Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?
• Yes
Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:
• (very long, TLDR at the end)
I can attest to everything put in the original post, and I would like to expand on some other aspects that haven’t been covered but that do make the current helicopter career unplayable in a very literal manner.
First, let’s talk about mission-specific bugs/functionalities that prevent the completion of several mission types.
On the Search and Rescue Missions (non-hoist), the location of the search area and the position of the person in distress are randomized without seemingly any check. For instance, the person in distress may be in the middle of a forest or on a very angled slope, which presents a major issue, as for these missions it is required to land close to the person (within ~0.2 nm). In most cases it is simply physically impossible to do so because of the trees or the slope: the mission is bound to fail.
In case the slope is manageable by a helicopter (i.e., you can maintain a stable position by hovering in the slope with part of the skids in contact), another bug/functionality prevents you from completing the mission. Indeed, if the game actually recognizes that you have landed and triggers the animation of boarding, said animation locks you out of the control! Worst, it seems like it reverts all the controls to a neutral position. So you are bound to see your helicopter drift in the slope and can enjoy the comical run of the person trying to board as they are chasing the helicopter drifting away. However, the fun stops abruptly as you realize that the mission is now soft locked. After the animation, if the player manages to recover the drift once the controls are unlocked without crashing, the mission objective stays on landing near the objective while the person needed to be rescued is physically inside of the helicopter already. Soft locked.
After completing 10 of these missions (or rather finding 10 of these missions that are actually doable without having to land inside a tree or crash into a cliff), we are greeted with the hoist version of the search and rescue, and the horror continues.
On the hoist search and rescue missions, I am saddened to see that the AI voices have not been used for the only useful thing they could have done.
For these missions the player has to hover above a designated area for a given amount of time. The issue is that nothing is communicated to the player during the process. There is, in the current iteration, absolutely no help given to the player in order to know their relative position to the hovering zone or any information about the process; the hoist operator is simply mute. As such, hovering at sea is nearly impossible: without any outside reference, it is not possible to tell how close we are to the target or what needs to be corrected in order to achieve the successful hover.
The AI should give the player an indication with regard to their relative position to the target (e.g., “X meters to the left/right”) or, at the very least, give the player a UI indicating the relative position to the target as it is being done in other games such as DCS. The hoist operator should also communicate to the player what is happening with the hoist, e.g., “rescuer at the door,” “rescuer is x meters from the ground/on the ground/unhooked,” etc. This is not justnice to have"; they are needed in order to understand what is happening and pilot accordingly.
Then on the sling load operations, here we suffer from a new bug in addition to other described ones. For the new one: when approaching landing platforms/helipads, there is currently a bug, that I assume is linked to ground effect, that propels the helicopter 10/20 ft in the air when doing an approach at low speed/altitude. This is not game-breaking but is annoying as it requires the player to restart their approach in hope that the bug won’t trigger again (sometimes 3/4 approaches are needed).
Then for the previous issues, well, here again, do not expect any help from your sling load operator: no info on your relative position to the charge/drop zone, no info on how the charge is behaving (swinging side to side/fore and aft, etc.): you are going in blind, no voice lines to help you, no UI either…
Again, it suffers with the direct comparison with other games like DCS, where it is already implemented. Still in the previously discussed category, the drop zones are randomly assigned when doing land operations; as a result, the mission is sometimes simply not doable, the drop zone being in the forest/on a building/tree, etc.
Finally, for the agricultural mission, we are blessed with a combination of all the previously mentioned issues: the random spawn of the refilling truck sometimes being next to trees/buildings, making refilling impossible. The platform of the refilling truck is subject to the same ground effect bug, requiring multiple approaches before being able to land our massive H125 on this small platform (really wondering why all promotional materials, including all illustrations in the game regarding helicopter agricultural missions, showcase the R66, but it is not usable in the career mode?!). And when landing on the platform, if you were relying on your input in order to stabilize on this ill-suited platform, guess what happens? That’s right, an animation locking you out of the control and leaving you to watch your helicopter tilting out of the platform in said animation.
To add insults to injuries, the missions themselves are almost all immersion-breaking due to incoherences mostly related to the random spawns done without any checks: the “lost” person in need of rescue can be waiting for you 1 meter away from a busy road or inside a village, the loads you are carrying can be described as a power generator while they are a bunch of 15 m long pipes, the area you are supplying with said loads is almost systematically reachable by roads, to the point that it looks intentional, the field you are fertilizing can be done in a couple of legs (no need for helicopter), etc.
So to sum up, there are, in addition to the OP, some game-breaking bugs that prevent the completion of the missions that are:
- Random spawns of the person in need of assistance in the SAR mission (non-hoist) that can put them in unreachable places (e.g., middle of a forest/cliff);
- Random spawns of the drop zone in the sling load mission that can put them in unreachable places (e.g., middle of a forest/cliff/houses) again;
- Random spawns of the refilling truck in the agricultural mission that can put them in unreachable places (e.g., next to trees/houses) again again, again.
There are also some missing features that prevent the good realization of the missions, such as:
- No indication of the relative position to the hoist zone via UI or AI voices and no indication of the status of the hoist operation (especially of missions at sea where visual references to esqtqblshh stqble hover are not possible)
- No indication of the relative position to the load drop zone via UI or AI voices and no indication of the status of the sling load
And finally the ground effect bug to spice things up a bit.
If relevant, provide additional screenshots/video:
•
For anyone who wants to contribute on this issue, Click on the button below to use this template:
