I would love to see some curated and random missions pop up as options on the free flight map so that when I’m looking for somewhere to fly from or to they would be there as options as well. Along with the photography objectives and stuff, it would be nice if all the activities were accessible right from free flight.
I was initially excited for career mode but after giving it a try I realized that I have neither the free time nor the desire to fly Lisa and Lisa around in a Cessna 172 for hours on end just to get to the missions that I’m actually interested in trying. I also have no interest in managing companies and the progression isn’t really appealing either, I just want more reasons to fly and for the flights that I do to be more engaging.
The fact the “Commercial Pilot License - Rotorcraft” is just out of reach from your starting funds is particularly painful. I’ve also watched YouTubers get completely lost and confused as to how they can take the CPL-Rotorcraft: not realising that although it looks like you can take the CPL-Rotorcraft after your PPL, you cannot: you must take CPL-Airplane first and grind in a Cessna for the funds. Some have even complained that the game is bugged because of it: not surprising, it’s giving you a choice you cannot actually take.
Voted for this as well.
One huge, very important issue I’ve not seen anybody bring up yet:
Missions being locked behind career makes them regionally location bound.
Tired of your usual career locations and want to go fly rescue missions in New Zealand for a change? Or medical transport in, let’s say, Ghana? “Well too bad, you haven’t been to NZ or Ghana in your career yet, no can do!”
Where you’ve chosen your HQ to be, areas where you’ve flown to before and where the first missions of each new type take place make up the artificial jail in which the sim keeps you locked in. You are forced to painfully slowly make your way to all 195 countries on earth, and all their regions, to gain the right to fly missions anywhere you want.
Due to confining missions within career mode, MSFS 2024 deliberately limits where pilots can enjoy their favorite mission activities, even though it is capable of spawning them almost anywhere.
Remember when they first revealed the video snippet of the globe with mission markers all over it? What we got instead is a highly locked-down-behind-a-grind version of this. Absolutely not what I envisioned when I first heard of the phenomenal mission generation capabilities of MSFS 2024. Wasted potential and a massive disappointment. Hopefully I’m not alone with this feeling.
Basically what the title says, I love doing the World Photographer objectives, but I like to do them as part of a complete flight, i.e. starting cold and dark at a nearby airport, flying to the destination, taking photos and then either flying back to my starting point or on to another destination.
World Photographer mode unfortunately doesn’t allow this, the only option is to spawn your plane in the air. However, taking the photos in free flight still counts, which is great, so you can make your photo objective part of a complete flight.
But with how things are set up right now, I have to go into World Photographer mode, make note of where I’m going and what my objectives are, and then go back out to free flight mode and set up my flight. So it would be great if I could just see all the objectives on the free flight map so that I could skip the initial step. It would also be really nice if a list of all objectives could be displayed from a menu during my actual flight so that I could ditch my pen and paper notes and see what objectives I’ve already done, and what other ones might be nearby.
As an alternative, maybe we could have the option to actually start cold and dark from a nearby airport in World Photographer mode, but I would really just prefer it to all be integrated into free flight.
Here’s hoping that new objectives will be a regular part of updates (not that there isn’t enough to keep busy for a while already) as it’s a really fun way to add some purpose to my flights and go to some beautiful places that I wouldn’t have gone otherwise.
