I played a lot of FSX and the missions were so much fun. I admit some were a bit silly but sometimes you want a challenge or something more interesting than a standard flight from A to B so I really enjoyed the missions that came with FSX.
When I heard missions were coming to MSFS I was really excited to see how they would go but after trying a few I am pretty disappointed with the experience…
Here are a few of my thoughts but I would like to know what everyone else thinks of them.
- No “difficulty” categories. I would like to be able to be able to pick a mission based on the challenge I am looking for. FSX had this but MSFS just lumps them all in to a category together. I think it would be great if missions could also be sorted by length so I can decide up front if I am looking for a 5 minute flight or something more like 1 hour.
- No charts. I did the flight across the channel from the UK to France which is an IFR flight which you are supposed to use the ILS approach for. There was no approach plate provided which makes this impossible to do properly unless you know how to find one yourself. There wasn’t even a hint from the dialog how to set up for it (freq and course would be helpful) so you pretty much can’t complete this mission unless you go digging for information elsewhere.
- Weather and aircraft state isn’t accurate. Flying the channel crossing mission after I took off I was instructed by ATC that my squawk code was incorrect. They asked me to set it to 1200 but when I checked it was 7000. This isn’t right for an IFR flight in the first place but also since the mission description said I was ready for departure I would expect this to be selected correctly already. I also was prompted by the dialog to ask for takeoff clearance as we were spawned on the runway ready for departure but when I opened the ATC window I was forced to first ask for taxi clearance (even though I was on the runway already) before I could request takeoff clearance. The weather also seems to be a problem - in that channel crossing when I was landing the clouds were way below minimums (probably 50ft) but on the Alaska mission in the sea plane the premise is that the conditions in Dutch Harbour are bad but the cloud base there was at around 2,000ft so I could easily get in VFR…
- Prompts seem broken in some cases. In the mission where you just have to land a C172 on the west coast of Canada I was tracking directly for the airport but got a prompt saying something like “the airport is behind us now and we don’t have enough fuel to stay out here for much longer so turn around and go towards the airport”.
I have only tried a handful of the missions that I was familiar with from my time playing FSX so I’m not sure how the others are but these all so far feel really rushed and pretty broken. In FSX I did these missions without any prior knowledge of how to fly them and they worked pretty well but I think these new missions in MSFS just seem really quickly slapped together and if I didn’t already know what I was doing I wouldn’t enjoy them at all.
I think there is a lot of potential here and missions should absolutely be a part of MSFS but I think the implementation needs to be improved a lot and it was probably a mistake to not include them in the beta testing.