Fallout 76 season one, The Legendary Run, kicked off yesterday, and it's not started so well. As players are collectively taking on the role of heroic Captain Cosmos against Evil Dr. Zorbo through the medium of boardgame-style season pass progression, many will have encountered one particular 'Legendary Reward' that's turning out to be anything but.
The 'Ammopoints Ammo Converter' is the fourth of 100 season pass unlocks until The Legendary Run ends in mid-September, and it doesn't take many daily and weekly challenges to get the S.C.O.R.E. points—the new currency that progresses each new season pass—needed to get that far. And now that players have done that and added the contraption to their C.A.M.Ps via the 'Resources' section of the build menu, many are coming away frustrated.
Ostensibly the machine makes plenty of sense: It offer players with an excess of a certain ammo type the chance to trade it in for points, which can be redeemed towards a new ammo type of their choice—or "turn other people's trash fire into your firepower", as the game puts it. However, criticisms of the machine's design and UI are currently dominating conversation on r/fo76.
They have a point, too. The decision to have players trade their ammo on a terminal is certainly an odd one, and rounds can only be swapped in arbitrarily small increments. While that's fine for a new player, for veterans who've been hoarding thousands of a certain ammo type, it's laborious to say the least. That's made worse when the menus slow to load and take you back to the home screen after you've traded one small portion of unwanted rounds.
While it's hardly as calamitous as some of Bethesda's other Fallout 76-related gaffes—the canvas bag debacle and the announcement of Fallout 1st spring to mind—I understand the frustration at being disappointed so early in a new battle pass. Like many others, I suspect, a new progression system and the promise of a treasure trove of new loot can get me hooked on a game, or return to it, all over again.
But that's not the only thing that's rankling Fallout 76 players at the start of its first season; Doing the maths shows that any player hoping to get to rank 100 before the season ends had better be prepared for the commitment. Redditor maybe-some-thyme worked out that you need roughly 220,000 S.C.O.R.E to max out the pass and completing every daily and weekly challenge for ten weeks awards around 215,000.
While mid-September is really 11 weeks off, that still assumes that the game doesn't bug out and actually register all the challenges correctly as complete, which seems optimistic. Of course, the seasonal model is free and players aren't necessarily owed all the season's cosmetics. However, if you're someone who does want everything and don't have the time to earn it all, you can always, err, pay real money for Atoms to put towards higher tiers.
That said, while The Legendary Run has got off to a rocky start, it's possible that if aggravated players are loud enough, Bethesda may address annoying items like the ammo converter. The company has showed more willingness to take fan feedback into account of late by widening PC access to the PTS in the Bethesda launcher, at least.
Either way it looks a small bump in Fallout 76's road to being a much better game than first released in 2018. I agree with Chris when he says that Fallout 76 finally feels like a Fallout game following the NPC-filled Wastelanders overhaul, despite the addition of some irksome new items.
