Rust Console Edition Finally Arrives In May, But There's A Downside

Popular survival game Rust has historically only been available to PC gamers, but that's finally changing. The team behind the game has announced Rust Console Edition, meaning PlayStation and Xbox owners will finally be able to get in on the fun. The downside? Only the Xbox One and PS4 will be supported at launch.

The team behind Rust notes that the Console Edition is 'based' on the PC game, but that there are some necessary changes that result in a 'completely separate and unique console player experience.' The game has to be optimized to run on the lesser hardware offered by consoles, for example.

The Double 11 team explained in a blog post:

To accommodate the game on these systems, some light optimisations wouldn't cut it! So the team needed to rip apart and rewrite major engine subsystems within Unity. Some of the systems we designed and refactored helped us a lot, improving the performance of the game over on consoles.

The team also had to work to reduce the game's load time from a massive 45 minutes to a more tolerable one-minute timeframe. Three years of work have gone into the console port and the result is, according to Double 11, a game with which 'we could not be more happy with the results.'

Rust Console Edition players can expect regular updates to the port, including the addition of new content over time. However, the console version will have its own update roadmap separate from the PC game. The game is available to preorder now and will be released on May 21.