By the same argument one could argue “There should be no free flight mode either, the only content should be the career mode and nothing else. If there is free flight mode (or anything that is not the career) that will take people away from doing the career. If that happens then no one will ever use the career and MS/Asobo will drop it entirely”.
This is putting the cart before the horse. The goal is not to make sure that career mode continues no matter what: the goal is to make the game as good as possible, and to have lots of happy customers. This is not a zero-sum game: if the game is better overall more people will want to play it. If more people want to play it then that brings in more money, and so more development effort will go into the game. If allowing missions to be used outside the career attracts more people to the game in total then that will likely mean more development resources are available for career, not less.
Career mode needs to be valuable on its own merits, and I believe it totally can be. Your argument seems to be “The career mode is so bad that unless we force people no one will ever want to play it and it’ll be abandoned. Therefore all the content must be locked inside career mode to ensure people play the career”. This is not the way to produce a successful game.
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You seem to think that a good game should include tedious grind that isn’t worth doing for its own sake but that you should put in many hours of otherwise unwanted activity in order to get a future reward.
I’ll give it to you that there’s a lot of games out there like that, but it’s not true, there’s no human limitation here. The entire point of a sandbox game is that the activity itself is the reward and that there’s limitless activities you can play your way. If you’re not enjoying it then just do something else.
“People will not work” - this is a game. I do not want to work, I want to play. There’s a reason why I’m here. I do not play any of those other games, they do not interest me.
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Given how punitive the career mode is, missions can’t currently be flown ‘for fun’, or by a friend who might crash whatever aircraft you unwisely trust them with.
It’s unreasonably restrictive, in my opinion.
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Career mode has a whole structure and progress that a lot of people like. I’m not saying it should be removed. Whoever wants to do it can do it.
If people prefer to fly missions freely instead of going through the career mode, perhaps career mode is not for them. It’s definitely not for me.
The “options” you say I have is to either forcefully doing career mode (something I don’t have any fun or interest in doing) or not use the new mission features.
I am defending more options and play paths to cater for more people. You are defending gatekeeping.
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I thought the same. I didn’t want to go there but that also crossed my mind.
I don’t want career mode to go away and I hope it doesn’t. But if people are afraid career mode may go away because people won’t play it, perhaps that’s a telltale that it’s not working.
I do think it’s working. But not for everyone.
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People are strange. Why does having these missions available outside career mode hurt career mode? Career mode has credits and buying planes, managing crew and insurance (when they fix it), wear and maintenance, and getting certifications. How does having missions available outside of career make that any different?
Like if someone were to do a medium cargo mission, and get a rating outside of career, and it was completely ephemeral, why does that matter at all to anyone else? What possible logic is there in being against this? I’m not saying Asobo will do it, I’m just confused how anyone could be against it. It literally does not affect you if you enjoy career lol. I’m so confused.
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We were able to fly missions in free flight mode in 2020. This is a serious step backwards.
1 Like
I would like to request that the career and missions be modified as soon as possible. I am really fed up with the fact that all my flights have stormy winds and strong turbulence. It is ridiculous. I would like the weather to be freely adjustable during the career. The strong turbulence is very annoying. Not to mention that I have set the turbulence to minimum in the settings, but the career mod overrides this.
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Just because someone is not interested in using a career mode in order to unlock features of a sim does not make them ‘lazy’.
I will likely at some point give the career mode a try, there are many reason why I do not wish to do that right now. However, I would really like to try the missions that are only available in the sim when you have ground through a career path.
Right now, the sim has plenty of bugs apparently including in the career mode. I dare say many user like myself work full time and do not necessarily have the free time, energy or desire to work another career just in order to try their hand at the missions.
I used to use Air Hauler, and for the last 2-3 years have been using Neofly with MSFS. It adds a little purpose to my flights but it in no way restricts what I can or cannot do in the sim.
There is a good chance at some point I will try the career to see how it compares to Neofly for example. Though some of the footage I see of it makes it look really quite cheesy and while it is flaky with bugs I don’t have the time to waste on it. Likewise, if I do not like how it works then I may choose not to continue with it. BUT, I would still WANT to fly the missions and enjoy the sim in my own way.
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Voted for this as well.
One huge, very important issue I’ve not seen anybody bring up yet:
Missions being locked behind career makes them regionally location bound.
Tired of your usual career locations and want to go fly rescue missions in New Zealand for a change? Or medical transport in, let’s say, Ghana? “Well too bad, you haven’t been to NZ or Ghana in your career yet, no can do!” 
Where you’ve chosen your HQ to be, areas where you’ve flown to before and where the first missions of each new type take place make up the artificial jail in which the sim keeps you locked in. You are forced to painfully slowly make your way to all 195 countries on earth, and all their regions, to gain the right to fly missions anywhere you want.
Due to confining missions within career mode, MSFS 2024 deliberately limits where pilots can enjoy their favorite mission activities, even though it is capable of spawning them almost anywhere.
Remember when they first revealed the video snippet of the globe with mission markers all over it? What we got instead is a highly locked-down-behind-a-grind version of this. Absolutely not what I envisioned when I first heard of the phenomenal mission generation capabilities of MSFS 2024. Wasted potential and a massive disappointment.
Imho, the whole gatekeeping idea because “otherwise people won’t use career mode as there is no incentive to it, leading to the demise of career mode” is laughably short-sighted, as it misses a huge point by a mile: Keeping things as they are will lead to the demise of career mode either way!
Career mode is for people who want to pursue a simulated aviation career. Full stop. Those who have no interest in career mode and just want to do missions will not enjoy the career grind they’re currently forced into. Unhappy users complain loudly, and in that case rightfully. Keeping missions locked behind career mode will consequently lead to a dumbed-and-watered-down version of career mode that neither of the two groups will enjoy in the end. Isn’t that the much bigger threat to the future of career mode?
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I would not have known about this limitation without your post. Thanks for the insight and I will continue to hold off on purchasing until this mess improves.
1 Like
Behind the career mode I realize that there is a significant part of the improvements that Microsoft has sold us by moving from MSFS2020 to MSFS2024. So I tried the career mode, but I quickly realized that I will never have the patience to waste all the time required.
I’ve been using MS simulators since they were born, I just don’t feel like putting up with someone again trying to teach me how to do a simple cirquit or ILS approach. Not to mention all the bugs that force you to do the same thing over and over again. I changed the command setting because the default one is ridiculously complicated, I’ve been using my same setting for years, already proven in FSX, P3D, XPlane 10 and 11. In career mode they even try to make me learn the default commands, and new bugs arise if the commands are changed.
Therefore, I hope that Asobo understands these motivations, although I am not very optimistic as someone who can issue software without even having verified that many fields are unusable because of the formats can hardly understand these motivations.
As far as I am concerned, however, my use of MSFS2024 will be exclusively in Free Flight mode. Even in MSFS2020 I have always used this mode exclusively. I think the others only serve to create artificial incentives for imagineless users, especially kids who will move on to the next new video game in a few weeks anyway.
1 Like
Agree 100%, same here, but in all fairness, you can do the certifications without grinding through the lessons, you only have to endure many hours of immensely boring, buggy and irritating missions to make enough money to pay for the next certification…
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Mover hits the nail on its head:
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I think a mission builder in free flight would be the best option to play all the specialty missions or career modes.
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At this rate, we need it just so we can troubleshoot without penalties, haha.
Along the same lines, it wouldn’t be bad for people who are practicing new things.
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Just casting my vote in favor of this, too, even though I’ve already unlocked most of the missions. It took a lot of time which I didn’t really have and will never get back, and even still I’m very restricted in where I can fly missions. In 2020, I flew landing challenges about 5 times, got bored, and did nothing but free flight for the next 4 years, primarily with high-fidelity airliners, but along the way I also discovered HPG’s H145 and got a taste for flying rescue and firefighting with that. One of the reasons I bought 2024 was so that I could fly similar missions with more aircraft. I can certainly understand why other people would enjoy career mode, but I don’t, and I believe that no one should be forced to waste time on an activity they don’t enjoy in order to use part of a product for which they paid hard-earned money.
6 Likes
It’s not a sim then to you. It’s a game.
