally fully released. Rust was a big commercial success from the off, easily eclipsing the revenue of Garry’s Mod within no time at all. Early reception was mixed, though reviewers and players noted that it had potential.

The game went through many different ideas and iterations in Early Access, including changing the blueprints system for something closer to an XP system, though this was not received well by the community and reverted at full launch.

Since its full release, Facepunch have released a regular stream of updates for Rust, some of which include ride-able horses, air travel, scuba diving, and AI-controlled areas where players could trade in peace.

In 2020, Rust is regularly a feature of Steam’s most played and is raking in the cash for Facepunch.

 

When Is Rust Coming To PS4 and Xbox One?

When Rust for PS4 and Xbox One was announced, all we received was a tentative release window of 2020, and that it will be developed alongside Double Even. However, in late 2020 with no news on a release date in sight, Double Eleven announced that it would instead be releasing in 2021.

Beyond that, it’s hard to really pinpoint a release date for Rust on consoles as we haven’t actually seen anything of the game yet — its reveal trailer for consoles featured PC gameplay. Who knows how far along in production the port is.

Speaking tentatively, we’d look to Rust to come to consoles during Q3/Q4 2021, though don’t be surprised to see it maybe even earlier. We’d also be very surprised if Xbox Series X | S and PS5 versions don’t also get announced.

 

What Should We Expect From Rust On Console?

According to Garry Newman, Facepunch head honcho, the studio are looking to avoid a lot of the mistakes that previous developers have made when porting their survival games to console.

“…there’s a lot of rushed, short sighted low frame rate survival games on console and we didn’t want to be in that group. If we release a console version it’s got to perform right and it’s got to play right. It’s got to be the best survival game you can get on a console.”

This instantly brings the likes of DayZ to mind, which was an absolutely disastrous port that didn’t do the game itself justice, though its PC version is hardly a shining beacon of optimisation, either.

As for how this will translate to console, Facepunch may have to make a few concessions to get Rust running relatively smoothly on console at a stable 30fps — it’s really difficult to see it managing above that in terms of frames.

At a guess, we’d expect the graphical quality to be pared back and for things like draw distance to take a hit, as well as for the map sizes and max player counts per server to be limited a little. This is because Rust is a CPU vampire and asks a lot of really powerful PCs as is, so with current generation consoles being a little underpowered, they may need to cut some things down.

There are a few features of Rust on PC that we struggle to see making their way to the console version, too. The admin menu would be difficult to implement and use with a controller, which is the same story for in-game text chat. It’s also quite unusual for console games to get things like private servers, but Garry Newman has confirmed that it will be an option.

In April 2020, a closed beta for Rust appeared on the Xbox One store, though this was later confirmed by Garry Newman to be for internal testing only.

This isn't an awesome joke so we can suprise you.

It's in closed beta so we can test internally.

We have many struggles to overcome until any kind of open beta is possible.

— garry (@garrynewman) April 11, 2020

We will update this over time as more and more concrete info becomes available. While you wait, you may as well check out an interview we did with Facepunch themselves.

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