Bethesda’s Fallout 76, the latest entry in the acclaimed Fallout franchise, was not without its flaws when it released in 2018. Unlike its predecessors, the online action RPG did not receive multiple awards, and instead it was viewed by many to be an unacceptable shift from what had made the series successful and a blatant cash grab with egregiously priced microtransactions.
Recently, Bethesda’s director and executive producer Todd Howard acknowledged that Fallout 76 was a letdown for many players. For example, the game released without NPCs, leaving the wasteland particularly barren of life, an oversight the developer later fixed with the Wastelanders and Steel Dawn DLCs. Like many games that experienced a lackluster launch and reception, Fallout 76 today feels very different from the game many fans wrote off two years ago, and Bethesda intends to continue tweaking the game and improving the user experience.
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Locked and Loaded, the next major update to the game, is slated for release on April 27 but has been available for playtesting on the Fallout 76 Public Test Server since March 12, which is accessible to PC players. The update will introduce CAMP Slots and SPECIAL Loadouts, and these were discussed in detail in a recent video with three members of the Fallout 76 development team.
First, the CAMP Slots feature allows players to build additional CAMPs in Fallout 76, increasing the total budget so that players can expand to new locations and open up more fast travel points. CAMPs in Fallout 76 are one of the more popular aspects of the game, giving players the opportunity to express their creativity, and gamers will now be able to build multiple CAMPs with a variety of themes. The caveat is that only one CAMP can be active at a time.
For Jake Raymor, Senior User Interface Designer at Bethesda, expanding the number of CAMPs a player can own coincides with the overarching theme of Fallout 76, in which a group of survivors rebuild Appalachia. Rather than having a single utilitarian and featureless CAMP, players can now settle down a bit and explore the many Fallout 76 CAMP building and decoration options available.
Also coming in the Locked and Loaded update for Fallout 76 are SPECIAL Loadouts, a feature intended to encourage players to experiment with different play styles. SPECIAL Loadouts allow for a full respec of SPECIAL and PERK loadouts, and players can save the different builds in order to swap between them more quickly and easily than with Fallout 76’s old Move a Point system. Move a Point will be removed from the game, replaced by Punch Card Machines, and these can be found at various locations in the game world or placed in a player’s CAMP. Using the Punch Card Machine is free, and loadouts can be changed as many times as desired.
Fallout 76 is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
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Source: Bethesda