When they said 2024 would have a career mode I thought ‘oh well, another thing I’ll never use, like missions and activities’. And I won’t; it’s not my thing, I’m here to simulate the aviation experiences I want, the way I want, and that’s all. But as long as the platform is open to everyone like Microsoft so often says it is, everyone should be happy, right?
Except… the existence of career mode is now affecting me and limiting my ability. Like this encryption issue. And features they added to the sim, like firefighting (which would be great for multi-player), SAR etc are not available to everyone, only to those grinding career mode. Simmers who don’t want to grind are excluded. That is not ‘the skies are open to all’.
This is not what flight simulation is supposed to be, as far as I’m concerned. A flight simulator should be an open platform for simulating aviation activities and scenarios. If you want to build an RPG on top of a platform like that, then OK; but it should be first and foremost an open platform for simulation where all features are accessible to all users unless they specifically choose to limit themselves by following the RPG path. That’s not what we have today, and I worry that the sim is going to go further and further down the RPG-first path until it basically is an RPG.
I would really like to be wrong, but stuff like this sets my spidey-sense tingling.