Fallout 76’s newest season offers the usual rewards, including new player cards, extra atoms, and weapon skins. But for players willing to grind (or with money to burn), you can unlock something a bit more nautical: Dolphin power armor.
Why does Fallout 76 now have dolphin-themed power armor in it? Well, let me explain. Each season of Fallout 76 contains a scoreboard, which is Bethesda’s name for a battle pass. Each of these scoreboards and seasons are themed around a comic book-like storyline, often involving space and superheroes or villains. The current season, which started July 7, tells the story of when adventurous historian K.D. Inkwell journeyed to the far future and discovered that mankind had been enslaved by a super-smart race of humanoid dolphins. *Insert dramatic music here!*
Because this season’s scoreboard theme is dolphin-related, some of the rewards you unlock as you rank up in the battle pass are delphinus in nature, including some dolphin-esque paint jobs for your various power armor suits. But the real star of the season, if you like weird armors based on marine life, can be found when you reach level 88 of the scoreboard. Once that rank has been achieved, you get “M.I.N.D Power Armor Paint,” which is much more than its boring name implies. This item fully modifies the look of whatever armor you equip it on and turns you into God’s most shameful mistake, a strange dolphin-human-armor hybrid.
Even more dolphin-based rewards await you if you reach level 100 at the end of the scoreboard. At that point, you get an even cooler, meaner-looking dolphin suit. If the last dolphin armor was a cute and cuddly mini-whale, this level 100 armor is instead more like the asshole dolphins from that Simpsons episode.
Because these power armor mods are so far down the scoreboard, many players haven’t yet unlocked them, so there’s not a huge amount of community discussion about them, at least not yet. Some players are excited for the rise of a dolphin-human army in Fallout 76, while others hate the new armor with a passion. I asked a dolphin for its thoughts on the suit and this is what it told me: “Krrrtttt kkrrttt krrrrrttt. Ehhk Ehkkk!” Couldn’t have said it better myself.
There is of course the question of whether this dolphin armor goes too far and jumps the shark for Fallout 76. (Or jumps the dolphin.) But considering how weird and wacky things have gotten in previous games, even before Bethesda took over, I’m not convinced. It’s weird, sure, and it doesn’t quite make sense if you think about the lore implications of it. But also who cares. You can fight aliens in these games. Things have always been a bit strange in the Wasteland.