After spending around 100-150h in career mode, I feel the cathartic need to express my opinion on this feature, because I can’t say it’s all bad. There’s good things, bad things, and meh things.
Let’s dive on this reading together.
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The start : A good vibe
Ok, first things first. Starting a new career seems really nice. You have to pass some exams to get a commercial pilot license and start to earn cash. They are helping a bit to understand how to get around a plane and fly it. It’s nowhere near enough, but that’s something. You get a sense of progression, you learn and it’s fun to do so.
There’s a lot that could be enhanced there. You won’t find anything telling you how to read an approach chart, how to use the autopilot, which lights you should use and when, how to properly prepare a trip… I don’t say these lessons should be mandatory, but it’s too bad that this game does not train you to be a “real” virtual pilot.But all in all, that’s not too bad, and you enjoy doing small missions, trying to save up to create your first company.
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Your first company
When the game told me I could create my company, I was excited, and at the same time I thought : « Hey, what were the requirements for that? ». I understood I was climbing a progression ladder while being blinded. I wouldn’t know if there is a next step and how high it was (and sure, it was the same thing when I bought my second plane).
I really enjoyed my time at this point. You start to get more cash, you can define your next big step (I really want that 7MS PC-12), and plan how you should reach it. You feel in command.
I think the planes are wearing a bit fast, but that’s part of the gamification and it’s alright.In fact, issues about planes are coming when you start to own more than three :
The maintenance screen is downright unusable when you start having several planes. You don’t have a global view of your planes status, you cannot even distinguish one plane from another apart by clicking on “show details”, and even so, it does not show you which plane it is, it shows you where that plane is (god forbid you park 4 Cessna 172 in the same airport, you’re in for troubles).Another point that made me raging is that I cannot define my planes livery. Is it really my company when I cannot create my own livery? (and excuse me, but the C172 brown-orange livery does not agree to my taste)
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Getting more certifications
After getting my CPL, I was really excited to fly something else. I like the Cessna 172. The G1000 variant is a nice help when you do a 2h flight, but it’s nice to have variety. I jumped into quite a number of certifications to handle multi-engine, turbine, tailwheels, etc… And I was very disappointed to see that the certification was just consisting in doing a circuit around an airport and voilà, you’re certified ! But you didn’t learn anything!
What use are all those new fancy buttons on your dual engine craft? Don’t know, don’t care, just do a left hand circuit…
I’m quite dissatisfied with that way of handling things -
Getting certified for IFR and night flying
There, we can start to talk about bad things. Once you’re certified for IFR (I wont talk about the certification, because that’s a joke, you don’t really learn anything there), you enable real-time weather. Which should be nice, but maybe last month weather over Europe and Japan was very hectic, or maybe MSFS has a peculiar way of handling the real-time weather, because from this very moment, you can forget about a nice landing. From now on, every landing, even when the wind is coming right at your nose is going to be a challenge (at least with a C172, a Draco X or a C208B). While the wind behaves for most of the flight, the second you’re about to touch the ground, a big wing gust will throw you off balance and you will have to balk the landing, or risk crash-landing… Every single time (ok, most of the time, but still…).To add insult to the injury, you cannot really know the weather you’ll get at the departure or destination airport, or even in flight. Because, unlike with free flight, in career, you won’t have the labels giving you wind direction and speed. You just have the global wind indications, you can get some info about the wind direction at airports in the briefing, but it’s not always a certainty, and the METAR just shows you the current weather, not the weather for the time you’re about to fly. So, if you don’t want to get in a precarious situation, you just don’t know what to look, and you usually won’t have enough informations.
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It’s not all bad though
I may be ranting a bit there, but it’s quite nice for the most part (except when you are resorting to ALT+F4 the fudge out of the game when your plane stalled 100 feet above ground as you were about to land, and you are now about to crash). If you spread your planes around the globe, you can fly on the 5 continents, trying to find a place where the weather is better, and try a variety of missions. You can switch back to being an employee to do things you can’t do with your company. And the game is quirky, but you can get around it. -
All the ugly things about career
But there is so much things that needs to be addressed for the career mode to be a nice place :
- You cannot use any toolbar mode.
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- I wanted to use FCR to record my landings and analyze them => No siree, you can’t, because what? Don’t ask.
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- I wanted to use a mod to handle the sim rate in a better way than using 2 buttons and guessing my current sim rate. Nope !! (Seriously, having to install a mod to have an indicator telling you the simrate, that should be built-in!)
- If the mission decide that you should land on runway 24 when the wind is blowing from 60°, you have to comply, or you will be penalized, even on an unregulated airport. Seriously??
- You ask your EFB to generate a flight plan for a route, everything feel good and while you fly, out of a sudden you get penalized for crossing a restricted airspace. How could I know it was restricted? Why is the game penalizing me for something it didn’t teach me?
- Conclusion
All in all, I think the career mode could be a great gamemode, but it has been botched, not given enough love. Clearly, the QA didn’t test it thoroughly, and not in a large scale, because all these issues I encountered, and mainly the hassle to maintain planes would have been addressed.
So, after that much time spent in this career mode, I’m using an unofficial career add-on, and they are better streamlined than the built-in career mode, I have the possibility to record my flights to look at them afterward and know what I handled badly, I can see the sim rate I’m in, and I’m getting much more in command. I can even choose to land somewhere else than what my mission was expecting and start it again from the same airport afterwards.
So, Asobo, or whoever developing the career mode, please, check the careers add-ons like NeoFly, OnAir, and such. Look at them, take what you want from them, enhance your UX, and come back with a finished product, please. Because it could really be a nice game mode.
), or just hang around and sell goods from point A to point B without any official mission.
