Fallout 76‘s Locked & Loaded update is live now, bringing with it character loadouts players can freely swap between and the ability to build a second home, plus the start of season 4 content and a ton of quality of life features.
There really are a lot of additions listed in the full update notes, but the most significant seems to be the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. loadouts. After level 25, you’ll be able to use Punch Card Machines to swap out stat and perk selections and to save your choices as custom loadouts. This means you can easily swap between different character builds for different kind of missions. There’s no cost to changing loadouts, and you can build a Punch Card Machine in your own camp.
You can now build a second camp, too. Every player now has an extra C.A.M.P. slot – Fallout 76’s version of player housing – and can swap between the two. Only one camp can be active at a time while the other is “stored”, and stored camps don’t generate any resources. There are changes to the items you can construct within your camp, too – for example, vending machines, fridges and fermenters all have a shared inventory across both of your homes.
In terms of missions, the update brings the start of season 4, which resets the Scoreboard in which players can climb through 100 ranks in order to unlock new items, perks and in-game currency. If you unlock a particularly nice outfit but don’t want to wear it, you can now display it on a mannequin in your camp.
There are also new Daily Ops – which are randomised, repeatable missions that change each day – amongst which is a new Decryption mode where players must disable Radio Interceptors by taking down “Code Carriers” and surviving increasingly difficult waves of enemies.
Fallout 76 had a rough launch – Nate described it as feeling like a dying, late-2000s MMO in his review – but like so many games these days it seems to have won an attritional war with players by relentlessly updating and adding new stuff to the game. I’m still not going to play it, mind you, but I’m happy that more people seem happy.
Locked & Loaded is an 11GB update on Steam (22GB from Bethesda.net and a whopping 63GB from the Microsoft store, weirdly) and is available now. There are more additions I’ve not mentioned here.