I want to reply to this, but felt it was posted to the wrong thread for the conversation it will spawn.
I have not returned to Career Mode for two primary reasons — I’m too stinkin’ busy in real life, and the bugs I keep reading about are more than I want to put up with. Therefore, I’d not even sure you could say I’ve scratched the surface of it, at all, to be able to comment on the missions.
What do you think could be done here to generate more interesting missions?
That’s tough, but a lot more options and flexibility in the mission parameters for starters.
The missions list should be a tabulated job board with more info. Departure, arrival, mileage, runway lengths, duration, start time… sortable columns with filters. There should be dozens of choices with large variety.
Goal oriented missions: Not micromanaged details. Get the cargo to the destination, don’t enforce hold short lines. flight plans, and diversions. The sim should be hands off instead of holding your hand. I should be able to stop enroute for weather, maintenance, or fuel. That’s an automatic mission failure right now.
Continuity: Your airplane should be where you left it, how you left it. Right now, it’s teleported to the mission start in a default parking spot, in a default cold and dark state. If you want to have an employee ferry it for you, great. But I should be able to do all the tasks too. Like, stopping at the pumps for fuel, and taxiing up to the maintenance hangar. You should have the same copilots in Freelance. Right now, you get a new copilot every time. Talk about high turn over rate.
Progression: Not just levels and money, but the missions themselves. Long multi-leg missions should be a thing. Long start and end points that follow a path should be a thing where you pick and plan the legs. Imagine running cargo or doing a ferry flights along the entire western coast of the Americas. Round the world airline transport. A pinboard that shows you where you’ve been with mission types that have the goal of always going someplace new and going everywhere.
No recycled/reused stuff: The NPCs say the same things over and over. AI can be really cringe, but I feel like it could be used here to say something unique. And if that can’t be a thing, maybe they just shouldn’t talk. Recycled details in the mission, combined with the strict parameters, make you feel like you’re playing the exact same mission over and over again. That’s the spell that needs to be broken. It’s a tough problem, but some creativity and ingenuity in making a flexible system is key.
Good post! I would love to see all of your suggestions implemented but especially the “Continuity” section. Getting your plane to your next job should be part of that mission.
Yep, you should be able to ferry it yourself. Or there should be mission types that just pick up from your last stop: delivering the mail, running medicine/supplies from village to village in the bush where you’re dropping one box at each stop instead of an entire load. The flaps should be where you left them. Forget the master switch? Ope, you’re gonna have to have the field mechanic come out and tend your battery if it’s been sitting on since yesterday.
I do love the continuity that’s already there. The fuel in the tanks, the dirt, and wear on the paint. That’s great. They should take it all the way.
Heck you should be able to pick where you get gas from for the best prices.
and I just crashed my 208 for the third time. why? I don’t know! 50 meters before the runway. A window just appeared that the plane had crashed.
I wonder if you hit an invisible object.
I had a “random crash” once on descent. I thought maybe the aircraft stress had been exceeded somehow. The sim should tell you if that’s the case. The turbulence can be so severe, I can see that being a thing.
I got this lovely gem today, a few miles from arrival after a 540 nm flight:
Yaaay. I bought the Sky Courier today after hearing that it didn’t have the 208’s handling problems. Only to discover it doesn’t load the flight plan into the avionics and the autopilot can be flakey.
Why do I play this game?
Lots of people have reported the same with that very aircraft. It could just be that it’s a common aircraft, but there’s also speculation that the 208, in particular, has an extended, invisible hitbox.
I have had 2 CTD in Medium Cargo Career Missions when trying to transfer an aircraft to a location that already has a plane there. Report won’t attach.
Dump their garbage AI that can’t talk and rent Amazon’s Alexa.
Extend the ranges. Why can I only get 1.5 to 2 hr missions on my 172 that has a 6 hr range?
That’s about my only complaints. I’ve been happy doing many missions with no issues aside from the asinine way the AI talks and… I’d like longer missions.
Edit: And make the option available to have missions at every airport. I’d love to hop and jump across the world making money without fast jumping my plane all over. Realistic? Doubful. But I want it anyway.
Exactly this.
For example with Neofly4 in MSFS 2020 during the flight it was easy to sort out issue with fuel, when I overplayed my hand taking too much cargo and underestimating fuel volume for flight. I could find appropriate airport on the second half of flight, reroute myself to it, contact to ATC, negotiate landing, refuel and continue with my route.
Not to mention with Neofly one could stack jobs with big planes carrying a few thousands of lbs of useful payload, so you could plan general route, figure out which airports you can visit during the flight, take a few jobs, load cargo and proceed to the nearest airport in chain.
Unload cargo, take off and fly to the next one.
There was a possibility to take another job right at the airport where you’ve landed and unloaded first portion of cargo and deliver it to the next destination.
And if there is no job from current airport to the next one, you could check for wares which are sold in the current airport and bought in the next one.
If there is a positive price difference, you could buy some wares and resell these in the next airport for additional profits.
That was very similar to the X game series (X3: Reunion, X4: Foundations and previous titles starting with X:BTF), where player tried to maximize his profits and avoided running trading routes with half-empty cargo bay.
Did 4 flights yesterday. 3 were tough but I landed in one piece even with good rating.
C172 with 48 knots crosswind really is a hard job, ok mission accomplished.
But flight 4…: started the mission and the plane immediately made a roll upside down.
55kts wind were just to much!
And that’s with a one start difficulty 
Get rid of plane crashes while taxiing, it’s fine for me to taxi through parked planes, but if I hit an invisible object it’s an instant crash. It would also alleviate some of the missions where your parking spot is amongst trees.
The UX is one thing I’ve been thinking about - how the current one seems more like a draft than an actual release candidate
Why can I not filter by airplane? By mission type? By payment (nevermind something like credits/30 minutes)? Why does my briefing not have the altitudes the mission wants me to be at, only giving them to me around 1NM early? And those are just early-game gripes, haven’t unlocked companies yet to dive into that potential mare
That’s not the problem, the “AI” (using the term loosely) is just a set of scripted lines with a few variables like [PoI name] or [plane name], a different voice won’t remedy the lack of said writing. May help with anglicized pronunciations of words though
The absurdity of this is incredible.
I cannot believe they did nothing to improve collision detection for 2020.
When I loaded the Tech Alpha and watched AI aircraft taxi through my aircraft, a bus drive through my aircraft and saw the over abundance of ground crew walk through my aircraft, I came here and made a post about how hard I was trying to remind myself that this is an alpha version of the sim.
Fast forward and it was not an alpha version at all, but a stripped down version of precisely what we were being sold.
And they sold us an alpha version. Lol
Nearly 1900 posts in this thread now, and most of it just complaining about the absurdity of the state of career mode. Would be nice if the devs would provide a statement addressing these problems.
Ha! You’re not new here, you know that will never happen.
Hey, I can hope for a Christmas miracle, right???
Then there’s the issue of not being able to find the ATIS frequencies via the ATC menus anymore… or from the EFB in most cases…
You can usually get your ATIS info from the charts on the EFB.
