Make “Career Mode” the heart of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Instead of just being another feature, Career Mode could be THE central experience—something that ties together the grind, the achievements, and the sense of progression.
No skipping. Every milestone should matter. Achievements could be represented as patches you “earn” and display on a leather flight jacket for your pilot avatar—and XBOX Achievement.
On top of that, Career Mode should give us a true home base. A place you return to between flights, whether it’s a hangar, an office, or a headquarters you can decorate. You should be able to choose a career path—cargo, charter, bush, airline—and feel the weight of building that career from the ground up.
It’s an incredible opportunity to right some of the struggles of this title - but the beauty is: it’s not too late. A sim update could enhance Career Mode and make it the true beating heart of Flight Simulator 2024.msfs-2024
Based on Jorg’s disclosure of the high level use case metrics in the last Dev Stream, Free Flight still encompasses more than half of the of sim’s player base, Career just a little over a third. Certainly there’s more room for growth, but Career isn’t necessarily trending to the be-all end-all vision for the sim. Argueably, it gives what MSFS2020 did not have natively - a focused and structured framework in which to conduct flying.
This is because career mode is broken, full of bugs where the sim crashes our planes at the gates and we lose all our grinding money. People have had enough and dropped back into free flight.
Remember then the sim launched career mode was the highlight and the mode, but after 10months of navigating bugs which aren’t getting fixed it’s now become a mode for newcomers until they encounter said bugs and lose their money and realize most of the aircraft in the sim particularly premium delux paid for aircraft aren’t even in career mode. Also no heavies and 3rd party take up has been lackluster too
It’s beyond frustrating how few aircraft are available in career mode, and how many of them are unusably bugged. We’re not able to fix anything ourselves due to the encryption of the cfg files and we’re locked out of adding or adapting anything ourselves due to having to go through the Marketplace for career planes. I finally broke down and bought one in the Marketplace (and the prices are absurd compared to the base game), only to find that it, too, was unusably bugged in career. Every plane for sale in career (new or used) has the same unchangeable livery. It keeps generating missions to the same broken procedural airports. The only crop dusting plane in career is unstable and barely flies. It’s not like they’re not fixing bugs - the release notes for the updates are truly impressive - but some of this stuff is…did they try to actually play it, like, at all, before release?
I just want to fly cargo missions in a radial twin at unnecessarily low altitude in politically unfriendly countries - is that so much to ask?
I’m trying to understand what this means.
Right now I can choose ‘Free Flight’ or ‘Career Mode’.
I love GA sightseeing.
I would also love to have a mode where I can hop into a plane, fly to a destination, shut down, exit the plane (and the sim) then, the next time I start the sim, be right where I left the plane, in the C&D state I left it, with current time/weather. Not sure what to call it - maybe ‘Real life’ mode?
I have yet to explore career mode. Not really interested until user reports tell me it’s working nearly perfectly. Even then, the grind holds little interest. But that’s just me.
So, in terms of ‘centrality’ what would like to see different? Are you talking more about the focus that the developers bring to the sim - the things they spend the most time improving?
Oh?! This is great news. As said above, it could be a super deep center of the whole experience. I dream of the best bits of Neofly and OnAir, but more polished and sleek.
I was just thinking for the careermode, if Asobo decided to add the career part in free flight like free lance jobs, based of the plane you wanted to fly that day and where your base/plane is you could just open the efb and choose freelance, a bit like sky4sim a neofly that way there no limitations and you still get paid that what i thought Asobo was going to do before we even saw the carreer mode then just link it to the fs2024 efb system, also careermode on its own is very lonely, i understand people might say just use that then, which is all fine and dandy being on pc but simmers on xbox should also have the options which can only be done via Asobo/microsoft
I’m one of the few “oddballs” that loves career mode. Yes it has issues and yes I agree that more effort should be put into this to make it an amazing experience.
It is very close to that already. The frustrations expressed by players (lack and bugginess of some planes, buggy takeoffs/landings/ATC etc..).. these are all there. But boy when it’s working it is so much fun.
I love the interactions, the people talking, the ambient music that shows up at the right moment(s). I love that I can see that my plane is dirty, I need to wash it. I need to pay attention to the condition. Land hard, better have your mechanic check out the landing gear. I had my elevator fail one flight during approach because I pushed the hours without getting it checked out.
This all seems to be just about right for me. The costs and rewards seem right. The grind pays off big when you fly the entire flight and don’t skip. You can make mistakes and recover from them.
I still play it but, as others have indicated, it needs to be fixed. I have to believe they can tweak some of the settings without major software changes (looser restrictions on taxi speeding, wrong runway landings when it’s not the pilots fault, etc.).. lots to improve on.
But for now it’s great for me. Let’s make it greater!
The promise of MSFS 2024 was to deliver “meaning” to the sim—real missions, real reasons to fly. If that core mission has failed, then the product must be called what it is: an abject failure. Right now, I’m flying in Career Mode over the desert with my windshield covered in bug splatter. This is what I paid for? Come on.
Thank you. The reveal of MSFS 2024 was stunning to the flight sim community—many of us were shocked given that MSFS 2020 had not yet fully matured. The marketing centered entirely on Career Mode, yet the release feels premature. Asobo should have waited until 2027; instead, this title plays like it has been stuck in beta for years.
Shrug. It’s been raised in the SDK and there are some workarounds. Over one third of the player base seems to think that’s not a showstopper. But to each their own…
I haven’t touched Career Mode, but I’ve read a number of posts where they regularly complain that repair costs and maintenance schedules are way out of line compared to real life.
FACTS! In all my time playing, I’ve only had ONE mission that actually started where the previous one ended. The constant hopscotching, with no ability to establish a true home base, is one of the sim’s most glaring shortcomings. Asobo would do well to consult not only with career pilots but also with developers from other studios—No Man’s Sky, for example, turned around a disastrous launch by making the game purposeful and cohesive.
I currently play with the Pilatus PC 12 in mission mode and I have a charter flight company, but although in the flight plan it puts a height lower than FL 300, the ATC tells me that I must go up the FL 350 on flights, which is impossible in the Pilatus PC 12, I have in the settings the option that the ATC follows the flight plan. Could someone give me a recommendation or if it also happens to them?
I have not seen this at all but I’m only up to turbo props. So for smaller to medium planes, costs seem reasonable in relation to income. I had no problem acquiring 30 million. Now, with that said, I have not yet gone into jets, so who knows.
