Career Mode in MSFS 2024 – A Huge Opportunity That Needs More Love

Discussion Hub Activities, Career & Challenges
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1

I want to share some thoughts as someone who is actively playing Career Mode every day, both actively flying and running passive income with my own airliners.

I’m not a casual user of this mode as I’m trying to treat it like a real system. I build a fleet, manage risk, plan routes, and invest time into making it work long-term.

And that’s exactly why I feel something important is missing.

Career Mode Needs Legitimacy

Right now, Career Mode is fun, but it doesn’t always feel safe or worth the time investment.

If you spend hours setting up a flight, planning, flying properly and then something outside your control happens (bugs, crashes, system issues), you can lose everything instantly.

That creates a feeling that:

“I can’t fully trust the system I’m investing my time in.”

And that’s a problem for a mode that is supposed to simulate a long-term career.

The Potential Is Huge

This mode has something special.

It could become:

  • A reason to log in every day

  • A long-term progression system

  • A simulation of actually building and running an aviation operation

But for that to happen, players need to feel that:

Their time, effort, and decisions actually matter and are respected by the system.

What Would Help

From my experience, a few areas would make a big difference:

1. Reliability and Trust

  • Protect players from losing everything due to bugs or crashes

  • Some form of compensation or validation system

  • Make outcomes feel fair and consistent

2. More Realistic Mission Structure

  • Better airline-style routes

  • More logical job distribution (especially for airliners)

  • Less “random”, more structured operations

3. Meaningful Progression

  • Clear sense of growth over time

  • Licenses, aircraft progression, or career paths

  • Something that makes you feel like you’re building toward something

A Simple Thought

Right now, I sometimes feel like I have to work around the system to avoid problems.

It should be the opposite.

The system should support the player.

Final Thought

Career Mode doesn’t need to be completely redesigned.

It just needs more polish, more stability, and a stronger sense of structure.

If that happens, I honestly believe a lot more players would:

  • Start using Career Mode seriously

  • Stay with it long-term

  • See MSFS 2024 as more than just a flight simulator

It could become something people truly invest in.

Thanks for reading.

2

You echo the thoughts of all of who play this mode. Or should I say, because I have stopped now, used to play. Stopped because of all the bugs and credit losses etc, etc.
When it is fixed, I will resume.

3

The state of play in career mode hasnt really changed since launch. The performance of the Sim has improved but the career mode bugs have been there since 2024, plathora of bug threads, feedback logged, bug logged and still no meaningful fixes to what you have stated as such there is no trust, it’s a lottery what bug will crush your mission, time and money. Then they released a PS5 version with the same bugs, further expanding their audience into the vortex of career mode frustrations. This is like launching a new meal but it’s still too rare to consume. There is nothing in the current beta meaningful that will fix the bugs, provide some simple QOL career mode improvements (liveries) or the heavy certificate. In its current state it’s more GA career mode, that’s where the least bugs are IMO, but there are still plenty and should have been hotfixes. I mainly moved to 2024 for the career mode, and 15months later finding myself back in free flight more than career mode. But there is some light in the tunnel, new 3rd party GA aircraft and entering the career mode economy, this is a tremendous boost. The QOL improvements are coming from external sources whilst Asobo are focused on other things that will generate income like PS5 marketplace

4

So far I come back harder when bugs brings me back. I don’t give up yet and I’ve already gone too far into the career sitting at almost lever 400 by now and own several airliners and some aditional other businesses. Personally I keep going doing what I love doing anyways but it can always improve. The way I built it is that even if a bug hits me I still make it thanks to massive passive income.

5

I understand your passion for it. It’s an addiction when you get into it. I keep wanting to jump back in but I just so dread losing credits and rep when I’ve done nothing wrong. Also, when you don’t use sim rate or skip function, it’s so many wasted hours and of course since I don’t own loads of airliners, every credit lost “hurts”.

6

Today career passenger VIP flight from LFQE, Rouvries to LSZS, Samedan, 1,5 hrs . Finally getting to Samedan MSFS2024 radio Zurichstill let me stay at 16.000ft time after time with radiocontCT even when i already passing the landingspot announced to land in the tower chat screen. Ok so i turn around to set landing booom over the max speed with 230kt an mission failed. Well you all can understand the frustration and madness for getting screwed here.

7

Many good ideas here, so I’ll share a few thoughts as well.

Career mode does have a lot of potential, but it still needs a lot of work; well, the entire game simulator does, but I’ll get to that later.

For context, I say this as someone who started playing the mode like 2 days ago, rank 38 rep. B. I haven’t bought any aircraft for my company yet because I’m waiting to find out if anything opens up at reputation lvl A, which brings my to my point: you get punished quite harshly for “putting up” with, let’s call them… unfair situations.

A few hours ago I flew a VIP charter mission on a Cessna C400 Corvalis TT. The destination was LF0621, a ~146m (=480ft) runway. When I finally “completed” the mission (which decreased my reputation bar by like 20%) I was like «mmh impossible», so I did a bit of research and realized (as if that wasn’t already clear) that it is mathematically impossible for that aircraft to land there (I’m simplifying a bit, HMO).

Another mission had me fuming because it was a night mission. On a taildragger in which the landing lights are absolutely useless, and on an absolutely dark grass field (I don’t remember what plane and field it was, sorry). As it happens in career, you cockpit setup loses all its “memory” between skips, so if you skipped taxiing you’d have to:

  1. pause the game
  2. go look for the flashlight hotkey, if you don’t know it by heart already
  3. turn on the flashlight
  4. turn on the cabin/instrument lights
  5. turn off the flashlight

and god forbid you have the desire to skip again, because there goes all the immersion again. Now, to add insult to injury, the game kept harassing me about using a taxiway or entering a runway without permission, ON A SEEMINGLY ONE-COLOURED, COMPLETELY UNMARKED GRASS FIELD.

These are just two examples, but what is a person supposed to do? There are 3 options:

  1. Restart the mission until you get it perfect, or close, which sometimes means having to literally just wait for a 20min climb until you get to try and land again (and still, for some of them… I wish you good luck…)
  2. Quit the mission and never run it again, just treating it as “a bug”
  3. Try to complete the mission and get penalized for a trying to play a poorly implemented game mode

Just to make it clear, all your options end up in a punishment for you, the player (the client!!).

Of course, fixing this system is a lot more work than it may seem at first glance. For example, if you want to make sure a plane with 1000ft landing distance doesn’t get paired with a 500ft runway, then you must code the landing distance into the game (or, ideally, just find a way to derive it from the aircraft’s performance, which, given how complex these systems are, I can assure you is no easy task), and if that had to be done for every plane in the game, then it would certainly take a while.

The game lacks a lot of polish. We all want our home city to be in the next update at Pixel Perfect™ 8K Ultra Plus® quality, but fixing what’s broken should be the priority. But I also understand that having 300 barebones aircraft will sell more copies than having the Airbus Skyhawk©’s landing light actually illuminate the ground, so Microsoft will do what Microsoft does.

But yeah, wall of text for this

TL;DR:

Tips for improving career mode

  • Stop the cockpit getting reset upon skips
  • Improve mission spawning conditions. You can’t just select a random mission type, AND a random plane, AND a random route/airfield pair at the same time (not saying that that’s what what happens all the time, but sometimes it does seem like it)
8

Today MSFS2024 close off the app for a strange reason for the third time every time i have reached 41.000 alt and have to inform the passengers in VIP career from Bagnat to Warschau, some bug i guess cause it happened every time ven when restarting.

9

Yes, you have to talk to the passengers 3 or 4 times in a VIP mission or else they get unhappy and your reputation is affected.

10

There’s nothing wrong with career mode…

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11

But what I don’t get is why they haven’t improved career mode enough to actually make it fun. Honestly, it can only be down to two things. Either they just don’t know how to do it, or they don’t want to. If they don’t want to, it’s obviously for purely financial reasons, just to push marketplace add-ons and planes. Even though, from what I’m seeing, you can’t even get a decent flight going with the best third-party aircraft anyway. But if it’s because they can’t do it, then I don’t understand why they don’t just open up the game files and let the community help out, maybe through modders, at least during the beta stages. Sometimes I really don’t get their attitude.

12

They must be making tons of money already. The problem being that they are now in a new financial year - if that’s the same as the UK - so pushing new content and consoles is going to be a thing.
I just wonder with the many bugs whether there will be so much bad press new content just won’t be enough.
Career is going to become the part of this sim that sustains it’s longevity financially so they really need to fix Career.

13

So this is the thing: I’m playing on Xbox, and the Career mode is a great concept, but it makes zero sense.

Having an aircraft spawn on a rural runway and immediately getting a notification that you skipped taxiing, and then flying 3 hours to an airport only to have the taxiing hold short bug out and radio communications die, and then getting penalised for missing ATC communications, then having no way to progress because the mission steps have bugged out and your radio button no longer works, to then losing 500,000 points in reputation for something that isn’t your fault, and then you fly again and do everything perfectly, only to get 10 points of reputation.

Having the game randomly fail your flight 2 hours in because you “didn’t follow the flight plan”, even though you were on the magenta line the whole time???

Having missions that ask you to fly beyond the fuel capacity of the aircraft.

Having zero missions spawn at the destination airport.

Asking players to spend $1000s of dollars getting “certified” for instrument landings and night-time missions, only to have absolutely ZERO missions that let you fly in live weather or night-time.

Charging players $250,000 dollars to “transfer” their aircraft because there are ZERO missions spawning to where they just flew to, even though it just cost them $10,000 in fuel to fly there in the first place.

Not to mention all the game crashes, the stuttering takeoffs, the sudden wind gust of 5 knots that launches your aircraft into the aligning runway or, worse, the field.

And so on and so on. This game currently costs $150.00 to purchase. That’s wild!!!

14

New to Flight Sim, on the PS5.
Dove right into career mode. After a couple months of building knowledge and in-game credits, I’ve settled in with regularly flying the Pilatus PC-24 in freelance VIP Charters. Still a LOT to learn within the avionics, which is motivating!
However, after recently failing numerous missions due to bugs and not my own faults, I find myself taking unwanted breaks to deal with ongoing frustrations and large amounts of my time just being completely wasted.

The two biggest issues being:

  1. Flying too far off flight path even though I was on AP navigation mode directly on the magenta line/path. Result - Mission Failure
  2. Failure to shutdown completely after taxi to parking stand. Engine shutdown stuck at 25% with all power and fuel in the off positions.

Some minor issues I’ve had:

  • All my landing gear was destroyed taxiing over some apparently broken taxiway texture at the Sydney, Australia airport. Cost me over a 1/4 million to fix.
  • Ongoing fuel issue with the PC-24. I’ve been using the ‘add fuel quantity’ workaround, but I shouldn’t have to.

I certainly wish they’d put more focus on bug fixes rather than the marketplace, that’s for sure!! I’m not naive, I get that this is a business. Nevertheless, it’s an expensive product and should work correctly.
Hoping for better outcomes in the future! Happy flying, Everyone!