This is a rundown of things that popped into my mind after having played quite a lot of the career mode.
Background: I have a real life PPL (EASA), used to work in VR game dev, and am currently working in the aviation industry in software and simulation, planning to become a CFI someday.
Here’s an unordered list of ideas, maybe someone finds this helpful or inspiring, or it just may serve as a basis for discussion. This is bugging me since a few days, because I found the idea of a career mode compelling, and I think it has lots of potential!
I will try to not go too much into bugs and shortcomings, but try to concentrate on constructive aspects that I would wish for, if I had the time and resources to make a dream sim (or career addon):
Certifications and Ops
I can only talk about PPL (and night VFR currency) here, not so much about CPL/ATPL, although I have quite a lot of contact with the industry.
I would love to see the actual aspects of real-world flying play a much bigger role. I would love to see things like
- Flight planning: Planning a route only using terrestrial navigation is a big part of VFR flying. Planning, not getting lost, finding ways to orientate are all very important aspects that I would love to see reflected in the simulator.
- Same goes for procedures like preflight, runup and the like. I know it’s maybe a bit tedious, but it is what makes it a simulation instead of a game. Maybe let people skip certain ‘secondary’ parts like preflight or runup without penalizing them, and make only skips of flight phases have an impact on mission rating?
- Flying solo (patterns as well as cross-country) is a big part of PPL training. Instead of flying a single traffic pattern, hour building should be a thing for certifications. This can also be reflected in the ingame economy, with your PPL mainly costing you money, and the later certifications opening up ways to earn money, just as it is in real life. Of course it would need to be rebalanced for significant changes like these, but I guess rebalancing is due anyway.
Missions
- Once the player has the certifications to earn money, I would love to see a reputation-based economy.
- There can be a certain predefined mission pool, but it would be cool to have multiple potential ‘customers’ for every location that is suitable (instead of just 10 predefined missions at fixed aerodromes in a 50 mile radius)
- Let me virtually negotiate my missions with the customer. This can be reputation-based, like a small mini-game with some sliders, two or three steps of ‘negotiation’ until I come to an agreement over the mission, or it simply does not happen. Haggle too hard, and people will just not fly with you. Just like real life.
- Other community addons (like OnAir) have multiple worlds with more or less harsh rulesets regarding the economy difficulty. This can be scaled and applied to any of the aspects in career mode, so everyone gets the experience she or he wants.
- Especially in early stages of career mode, and since the sim is still very young, I would like the ability to invalidate flights. If I crash due to a bug, or lose my plane and the insurance system is not workiung as intended, there should be an alternative to completely resetting the career. Maybe introduce an option after each flight or mission that allows to ‘not let this one count’? Then I would have lost playtime, but I don’t end up in a state where I have to start over.
- Introduce a system that allows me to auto-travel (and auto-transfer a plane) to a freelancer mission if there is none at my current location. Let me pick a mission, pop a list of nearby planes with transfer cost, and let me pick one for deducted payment.
- Let me free-fly in career mode to relocate me and my plane. This can be a slightly cheaper option to transfer assets at the cost of fuel and maintenance. Fully automatic transfer can be a bit more expensive as a faster option.
- Very long shot: Let me place my transfers on a player-based mission market, so other players can pick my transfer as a ferry flight mission. We should have a large enough user base for this.
Passive income and player-based economy
- Introduce a player-based plane charter market. Instead of having a script fly my plane and/or mission and randomly crashing it on a mission, let me rent out my aircraft to other players to generate income.
- At the same time, let me ‘register’ my plane with a specific registration, which is unique in the sim world.
- Together with chartering other people’s aircraft, this opens up a whole new ecosystem of plane charter, purchase, used sales and even planespotting each other’s aircraft, maybe with tie-ins to the photo mode.
- In combination with the ‘negotiate contracts’ idea above, let players outsource ‘their’ pending missions to other players. This basically opens up a whole new way of playing the sim more as a tycoon-type game.
Sorry for the wall of text. I feel lighter now 