Career Design Direction

Discussion Hub Activities, Career & Challenges
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A slow Monday at work and earlier reading of another Career mode thread inspired me to brain dump my ideas on MSFS’ career mode. It’s overly dramatic for sure, but thinking about “what could have been” when it comes to career mode is quite depressing to think about.

My “Career” idea is as follows:

Rather than a procedurally generated career, let’s pivot to a “Campaign” type of career. There is absolutely no substitute for the pacing, narrative immersion, and charm of hand-crafted missions like we had in Flight Simulator X. A structured but flexible career mode featuring bespoke scenarios would be an incredible addition to future iterations of the simulator.

  • The user selects a “Career Path”. Users are not locked to a single career path, they can jump between paths at any time.
  • Each career path is roughly 20 hours of content. Sounds long, but when you really think about it, that amounts to only about 2 dozen scripted missions of varying length, with only a few minutes of written voice acting being required. This isn’t like a Call of Duty campaign that requires constant action & writing. Most of the time spent in the flight sim campaign is good ole’ fashioned flying in silence, towards a goal.
  • The start of each career path has a couple of basic training missions to familiarize the user with the aircraft and type of flying they should expect in that career path, with the later missions becoming increasingly difficult.
  • Career Paths include the following: Sport Pilot, Private Pilot, Helicopter Pilot, Contract Pilot, Airline Pilot, Military Pilot

Sport Pilot -

Examples from FSX: Tutorials 1-3: Air Creation Trike Ultralight basics and navigation. Introduction to Soaring & Austrian Alpine Soaring Course: Learning ridge lift and thermals in the DG-808S.

Private Pilot -

Examples from FSX: Midwest Fly-in: A relaxed VFR flight in a Piper Cub to a local gathering, Sitka Approach, Intro to Mountain Flying: Navigating a Cessna 172 through challenging topography and shifting weather, San Juan Island Run: Flying friends on a sightseeing trip in the de Havilland Beaver.

Helicopter Pilot -

Examples from FSX: Helicopter Basics & Maneuvers: Learning to hover and auto-rotate in the Robinson R22, Resort Supply & Catalina Day Spa: Precision flying and VIP transport in the Bell 206B JetRanger, Oil Rig Transport: Navigating over open water to land on a tiny, oil rig helipad.

Can be bolstered by the new MSFS 2024 features like aerial construction, SAR, aerial firefighting

Contract Pilot -

Examples from FSX: Tokyo Executive Transport & Telluride Landing: Flying high-value VIPs into challenging airports in the King Air 350 or Lear 45, Africa Relief: Delivering humanitarian supplies in a rugged Douglas DC-3, Jet Truck Drag Race: A bizarre but thrilling stunt/test pilot scenario racing a jet truck in a Learjet 45.

Can be bolstered by the new MSFS 2024 features like Agricultural flying, Air Ambulances, etc.

Airline Pilot -

Pretty self explanatory. Examples from FSX: Transitioning to Jets: Learning the ropes of commercial flight in the CRJ-700, Rome-Naples Airline Run: A scheduled A321 passenger route, Monsoon Approach: Battling severe weather to land a Boeing 747 in Singapore, Caribbean Landing: A visual approach into Princess Juliana International Airport over Maho Beach.

Military Pilot -

Examples from FSX: Intercept: Scrambling an F/A-18 Hornet to intercept a rogue “aircraft”, Carrier Practice: Nailing the glideslope to trap a wire on a moving aircraft carrier, Space Shuttle Landing: (From the Acceleration expansion) Escorting the shuttle to a landing at Edwards Airforce Base

I could go on and on. Look - I know there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes into creating game modes, hiring voice actors, scripting missions, etc. It’s not as easy as making a forum post like I’ve just done. But man, it’s not hard to say that it would have been better for this sim to have shipped with no Career mode at all rather than what we were given. Another user put it best - the Career mode missions available now are so incredibly repetitive. “Once you’ve flown one type of mission, you’ve flown them all”. A campaign mode that provides hours of content and is actually interesting to play through - jeez, what a concept.

Anyway, glad to have gotten that off my chest. Now I can get on with the rest of my Monday.

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Whew, that’s a really, really slow Monday :snail:. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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That’s a pilot’s course, not a career mode

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I do think the sentiment is right though. We could do with a root and branch reset of Career mode. However, perhaps it needs to have different levels of expertise built in - like sandbox mode, easy, medium and difficult for those who can already fly well in a sim. It also needs the lessons to reflect the same levels of ability to match those 4 modes.
That mode has a massive amount of potential, they just need to give it an entire rethink and Beta test of its own.

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All of that is already there; in each mission, stars appear indicating the mission’s difficulty level.

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Not in the way we mean. There is NO sandbox mode at all. I am also referring to the training which is lacking at best.

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Traditional Career Mode is already done very well by numerous 3rd party products. (For the sake of argument, I’m not acknowledging the issue that console users can’t use these 3rd party products).

If Microsoft/Asobo want their career mode to be taken seriously, they need to match or exceed the functionality of these 3rd party offerings. I think it’s pretty clear that the current implementation does not do that, and I think they’d be better off pivoting into a scripted “mission”-driven campaign. ACES studio did more with less with the FSX missions. Asobo should have the capability of doing something even better.

I personally don’t understand how anyone can enjoy the repetitive AI generated missions, but to each their own.

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The achievement bug bites. You can’t acquire the next biggest plane which makes more “money” than the one you are in. The beating the “system” if you like.
To be sure, Career pilots also fly Freelance a lot - well I do anyway. My hangar is chock full of A2A, PMDG, Black Square, Inibuilds, Carenado, FS Reborn, Aeroprakt, Miltech and a couple of others. I wouldn’t get a chance to fly them if I didn’t. I probably have too many really and can’t give each enough attention - but I sure am trying :grin:

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In my honest opinion Asobo should have a 3rd party manage Career Mode. Asobo is too busy with Sim Updates and the like, and Career Mode is being neglected – very sad for the main feature of this sim. Just like they hired Gaya to make handcrafted airports, and IniBuilds to make the Airbuses, they should also hire a 3rd party with experience in Career-like mods for MSFS.

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Or like Working Title with the avionics.

Agreed - someone else could/would have done a much better job, without relying on AI.

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They can still do it – it’ll take more effort to fix a broken system than to build one from scratch though, I can’t imagine too many devs want to do this…