I don’t see it working that way. I see missions being available in free flight. No credits, no progression, no purchases, no company, nothing. We just jump into free flight, click an icon, do a mission and that’s it.
I have no time and no intereste in having to spend hours doing stuff I don’t like to be able to eventually do something I like.
I’m not after the virtual money, I don’t care about points, I don’t need to buy aircraft. None of those mechanics are interesting to me. So I don’t want an unlimited credits career mode. I want those missions to be available to me without even using the career mode interface.
I think they understood part of the user base. They didn’t seem to think that there are other ways of doing it. Or didn’t realize there was another segment. Or didn’t have time? From my conversations with them, though, it looks like they didn’t think of it.
It also seems like they also underestimated the effort necessary to get to helicopters, for example. 30 minutes flying fixed wing aircraft is clearly not enough to get the helicopter license. So much that I quit career mode and I didn’t even get to it. It’s just not fun for me, at all. I’m doing free flight and World Photographer challenges.
I welcome career mode. I welcome the license system, the points system, the virtual currency. I think the tutorials integrated in career mode are fantastic. All that is nicely done – with the exception of bugs and issues but that’s all going to get fixed. That’s excellent for people that want to do that and I am genuinely happy that it was included because it was necessary and a very big step in the right direction.
But while they did this to cater for people that wanted or even needed that structure to learn, they forgot that there are many more folks out there that are experienced, know what they are doing (or don’t care about doing it wrong) and they just want to use the new mission dynamics. Not to make money, not to get points, not to progress through a tree system, but just to have fun for a bit.
Agree, that would be the best option. Giving unlimited credits might make them keep their promise of unlocking everything in 2 days. But it is still too much of a drag, I similarly am not interested in the whole career thing, just wanna get to the interesting stuff. I agree these missions need to be free to play.
Most sandbox mode is unlimited credits and unlocked tech tree. In this case, it woul de all ratings. So, all mission types are unlocked and available. To experienced pilots the ratings is a waste of time.
Yeah these ratings are a joke. I wish my CPL was that easy . I’m not spending a single second on career mode, it is a waste of time. Yesterday I got stuck at the end of an hour long flight because it wanted me to set parking brake on a helicopter with skids .
It has not even a month old for heaven’s sake people…give it a chance.
The Missions are the core design of the Career mode.
Will no one acknowledge that you create a new problem if you take the Career mode mission structure and make it a free flight activity?
Doing so would gut the design of the Career mode game play which in turn means you have no purposeful gameplay…again. That was a problem with MSFS 2020 for a lot of players.
Career Mode only adds to MSFS 2024 and it is important for MSFS longevity.
It keeps the MSFS 2020 players who stuck it out waiting for this to be developed in the 2024 release and it attracts new gamers, which the vast majority expect purposeful gameplay. All the successful games have that.
Nothing is lost, It does not take anything away that was in MSFS 2020 as just a simulator…it still is.
Also, career Mode is not that hard.
I have played maybe all of 100 hours in career mode and I have already nearly maxed out the Fixed Wing Tree. And that is with having to work around the bugs. If they can fix the bugs and refine it a bit …it would be even easier.
First, stop dictating how others should play, you like the career mode, I’m happy for you. A lot of us don’t want to go through those hurldes and don’t like these missions being locked behind a career. Making missions available outside the career mode will cause more interaction, not less.
Of course something is lost, I would assume a lot of people bought the sim exactly because of the new content (fire fighting, SAR, crop dusting etc.) only to find out they are locked behind a (very bugged) career mode which you are forced to play because otherwise no access to the new content advertised.
It is not hard, but some are simply not interested. You say you have flown 100 hrs to unlock the tree? That is far, far more time that I’m willing to invest (and far more than the weekend of playing promised by Asobo). I gave it a try, only to be met with game breaking bugs, the last one I did, I couldn’t finish a 1 hr long mission because I couldn’t set the parking brake on the R66. I’m not spending a second more on this.
If the career mode is so important for MSobo as you claim it is (without providing any evidence), I think they would have made sure it is working properly before release. It feels like it has been slapped together in a hurry without anyone testing for bugs. The only one destroying career mode is Asobo themselves at the moment.
Asobo’s reason given, namely, players would otherwise be lost if they can freely fly missions, it’s nonsense for experienced simmers.
You need to stop trying to apply this flawed logic that adding missions to free flight will somehow gut career mode. Doing this will take nothing away from career mode and will ADD something to the game that some (maybe a lot) of people will obviously enjoy.
The only reasonable downside that has been put forward in this thread is that if missions are added to free flight then no one will want to play career mode and MS will starve it of resources. I don’t believe this for one second. There are three groups of players.
1.Those who like career mode and will play it no matter what.
2.Those who hate career mode and will never play it - some of these might be interested in missions if they were not gated.
3.Those who hate career mode but will play it, grinding their teeth the whole time just to get access to the missions which is what they really want to do.
It is my considered opinion that groups 1. and 2. are both a lot bigger than you think and group 3. is not really big enough to have much of an effect.
TLDR: There is little to no down side in adding missions to free flight and potentially a very large up side.
P.S. The elephant in the room (see what I did there ;)) is the worrying possibility that MS is really trying to turn the sim into a true MMORPG, complete with micro transactions and pay to bypass grind. Should this prove to be true in the long run then you will get your wish and I will probably hand in my wings for good…
I think Franco is trolling at this point. There is simply no way he does not grasp the concept being explained.
If nothing else it keeps the thread alive and the votes keep increasing.
I watch streamers who have grinded their way up the career tree so they can unlock those missions and whilst they look like they would be fun once or twice, they all seem very repetitive and grindy all they way up.
I would much rather have the ability hoist some stuff around or spray any fields I chose with no clunky rails.
We’re all just playing the game andpretending we’re pilots doing what we want and having fun how we see fit. The on rails approach to missions is great for an initial tutorial but after that it just gets in the way.
Opening up the “sandbox career” would also allow us to replicate conditions and debug. To see why the weather is off, to see why an aircraft or airport or mission isn’t working right. To determine if it’s just happening on our system or is a global bug?
Currently, we’re all in different places in career - certification-wise, experience-wise, and even geographically. This makes for a lot of noisy data and in many cases fairly impossible to debug. I don’t know if that itself is a feature or a bug.
spending 2 months farming for a 208 is very boring, the 172 in the end we get tired of it especially since I’m more of a turboprop pilot so the 172 I’m fed up. As soon as I figure out how to cheat I will do it because I have a life outside of msfs. yesterday I flew 5 hours I had 79k of passive income it’s a huge joke in the income there was a vision jet though. not to mention the insurance which is very expensive and which does not cover anything in the event of a problem
You purchase a game and it has a mechanic you do not like, then because someone disagrees with your effort to get them to change it to fit you (and others here), you claim your being dictated to? Really, that is not even logical.
Yes career mode is bugged and has flaws…it’s been out a month…do you think maybe you might have some patience and let it develop or maybe even contribute to its development?
It was clear that MSFS 2024 would have career mode and that Fire Fighting, etc. was part of that. I suppose some people made some assumptions as you said, but that is on you and them is it not? Are we not all responsible for what we fail to do?
If you are not interested in career mode, then do not do it. It is the same simulator you had in 2020 is it not, only improved. You can go off and free fly all you want just as you did in 2020.
As I have said here before, no one want to face the fact that if you make Missions an activity, then what is the point of having a Career Mode? The Missions are the career mode mechanic.
Maybe MS will accommodate you and whoever else demands they change it but if they do Career Mode will be over…there will be no reason to play it. And when no one plays it because it has nothing to offer, development of Career mode and more content that fits within it will end.
I guess you have never played a game, only done simulations where you have no game mechanics…because that is the only way you can think what you said makes sense.
I get it that there are old school simulation players here, people who do not even think MSFS is a game, or they do not want it to be a game, and so forth. That is why Free Flight exists.
But a game is something that is designed to be purposeful play. You do Content to unlock more content and rewards. That is the whole point of Career Mode…something to do, to progress at it. That is what gamers do. Look at any of the successful games, thousands of them…they all have that mechanic. If you put all the content into a Free Fly Activity, then its over…there is not reason to play the game.
Now you may not want to play the game…I get that…there is a group of people who are used to just playing around in a simulator, no game in it. Basically, Free Flight.
But MS is trying to expand the reach of the game to gamers and also trying to build the player base to stay in the game longer. You may not like that, but this is not a Charity…for MSFS to continue investing massive amounts of money in the development of the MSFS, it has to be successful financially.
It should be obvious to all that they took this step of investing in a game play mechanic to do just that. This is after all an XBox Studio property which is a gaming subscription service. The catalog of games they are going to support have to not be financial losers.
You may get your way and end the game play aspect of MSFS 2024, and you will be happy…but I think it will be short term.
2 months? It does not take 2 months to get to the Turboprops.
I’m playing it 3 to 4 times a week doing 2 flights a night (all of them under 1.5 hours in length without use the Sim Rate) and I am in the 40s levels and have nearly everything in fixed aircraft unlocked.
This is the easiest leveling up game I think I have ever played actually.
The biggest impediment might be some of the odd bugs that need to be fixed and I am sure if they don’t gut the game and people continue to ask for those bugs to be fixed and other improvements. they will respond.
When I preordered there were only those two fancy trailers showcasing the new content. Later there was the preview event were it became clear that those are locked behind a career mode, but according to the developers you can unlock everything in a weekend (which turns out is not true). The way career mode works was not clear before ordering.
I am insterested in the new content, just not interested in the career mode, nor do I have the time. You are making a lot of assumptions about the importance and Asobo’s reasoning for doing so. There is no evidence for your claims, all we know is that Asobo thinks people will get lost when playing missions without the hand rails which is simply not true for experienced simmers.
I think having the career mode and option to play these missions free outside career mode will cause more interaction with the platform, not less. Those interested in the progression and rewards will play the career mode anyway, those who are not interested will never do so.
Anyway it’s better to talk to a wallnut tree, I think I will do that instead. We keep repeating arguments and it’s leading nowhere. Lets agree to disagree. This is starting to reach the top of the wishlist, we will see what Asobo decides.
Sorry I missed this post earlier…very interesting.
We can have a reasonable idea about the finances by using logic.
If MSFS could survive as just a PC simulator (which it was)
they would not have invested money into making it an XBox product.
they would not have invested money into adding racing and now career mode.
Logic dictates that XBox Studio is spending money on these things because they want MSFS 2024 to be a viable game in their XBox Studio Catalog.
For a subscription service it is all about Capturing. If you capture a subscription, the way you hold it month to month is for your Catalog to have very good games in each genre so that when players who bore of one game will pick up another and stay subscribed.
MSFS is in the Game Simulator niche. It competes with Racing Sims, Farming Sims, Truck Sims, Railroad Sims and a dozen other type of sim games all of which have structured GAME components.
I am speculating that XBox Studio is searching for a way to make MSFS competitive by adding the structured game. It can both help in the catalog and also in the market place as I am sure there will be product that works into it.
What I am trying to tell people here is …you should hope the Career Mode does work…because if it fails, then what? MSFS is not going to survive as just a PC Simulation. If it could, it would have not died with the version prior to MSFS 2020. The proof to that is XPlane…which does and has existed as a Hobby level enterprise. No way is the cost of MSFS 2024 going to be recuperated at the XPlane level of enterprise.
. I’m not spending a single second on career mode, it is a waste of time. Yesterday I got stuck at the end of an hour long flight because it wanted me to set parking brake on a helicopter with skids 
.