I suffered through this painful and unrealistic mission, listening to that camera lady complain about the bumpy ride for 30 minutes.
We survived, even though the plane was pitched into stalls by wild wind shear several times, while she continued to admonish me that her precious gear didn’t like it.
In the end I had the filming at 78%, ok, fair enough… But then I got brutalized in scoring for “Smoothness?”. Its pretty hard for me to contain my four letter words about that topic. Smoothness? In a tornado… Uh, huh, right… I’ll try harder or something perhaps. So incredibly stupid.
I also got smashed on my rating because of speed excursions (also caused by the windshear). Ultimately it trashed my S tier reputation down to B, I don’t think I got any money, and the game crashed to desktop to put a nice cherry on top.
This is ‘S’ tier garbage level design. This is exactly the opposite of good gaming. This is the kind of thing that will chase people away and cause them not to look back. Its atrocious.
Career mode in general hasn’t at all lived up to the hype, but winging on about that is just a drop in the sea of user tears anyhow, so not gonna get into that. But this mission specifically is the worst scripting and play I think I’ve ever experienced in any software (and I’m in my mid-50’s and been a gamer since I was 10). It is like it was designed to be punitive and nothing more than punitive.
Don’t take this mission if it is offered to you, you’ll get nothing from it. I should have known better than to dive into the ‘game’ side of things.. I’ll return to my “simmer” lane and we’ll not speak about this again… ever.
As a ‘yellow’ starter mission, it opens up others in the future. I suspected it would hit my reputation (which it did) but done is done. I can’t be scared of reputation knocks or I won’t learn new aircraft or new mission types.
I feel like you missed the point – Getting marked down for smoothness in a tornado is very much like getting marked down for getting your shorts wet while snorkeling. It’s a stupid metric to be looking at in this mission.
Huh.
So this “bug”, which did cost me valuable lifetime I’ll never get back, isn’t a new thing (update related - or maybe they disimproved it further).
Whoever wrote the prompts for the “A.I.”, that resulted in this wreck of cringe dialog lines topped with robotic auto voice overs, must’ve been tasked to “prompt” the level parameters, too.
The permanent “special” to tornado mission in Arizona was somewhat playable, but the other time limited popping up somewhere in the eastern part of the US is a pure reputation wrecker & waste of time.
The Cessna 208 sky caravan is usually a reliable flight model, but in this crooked mission it behaves as if the aviation got hacked, e.g. thrust levers that jump directly into reverse during the outbound flight, nearly crashing the plane (as I had to increase the sim rate or else the looped two lines of dialogue by those scientists would’ve ended with them becoming sky divers), but even with full thrust reverse I wasn’t able get the plane to the wanted “98 knots” for the circling around the tornado (flaps 50% was also ineffective, flaps 100% resulted in instantaneous reprimand for over speeding). The plane got tumbled and tossed around (quite realistic), because the “mission developers” must’ve never talked to actual pilots from the NOAA what distances they use to study storm and tornados (and they fly flimsy single engines)¹.
Anyhow, somehow I finished the circle and the grumbly response (“we didn’t get what we wanted..yaddayadda”) was enough for me the rage quit into the main menu (thus, the mission aren’t counted).
The missions seriously annoyed me too. They are badly designed. They lack some briefing of how to fly into the tornado, I would assume everything but a counter-clockwise turn will end in total disaster, but there is no indication, even the path indicators suddenly stop. Nothing on the GPS. It proved unflyable in the aircraft that I was offered, on approach exceed airspeed, crash in 2 seconds. Flying through the indicated path with the plane was impossible. Downgraded from A to C. Advertised as any other mission to fly, No indications of “sorry, we put this in to trap you”.
Given the time it takes to fly there, and to fly back, and the time it takes being set back 120km to “approach again”, the missions are a success if the goal is player frustration
If you play enough career mode you will eventually need to take reputation hits on purpose just to complete the mission, so no biggie. Luckily it recognises you were once at S reputation so it seems to give you more reputation back as a “okay it was one mistake you can have most of your reputation back”.
I was dreading this mission after reading everything in this thread, but just did it with SU5 and had no issues at all. I was able to get an S result with 86% filming quality and 100% flight smoothness so no reputation hit and did enjoy the mission overall.
After the initial climb I ignored the flight path on the EFB and just turned right at the tornado. Once I hit the next checkpoint I circled around it clockwise. I wasn’t too close to the tornado, and while I’m not sure of the exact distance I was never further than the 1.1NM it specified. It was rough flying for sure, and I went out of the altitude range and over 101kts a couple times. I was able to keep the roll and attitude of the plane from doing anything too crazy though, and avoided over correcting for the turbulence, so I didn’t take any hits on the flight smoothness rating. After circling the tornado I was given a straight in approach from ATC and was able to land pretty smoothly considering the wind.
The NPC lines are still not great, but they are at least different from the other NPC lines in other missions that you here 1000x over.
