The variety of missions is quite good and I appreciate the fact you’ve recreated historic missions we knew and loved from earlier versions of flight sim.
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Too many missions (and achievements in general) are buggy. For example, I have successfully done My Way without assistance MANY times and it has never unlocked. I’ve also done the entire Gold Rush / Nevada bush trip mission without assistance within the last few weeks (although others have been reporting this for ages) and even immediately closing the VFR map at the start of every flight and using nothing except the navlog – not even an autopilot as that plane lacks one – again the achievement never unlocked.
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Missions you have already achieved also randomly disappear. For example, I know for a fact that I have completed the Balkans mission as not only do I remember it and have the flights in my logbook, I even have the achievement for it. But in the bush trips page, it now shows as 0% completed.
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There are also bush trips with bugs like incorrect formatting of the navlog, such that the time/heading info etc. appear on subsequent lines, not on one line as they should
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Also bush trips with missing photos of the destination in the navlog, so you have no visual reference whatsoever on arrival
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Also bush trips whose photos look significantly different to the actual destination, and not just in the sense that they’re shot from a different angle than you may actually approach from or in the instance that a user has custom scenery, as I’ve seen quite major differences in ground textures from the photos even in areas that are thousands of miles from my nearest scenery. I think this is probably an artifact of world updates and that you aren’t updating the imagery after a world update takes place. Might I suggest that you create a script which simply regenerates every single photo for every mission after each world update? It seems like this should be quite achievable and automateable on your end.
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Also bush trips with simply incorrect and misleading descriptions of the route. For example, on the same Nevada bush trip used for Gold Rush, one destination is described as having a “single” airport, but in fact there are three airports – one with two paved and labeled runways, a windsock and a gas pump (but bizarrely with vehicles driving down both runways), another with two wide grass runways, and a third barely-visible one with just a single, narrow grass strip and no accoutrements – all within less than a mile of each other, and you’re somehow supposed to magically know to ignore the two larger airports in favor of one that (especially in VR) you can’t even see until you’re almost on top of it.
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It is also sometimes not clear what part of grass strips even counts as the runway. For example, in one stop on the Nevada trip, I had to land three times literally just a couple of hundred feet to one side or other to figure out what was the runway (which actually turned out to be something which appeared to be a curving road in parallel), after first landing on a straighter line to its right and then on the grass in between those two lines, thinking each looked significantly more like a runway than the one with curves in it. It would also be helpful if the actual location of the runway was clearly indicated with an arrow or label on the navlog photo.
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Mission flights (and to a lesser extent flights in general) also frequently fail to show up correctly in your logbook, including absurd things like finishing a bush trip flight having started on the ground only to see it indicated in your logbook as having one landing but no takeoff which is clearly a physical impossibility.
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In VR at least, I also have to not just close the VFR map but also reposition and rescale the navlog at the start of every leg on bush trips, or every other mission as well. That’s particularly fun on things like the Changi mission, where not only am I thrown in the deep end with awful weather and a plane that wants not to be a plane any more, but I get to fumble around trying to close and move windows so I can see where the heck I’m even going.
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Oh yes, and missions often load incorrectly and have to be reloaded. My favorite one this far was a 747 mission that was supposed to start airborne but which actually started stationary. on the ground in the middle of a dense forest. I’ve also had them load in with certain switches or controls inoperable or incorrect but been fine on a second attempt.
TL;dr: Missions are very, VERY buggy as-is and are in desperate need of a play-through start to finish by actual human beings at Asobo.
We should be able to change the aircraft type after each landing, should we want to do so. For the Nevada bush trip, I’m unlikely to have the time to spend 9.5+ hours re-flying the entire thing to try and get the achievement I should rightfully already have, but being able to switch the longer flights to a faster plane might persuade me to give it one more try.
I’d also like to see multiplayer support in missions. I want to be able to fly them with my brother who lives overseas and plays more casually so we can share the experience together. We shouldn’t have to resort to third-party addons (which we’ve yet to try) to achieve that. Disable multiplayer as a default if you like, but give players a quick and easy way to reenable multiplayer with people we’ve specifically added to our friends list, at the very least, even if not full-on multiplayer as in free roam mode!
It would also be helpful if there were any indication on completed segments of a bush trip whether or not that segment has been completed in the correct manner to unlock all related achievements, so that if you fail to gain an achievement, you know which individual segment(s) must be reflown rather than having to re-fly the entire bush trip again from start to finish.
I’d also like to see it made easier for users to create and share their own missions with each other.
Not a question so much as a comment, really. Please don’t take all of this as just negativity, because I love the sim and it is great. But please also know that when you’re asking users to spend literally many hours trying to earn an achievement, it leads to major feelings of disappointment and regret when achievement bugs prevent you from earning the reward that was held out to you. Honestly, I’d rather no achievements at all than buggy ones.
It would also be helpful if you were more crystal-clear about what does or doesn’t have any effect on the ability to earn missions, because a perusal of your own forums will show you that a mythology has built up around what might or might not have any effect, with people suggesting things like that you can or can’t use VR when earning achievements, or that you can or can’t touch the autopilot, or that merely opening this or that panel will prevent the achievement being earned, or that you must hop on your left foot the entire time, or… you get my drift.
That’s no way to play a game. So please, be very clear that the achievement being earned relies only on XYZ, and that nothing else will have any effect whatsoever, so we can stop beating our heads against mysterious brick walls of our own making as we try over and over to earn unearnable achievements. Pretty please? 